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This paper investigates the relationship between syllabic duration and F0 contours for implementing three prosodic functions. Work on rhythm usually describes the evolution of syllable-sized durations throughout utterances, rarely making reference to melodic events. On the other hand, work on intonation usually describes linear sequences of melodic events with indirect references to duration. Although some scholars have explored the relationship between these two parameters for particular functions, to our knowledge, there has been no investigation on the systematic correlation between syllabic duration and F0 values throughout narrative sequences. Based on a corpus of story retelling with nine speakers of Brazilian Portuguese from two regions, our work investigated the interplay between syllabic duration and melody to signal three prosodic functions: terminal and non-terminal boundary marking and prominence. The examination of local syllabic duration maxima and four F0 descriptors revealed that these maxima act as landmarks for particular F0 shapes: for non-terminal boundaries, the great majority of shapes were increasing and increasing–decreasing patterns; for terminal boundaries, almost all shapes were decreasing F0 patterns; and for prominence marking, the great majority of shapes were high tones across the stressed syllable. Time series analyses revealed significant correlations between duration and specific F0 descriptors, pointing to a ruled interplay between F0 and syllabic duration patterns in Brazilian Portuguese story retelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work proposes an odour‐induced affect scale for use in the cosmetic industry that relies on the approach that produced the UniGEOS, a universal odour‐related emotional scale from the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. The Natura Emotion and Odor Scale (NEOS) was built on experiments conducted with a larger set of participants (491) and a set of 35 scents that combine seven commercial perfumes from Natura & Co cosmetic company with 28 odours from different olfactory classes important for the cosmetic industry. The results showed the stability of 60 Emotion‐Related terms in Brazilian Portuguese split into five emotion‐related dimensions: Romance, Attention, Energy, Well‐being and Negative feelings. The association of the scents evoking these five dimensions has direct implications in the design of new products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to assess what we refer to as the speaker discriminatory power asymmetry and its forensic implications in comparisons performed in different speaking styles: spontaneous dialogues vs. interviews. We also addressed the impact of data sampling on the speaker's discriminatory performance concerning different acoustic-phonetic estimates. The participants were 20 male speakers, Brazilian Portuguese speakers from the same dialectal area. The speech material consisted of spontaneous telephone conversations between familiar individuals, and interviews conducted between each individual participant and the researcher. Nine acoustic-phonetic parameters were chosen for the comparisons, spanning from temporal and melodic to spectral acoustic-phonetic estimates. Ultimately, an analysis based on the combination of different parameters was also conducted. Two speaker discriminatory metrics were examined: Cost Log-likelihood-ratio (Cllr) and Equal Error Rate (EER) values. A general speaker discriminatory trend was suggested when assessing the parameters individually. Parameters pertaining to the temporal acoustic-phonetic class depicted the weakest performance in terms of speaker contrasting power as evidenced by the relatively higher Cllr and EER values. Moreover, from the set of acoustic parameters assessed, spectral parameters, mainly high formant frequencies, i.e., F3 and F4, were the best performing in terms of speaker discrimination, depicting the lowest EER and Cllr scores. The results appear to suggest a speaker discriminatory power asymmetry concerning parameters from different acoustic-phonetic classes, in which temporal parameters tended to present a lower discriminatory power. The speaking style mismatch also seemed to considerably impact the speaker comparison task, by undermining the overall discriminatory performance. A statistical model based on the combination of different acoustic-phonetic estimates was found to perform best in this case. Finally, data sampling has proven to be of crucial relevance for the reliability of discriminatory power assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In poetry declamation, the appropriate use of prosody to cause pleasure is essential. Among the prosodic parameters, pause is one of the most effective to engage the listeners and provide them with a pleasant experience. The declamation of three poems in two varieties of Portuguese by ten Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speakers and ten European Portuguese (EP) speakers, balanced for gender, was used as a corpus for evaluating the degree of pleasantness by listeners from the same language variety. The distributions of pause duration and inter-pause interval (IPI) both varied greatly across the subjects, being the main source of variability and strongly right-tailed. The evaluation of the degree of pleasantness revealed that pause duration predicts degree of pleasantness in EP, whereas IPI predicts degree of pleasantness in BP. Reciters perform a kind of complex "dance", where sonority between pauses is favored in BP and pause duration in EP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to assess the speaker-discriminatory potential of a set of speech timing parameters while probing their suitability for forensic speaker comparison applications. The recordings comprised of spontaneous dialogues between twin pairs through mobile phones while being directly recorded with professional headset microphones. Speaker comparisons were performed with twins speakers engaged in a dialogue (i.e., intra-twin pairs) and among all subjects (i.e., cross-twin pairs). The participants were 20 Brazilian Portuguese speakers, ten male identical twin pairs from the same dialectal area. A set of 11 speech timing parameters was extracted and analyzed, including speech rate, articulation rate, syllable duration (V-V unit), vowel duration, and pause duration. Three system performance estimates were considered for assessing the suitability of the parameters for speaker comparison purposes, namely global Cllr, EER, and AUC values. These were interpreted while also taking into consideration the analysis of effect sizes. Overall, speech rate and articulation rate were found the most reliable parameters, displaying the largest effect sizes for the factor "speaker" and the best system performance outcomes, namely lowest Cllr, EER, and highest AUC values. Conversely, smaller effect sizes were found for the other parameters, which is compatible with a lower explanatory potential of the speaker identity on the duration of such units and a possibly higher linguistic control regarding their temporal variation. In addition, there was a tendency for speech timing estimates based on larger temporal intervals to present larger effect sizes and better speaker-discriminatory performance. Finally, identical twin pairs were found remarkably similar in their speech temporal patterns at the macro and micro levels while engaging in a dialogue, resulting in poor system discriminatory performance. Possible