Abstract
This paper introduces an experimental study on the role of breathing patterns and acoustic characteristics on the appraisal of emotional content in two speech styles. The corpus is a song lyrics, read and sung by six professional lyrical singers, three men and three women. Three breathing parameters (breath cycle duration, inhalation duration and inhalation amplitude), twelve acoustic parameters, related to fundamental frequency, intensity, spectral tilt and Long Term Analysis, and one semantic descriptor (emotional impact) were analyzed. Results showed stylistic, gender and individual differences. Reading mainly differentiated from singing in relation to the three breathing measures and six acoustic measures. The durations of the breath cycles and the inhalations were higher in singing than in reading and in men than in women. The amplitude of the inhalation was an important factor in separating reading and singing in terms of emotional impact.
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Barbosa, P.A., Madureira, S., Fontes, M.A.S., Menegon, P. (2020). Speech Breathing and Expressivity: An Experimental Study in Reading and Singing Styles. In: Quaresma, P., Vieira, R., Aluísio, S., Moniz, H., Batista, F., Gonçalves, T. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12037. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41505-1_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41505-1_37
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