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Since emotions are expressed through a combination of verbal and non-verbal channels, a joint analysis of speech and gestures is required to understand expressive human communication. To facilitate such investigations, this paper describes a new corpus named the “interactive emotional dyadic motion capture database” (IEMOCAP), collected by the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at the University of Southern California (USC). This database was recorded from ten actors in dyadic sessions with markers on the face, head, and hands, which provide detailed information about their facial expressions and hand movements during scripted and spontaneous spoken communication scenarios. The actors performed selected emotional scripts and also improvised hypothetical scenarios designed to elicit specific types of emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, frustration and neutral state). The corpus contains approximately 12 h of data. The detailed motion capture information, the interactive setting to elicit authentic emotions, and the size of the database make this corpus a valuable addition to the existing databases in the community for the study and modeling of multimodal and expressive human communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional information in speech is commonly described in terms of prosody features such as F0, duration, and energy. In this paper, the focus is on how F0 characteristics can be used to effectively parametrize emotional quality in speech signals. Using an analysis-by-synthesis approach, F0 mean, range, and shape properties of emotional utterances are systematically modified. The results show the aspects of the F0 parameter that can be modified without causing any significant changes in the perception of emotions. To model this behavior the concept of emotional regions is introduced. Emotional regions represent the variability present in the emotional speech and provide a new procedure for studying speech cues for judgments of emotion. The method is applied to F0 but can be also used on other aspects of prosody such as duration or loudness. Statistical analysis of the factors affecting the emotional regions, and discussion of the effects of F0 modifications on the emotion and speech quality perception are also presented. The results show that F0 range is more important than F0 mean for emotion expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]