Acoustic, semantic and personality dimensions in the speech of traditional puppeteers

Puppeteering represents a traditional but slowly dying folk art in which impersonation based on modifying the puppeteer's voice belongs among the core expressive and stylistic devices. A study of the formal and functional aspects of voice quality and other prosodic features in puppeteers' production as well as their acoustic correlates is thus an integral part of studies into communicative social signals especially in emotional and expressive speech. This analysis becomes even more relevant in cases when puppeteers' performance represents a very salient communication code in a particular culture. Better understanding of such traditional code opens possibilities of applications into several speech processing domains. Our data consist of recordings of plays and excerpts by two puppeteers (a father and a son) and verbal descriptions of personality features of the characters that the actor tries to express through their voices. We propose an approach to the taxonomy of archetypal characters based on analyzing the psychological, aesthetic and acoustic-phonetic aspects of their personalities. More specifically, we identify salient links between acoustic-prosodic features on the one hand and semantic and personality features on the other hand.