Title: Analysis of stressed human speech

Authors: Mihir Narayan Mohanty, Bhagyalaxmi Jena

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, Institute of Technical Education and Research, Siksha O' Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar, India. ' Department of Applied Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, Silicon Institute of Technology, Bhubaneswar, India

Abstract: Stress is a condition in which the normal speech of a person is changed. It has been observed that stressed syllables are longer than unstressed ones. The investigation of the speaker|s stress is based on specific changes in short-time spectrum of phonemes. Comparative results between the normal speech and stressful speech are achieved. In case of speech under stress, the obtained spectra differ towards the higher frequency due to enhanced pitch modulation observed in the envelope of the normal speech spectrum. In this work, a new database of speech under stress and normal condition consisting of data collected during the examination of final year students. Frequency domain analysis is most useful for speech processing and is done in this paper. It is observed that stress primarily affects vowel duration, whereas syllable final consonants have little stress variation and the durations typically differ 20%-40% between stressed and unstressed syllables.

Keywords: stressed speech; emotional speech signals; spectral analysis; Fourier transform; STFT; stress; stressful speech; speech processing; vowel duration; unstressed syllables; stressed syllables.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCVR.2011.042273

International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, 2011 Vol.2 No.2, pp.180 - 187

Published online: 02 Sep 2011 *

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