A Note on Acoustic Features in Pitch Contours for Discrimination of Happiness and Anger

The intonation pattern of speech consists of many short intonation contours, so-called individual intonation contours (IICs). This paper is concerned with the acoustic features of IICs for five emotional categories: anger, fear, sadness, happiness and neutral. The acoustic features are: mean duration of IICs, mean frequency dynamic of IICs (pitch-Fo variation), mean duration between the Fo maximum and the minimum inside IICs, relative number of IICs with rising shape and EAC (emotional articulatory changes), defined on a raising part of IICs. The results have shown that the EAC is the most effective feature in the discrimination between happiness and anger.