Acoustic Correlates For Perceived Effort Levels In Expressive Speech

Actors and other vocal performers vary their speech across the continuum of vocal effort to express ideas, emphasize thoughts, communicate emotions, and create drama. They are experts at vocal expression. To analyze this range of expression across effort levels, we curated a corpus of professional actors' Hamlet soliloquy performances and present an acoustic feature set and classification model suitable for tracking actors' expressive speech from extreme to extreme - from whispered, to breathy, through modal, to resonant speech.