Does the Lombard Effect Improve Emotional Communication in Noise? - Analysis of Emotional Speech Acted in Noise -

TL;DR

This study investigates how the Lombard effect influences emotional speech communication in noisy environments by analyzing acoustic features and recognition accuracy in controlled recordings.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the Lombard effect's impact on emotional speech expression and perception under noisy conditions.

Findings

Emotional speech can be correctly expressed even in noise.

Listeners can recognize emotions in noisy emotional speech.

Acoustic features of emotional speech are altered by noise and Lombard effect.

Abstract

Speakers usually adjust their way of talking in noisy environments involuntarily for effective communication. This adaptation is known as the Lombard effect. Although speech accompanying the Lombard effect can improve the intelligibility of a speaker's voice, the changes in acoustic features (e.g. fundamental frequency, speech intensity, and spectral tilt) caused by the Lombard effect may also affect the listener's judgment of emotional content. To the best of our knowledge, there is no published study on the influence of the Lombard effect in emotional speech. Therefore, we recorded parallel emotional speech waveforms uttered by 12 speakers under both quiet and noisy conditions in a professional recording studio in order to explore how the Lombard effect interacts with emotional speech. By analyzing confusion matrices and acoustic features, we aim to answer the following questions: 1) Can speakers express their emotions correctly even under adverse conditions? 2) Can listeners recognize the emotion contained in speech signals even under noise? 3) How does emotional speech uttered in noise differ from emotional speech uttered in quiet conditions in terms of acoustic characteristic?