Acoustical Analysis of Speech Under Physical Stress in Relation to Physical Activities and Physical Literacy

TL;DR

This study investigates how physical activity affects speech acoustics, revealing significant changes in pitch, rate, and pauses, and explores the relationship with physical fitness and literacy using a Cantonese speech database.

Contribution

It introduces a new Cantonese speech database capturing pre- and post-exercise speech and analyzes how physical activity influences speech features in relation to physical literacy.

Findings

Physical activity alters pitch, speaking rate, and pause patterns.

Changes in speech are correlated with physical fitness and literacy measures.

Preliminary results demonstrate measurable acoustical differences related to exercise intensity.

Abstract

Human speech production encompasses physiological processes that naturally react to physic stress. Stress caused by physical activity (PA), e.g., running, may lead to significant changes in a person's speech. The major changes are related to the aspects of pitch level, speaking rate, pause pattern, and breathiness. The extent of change depends presumably on physical fitness and well-being of the person, as well as intensity of PA. The general wellness of a person is further related to his/her physical literacy (PL), which refers to a holistic description of engagement in PA. This paper presents the development of a Cantonese speech database that contains audio recordings of speech before and after physical exercises of different intensity levels. The corpus design and data collection process are described. Preliminary results of acoustical analysis are presented to illustrate the impact of PA on pitch level, pitch range, speaking and articulation rate, and time duration of pauses. It is also noted that the effect of PA is correlated to some of the PA and PL measures.