The acoustic realization of anger, fear, joy and sadness in Chinese

Abstract

This paper studies the acoustic realization of anger, fear, joy and sadness in Chinese. An emotion database of total 288 sentences was collected from nine speakers. Four listeners were asked to judge the emotion type of each sentence, choosing from anger, fear, joy, sadness and neutral. The results suggest that there are two dimensions in the acoustic realization of anger, fear, joy and sadness in Chinese. We then conducted acoustic analyses on the database. The acoustic attributes of each emotion in the domains of phonation, articulation and prosody are reported. We concluded that anger and fear are mainly realized on phonation; joy is mainly realized on prosody of F0; and sadness is realized on both of the two dimensions. Articulation and prosody of duration play a secondary role in the acoustic realization of the emotions.