WarpMyMind

Hi

I am just looking for information about how a voice changes. I mean, how different mood and temper does influence the voice.
Trying to analyze it myself, I would like to read about it from a professional point view, that means technically (pitch, spectrum, modulation and such points).

Does anyone maybe know if there is something to read about this on the net? I read about it a little in wikipedia but would like to go deeper into this topic...

Hmm... you're best off trying to look up things from vocal coaches. I'm more on the acting side, so I tend to be more concerned with how to make my voice sound that way, rather than what the changes are, but I'll try on some things of mood/temper:

Anger - Temper changes tend to vary among people, some get very loud, some get rather soft, but the constant one across all people is an increase in enunciation. People attempt to be very clear with their words, whether through yelling or simply being Very. Punctuated. With. Their. Words.

Excitement - Less control over the pitch of the voice. Many people go higher than normal, but generally the more important part is that it'll move up and down a lot while speaking, generally higher on words or ideas the person is most excited about, and lower on unimportant things like articles or prepositions. Some lose a sense of how fast they're talking, tending to cause words to run together in a rush to communicate their excitement.

Happiness - Less enunciation, words will flow more easily. The person is feeling good, and isn't as subconsciously needing to put in anything fancy with their voice.

Generally, you can take any of these, and the opposite emotion/mood will have opposite effects(calm people will be more relaxed with their speech, sad people will take long pauses while talking, and so forth). My best recommendation barring a more professional source is to just listen to people. Hear how they talk, why they're talking that way, and so forth. Make it a conscious perception, and you'll start noticing patterns of speech better.

DKaiser wrote:Hmm... you're best off trying to look up things from vocal coaches. I'm more on the acting side, so I tend to be more concerned with how to make my voice sound that way, rather than what the changes are, but I'll try on some things of mood/temper:

Well my attempt is to think about if it is possible to bring more emotional feeling into synthetic voices. So I had just thought about that maybe "emotional tags" could be insert to a text, telling the synthesizer to vary the sound in some kind. But how to vary it thats the question.

DKaiser wrote:Anger - Temper changes tend to vary among people, some get very loud, some get rather soft, but the constant one across all people is an increase in enunciation. People attempt to be very clear with their words, whether through yelling or simply being Very. Punctuated. With. Their. Words.

So, the words are spoken short and between the words there are noticeable gaps, while in more normal speech the words flow into eachother more, is that right?
To add periods into the text of a syntesized text wouldnt be enough, because it should also speak the words faster while leaving the gaps at normal speed, like compressing the words against the gaps.

DKaiser wrote:Excitement - Less control over the pitch of the voice. Many people go higher than normal, but generally the more important part is that it'll move up and down a lot while speaking, generally higher on words or ideas the person is most excited about, and lower on unimportant things like articles or prepositions. Some lose a sense of how fast they're talking, tending to cause words to run together in a rush to communicate their excitement.

Hm, so maybe the words would run fast and have a noticeable pitch curve while however the overall curve of the sentence is more monotone, is that right?

DKaiser wrote:Happiness - Less enunciation, words will flow more easily. The person is feeling good, and isn't as subconsciously needing to put in anything fancy with their voice.

Yes that I can imagine. I would add do a happy voice a little more "sing", means the pitch changes in a certain rhythm making the words like "jump" around and waving...