underlying factors for such a striking convergence in identical twins' speech timing patterns are presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore the speaker-discriminatory potential of vowel formant mean frequencies in comparisons of identical twin pairs and non-genetically related speakers. The influences of lexical stress and the vowels' acoustic distances on the discriminatory patterns of formant frequencies were also assessed. Acoustic extraction and analysis of the first four speech formants F1-F4 were carried out using spontaneous speech materials. The recordings comprise telephone conversations between identical twin pairs while being directly recorded through high-quality microphones. The subjects were 20 male adult speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), aged between 19 and 35. As for comparisons, stressed and unstressed oral vowels of BP were segmented and transcribed manually in the Praat software. F1-F4 formant estimates were automatically extracted from the middle points of each labeled vowel. Formant values were represented in both Hertz and Bark. Comparisons within identical twin pairs using the Bark scale were performed to verify whether the measured differences would be potentially significant when following a psychoacoustic criterion. The results revealed consistent patterns regarding the comparison of low-frequency and high-frequency formants in twin pairs and non-genetically related speakers, with high-frequency formants displaying a greater speaker-discriminatory power compared to low-frequency formants. Among all formants, F4 seemed to display the highest discriminatory potential within identical twin pairs, followed by F3. As for non-genetically related speakers, both F3 and F4 displayed a similar high discriminatory potential. Regarding vowel quality, the central vowel /a/ was found to be the most speaker-discriminatory segment, followed by front vowels. Moreover, stressed vowels displayed a higher inter-speaker discrimination than unstressed vowels in both groups; however, the combination of stressed and unstressed vowels was found even more explanatory in terms of the observed differences. Although identical twins displayed a higher phonetic similarity, they were not found phonetically identical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assess the speaker-discriminatory potential of a set of fundamental frequency estimates in intraidentical twin pair comparisons and cross-pair comparisons (i.e., among all speakers). A total of 20 Brazilian Portuguese speakers of the same dialect, namely 10 male identical twin pairs aged between 19 and 35, were recruited. The participants were recorded directly through professional microphones while taking part in a spontaneous dialogue over mobile phones. Acoustic measurements were performed in connected speech samples, and in lengthened vowels, at least 160 ms long produced during spontaneous speech. f 0 baseline, central tendency, and extreme values were found mostly discriminatory in intra-twin pair and cross-pair comparisons. These were also the estimates displaying the largest effect sizes. Overall, only three identical twins were found statistically different regarding their f 0 patterns in connected speech, but not for lengthened vowel-based f 0 metrics. Estimates of f 0 variation and modulation were found the least discriminatory across speakers, which may signal the control of speaking style and dialect on dynamic patterns of f 0. Concerning system performance, the base value of f 0 (f 0 baseline) was found the most reliable metric, displaying the lowest equal error rate (EER). The outcomes suggest that, although identical twins were very closely related regarding their f 0 patterns, some pairs could still be differentiated acoustically, only in connected speech. Such findings reinforce the relevance of analyzing long-term f 0 metrics for speaker comparison purposes, with particular consideration to f 0 baseline. Furthermore, f 0 differences across subjects were suggested as more expressive in connected speech than in lengthened vowels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotional phenomena can be described according to various psychological approaches, the most adopted being the discrete (basic) and the dimensional ones. This study aimed at investigating the relation between the perception of some basic emotions and emotional dimensions in speech, as well as determining which acoustic cues are related to their perception. We conducted two perception experiments with utterances selected from a foreign language (Swedish) of which the listeners had no knowledge. In the first one, Brazilian subjects rated on 5-point scales the expressivity of four basic emotions: joy, anger, sadness, and calmness. In the second, a distinct group of Brazilian subjects rated the expressivity of five emotional dimensions: activation, fairness, valence, motivation, and involvement. The perception of the basic emotions and of the emotional dimensions was then compared by means of the Spearman's correlation coefficient. The five emotional dimensions were significantly correlated to some extent with the basic emotions, and these correlations were, in general, consistent with the literature and with the hypotheses that guided this study. We also performed an acoustic analysis, utterances evaluated by the listeners. The parameters which correlated better with the listeners' judgments were fundamental frequency (median, interquantile semi-amplitude, 99.5% quantile), spectral tilt (mean and standard deviation), and LTAS slope. We concluded that it is possible to describe the perception of basic emotions in speech as a combination of emotional dimensions and that emotional dimensions may be better for describing the expression of emotions in speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] This article introduces new scales to measure odor-related feelings in four geographic areas. [•] Cultural specificities as well as cultural differences are highlighted and discussed. [•] A unique scale is proposed (UniGEOS) for future research in other cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assessed the influence of speaker similarity and sample length on the performance of an automatic speaker recognition (ASR) system utilizing the SpeechBrain toolkit. The dataset comprised recordings from 20 male identical twin speakers engaged in spontaneous dialogues and interviews. Performance evaluations involved comparing identical twins, all speakers in the dataset (including twin pairs), and all speakers excluding twin pairs. Speech samples, ranging from 5 to 30 s, underwent assessment based on equal error rates (EER) and Log cost-likelihood ratios (Cllr). Results highlight the substantial challenge posed by identical twins to the ASR system, leading to a decrease in overall speaker recognition accuracy. Furthermore, analyses based on longer speech samples outperformed those using shorter samples. As sample size increased, standard deviation values for both intra and inter-speaker similarity scores decreased, indicating reduced variability in estimating speaker similarity/dissimilarity levels in longer speech stretches compared to shorter ones. The study also uncovered varying degrees of likeness among identical twins, with certain pairs presenting a greater challenge for ASR systems. These outcomes align with prior research and are discussed within the context of relevant literature., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Cavalcanti, da Silva, Eriksson and Barbosa.)