Intra-, Inter-, and Cross-cultural Classification of Vocal Affect

We present intra-, inter- and cross-cultural classifications of vocal expressions. Stimuli were selected from the VENEC corpus and consisted of portrayals of 11 emotions, each expressed with 3 levels of intensity. Classification (nu-SVM) was based on acoustic measures related to pitch, intensity, formants, voice source and duration. Results showed that mean recall across emotions was around 2.4-3 times higher than chance level for both intra- and inter-cultural conditions. For cross-cultural conditions, the relative performance drcipped 26%, 32%, and 34% for high, medium, and low emotion intensity, respectively. This suggests that intra-cultural models were more sensitive to mismatched conditions for low emotion intensity. Preliminary results further indicated that recall rate varied as a function of emotion, with lust and sadness showing the smallest performance drops in the cross-cultural condition.