Once More, With Feeling: Measuring Emotion of Acting Performances in Contemporary American Film

TL;DR

This paper explores acting performances in contemporary American film using speech emotion recognition and sociolinguistic analysis to uncover narrative, genre, and dialogue-based emotional patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a computational approach combining speech emotion recognition with sociolinguistic analysis to study acting in film, focusing on narrative and genre influences.

Findings

Identifies narrative and genre-based emotional patterns in performances

Discovers diachronic shifts in acting styles over time

Reveals constraints imposed by dialogue and genre on emotional expression

Abstract

Narrative film is a composition of writing, cinematography, editing, and performance. While much computational work has focused on the writing or visual style in film, we conduct in this paper a computational exploration of acting performance. Applying speech emotion recognition models and a variationist sociolinguistic analytical framework to a corpus of popular, contemporary American film, we find narrative structure, diachronic shifts, and genre- and dialogue-based constraints located in spoken performances.