Subsegmental level analysis of high arousal speech using the zero-time windowing method

Speech produced by a speaker in emotionally charged situations, such as anger, happiness, and shout corresponds to high arousal speech. Changes in the production characteristics such as increase in the subglottal air pressure, increase in the glottal closed phase in each cycle, and increase in the rate of glottal vibration are observed in the high arousal speech. Acoustic parameters such as glottal closed quotient and fundamental frequency (F₀) are used to characterize the high arousal speech. In this paper, high arousal is characterized by features extracted using the zero-time windowing (ZTW) method. The spectrum derived from the ZTW method emphasizes the instantaneous spectral characteristics in the speech signal. In the glottal open region, changes are clearly observed in the lower frequency range of the spectrum. Distinctive spectral features are observed during the glottal open region in the case of high arousal speech, when compared to neutral speech. These features are used to develop a method for identification of high arousal speech. Simple and maybe somewhat ad hoc rules, based on these features seem to give good performance in the identification of high arousal speech, even without using neutral speech as reference.