Measurements of articulatory variation in expressive speech for a set of Swedish vowels

Facial gestures are used to convey e.g. emotions, dialogue states and conversational signals, which support us in the interpretation of other people's feelings and intentions. Synthesising this behaviour with an animated talking head would widen the possibilities of this intuitive interface. The dynamic characteristics of these facial gestures during speech affect articulation. Previously, articulation for neutral speech has been studied and implemented in animation rules. The results obtained in this study show how some articulatory parameters are affected by the influence of expressiveness in speech for a selection of Swedish vowels. Our focus has primarily been on attitudes and emotions conveying information that is intended to make an animated agent more "human-like". A multimodal corpus of acted expressive speech has been collected for this purpose. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.