Definition :

Speech emotion recognition (SER) is the field of technology focused on identifying the emotional state of a speaker from their voice. This goes beyond the words spoken and analyzes how they are spoken.

• Speech Input: Similar to standard speech recognition, the user's voice is recorded.

• Pre-processing: The audio is prepared by removing noise and potentially isolating specific speech segments.

• Feature Extraction: Crucial features related to emotions are extracted, including:

  • Prosodic features: Pitch, intonation, volume, speaking rate, pauses
  • Spectral Features: Spectrum of the voice, MFCCs (emphasizing qualities similar to human perception)
  • Voice Quality Features: Jitter, shimmer (small variations in voice quality)

• Emotion Model: A trained machine learning model (often using classification algorithms) takes these features and identifies the associated emotion.

• Emotion Output: The system outputs the detected emotion, typically with probability or confidence scores (e.g., angry, happy, sad, neutral, etc.).

• Mental Health: Potential uses in diagnosing and monitoring mental health conditions, detecting stress or depression.

• Customer Service: Analyzing customer interactions in call centers to improve service and gauge satisfaction.

• Human-Computer Interaction: Creating more responsive and emotionally intelligent virtual assistants and robots.

• Market Research: Analyzing focus group responses or advertisement reception to understand emotional reactions.

• Game Design: Developing adaptive games that change based on a player's emotional state.

Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (Ravdess)

RAVDESS is one of the most common datasets used for this exercise by others. It's well-liked because of its quality of speakers, recordings, and it includes 24 actors of different genders. Additionally, it provides data in both speech and song formats, catering to a wide range of research projects.

For convenience, here's the filename identifiers as per the official RAVDESS website:

• Modality:

  • 01 = full-AV (audio-visual)
  • 02 = video-only
  • 03 = audio-only

• Vocal channel:

  • 01 = speech
  • 02 = song

• Emotion:

  • 01 = neutral
  • 02 = calm
  • 03 = happy
  • 04 = sad
  • 05 = angry
  • 06 = fearful
  • 07 = disgust
  • 08 = surprised

• Emotional intensity:

  • 01 = normal
  • 02 = strong (Note: There is no strong intensity for the 'neutral' emotion)

• Statement:

  • 01 = "Kids are talking by the door"
  • 02 = "Dogs are sitting by the door"

• Repetition:

  • 01 = 1st repetition
  • 02 = 2nd repetition

• Actor:

  • 01 to 24 (Odd numbered actors are male, even numbered actors are female)

So, here's an example of an audio filename: 02-01-06-01-02-01-12.mp4

This means the metadata for the audio file is:

• Video-only (02)
• Speech (01)
• Fearful (06)
• Normal intensity (01)
• Statement "dogs" (02)
• 1st Repetition (01)
• 12th Actor (12) - Female (as the actor ID number is even)

Accuracy: ⚽️...... 62.407%