ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007

Visualizing acoustic similarities between emotions in speech: an acoustic map of emotions

Khiet P. Truong, David A. van Leeuwen

In this paper, we introduce a visual analysis method to assess the discriminability and confusability between emotions according to automatic emotion classifiers. The degree of acoustic similarities between emotions can be defined in terms of distances that are based on pair-wise emotion discrimination experiments. By employing Multidimensional Scaling, the discriminability between emotions can then be visualized in a two-dimensional plot that is relatively easy to interpret. This ‘map of emotions’ is compared to the well-known ‘Feeltrace’ two-dimensional mapping of emotions. While there is correlation with the ‘arousal’ dimension of Feeltrace, it appears that the ‘valence’ dimension is difficult to relate to the acoustic map.