Expressing degree of activation in synthetic speech

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system capable of expressing a continuum of emotional states in synthetic speech. A review of the literature and an analysis of a naturalistic database of emotional speech provided detailed descriptions of the link between acoustic parameters and the three emotion dimensions activation, evaluation, and power. We formulated a set of emotional prosody rules and implemented them in a German text-to-speech (TTS) system. A perception study investigated how well the resulting synthesized prosody fits with emotional states defined through textual situation descriptions. Results show that degree of activation is perceived as intended