Statistical Analysis of Fundamental Frequency Based Features in Speech under Stress

Abstract

A significant part of the non-linguistic information carried in speech refers to the speaker and his/her internal state. This study investigates sixteen features based on fundamental frequency of speech F0 in order to detect stress in speakers. The most effective features resulting from experiments are presented here. The total frequency ranges of F0 across specific short-time speech segments created by two or three frames having stable F0 values were evaluated as the best features for speaker-independent stress detection. F0 contours were computed frame-by-frame using an optimized autocorrelation function. In our experiments, we used utterances spoken by 14 male speakers and taken from own database of speech under real psychological stress.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.42.3.3895