Does the Lombard Effect Improve Emotional Communication in Noise? - Analysis of Emotional Speech Acted in Noise -
This addresses a gap in understanding how noise impacts emotional speech perception, relevant for fields like human-computer interaction and communication disorders, but is incremental as it explores an understudied aspect of a known phenomenon.
The study investigated whether the Lombard effect, an involuntary adaptation to noise, improves emotional communication by analyzing emotional speech from 12 speakers in quiet and noisy conditions, finding that it affects acoustic features and emotional recognition.
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?