The acoustics of feeling: Emotional prosody in the StoryCorps corpus

Effective communication depends not only on lexical content but also on how language is produced and perceived. Prosodic elements such as intensity, pitch accent (i.e., the pattern of low and high tones used in a stressed word), and intonation, have been suggested to aid in conveying emotional affect (e.g., happiness) in acted speech. For example, the word “yes” produced with a falling tone, high intensity, and large pitch range may indicate a high-arousal emotion like anger, whereas the same word produced with a flatter intonation, and lower intensity may indicate a low-arousal emotion like gloominess. Understanding the emotion with which words are produced facilitates appropriate communication because it tells the interlocutor how to best respond. Although this is intuitively true, the role of prosody in conveying emotional meaning is understudied, particularly in natural speech. This project thus utilizes StoryCorps, an extensive corpus of naturalistic interviews (publicly available at www.storycorps.org), to acoustically analyze pitch-accent usage in speech conveying different emotional affects. Portions of the StoryCorps interviews that convey overt emotional effect are selected and transcribed, and f0 trajectory, pitch range, duration, and intensity are tracked across stressed vowels to explore whether there are distinctive pitch-accent patterns used to convey different emotions.