Volume 3 Culture and Perception
Krzysztof Izdebski
Plural Publishing, 2008,
£41
ISBN: 1597 561 193
This American publication is the third in a series on emotion and the Human Voice; the first two dealing with Foundations, and Clinical Evidence. In this volume the contributors, specialists in a wide range of disciplines and nationalities, explore in detailed analysis how emotion is conveyed to the hearer through the voice, through articulatory and laryngeal settings, pitch, pace, prosody, etc. and how the perceptions of the hearer may be influenced by culture or expectations: “speech emotion recognition is a dynamically evolving research field”. Most of this research is being done with the purpose of improving the quality of synthesised voices for robotic interface, spoken tutoring systems, call centres and dubbing – as in “how to create a persona using a paralinguistic template.” This can provide voices for Interactive Response Systems, which will recognise the client's mood and respond with suitable emotions, such as welcome, empathy, sadness, happiness. However it was good to read in the Voice-Over Artist's chapter “I've been less put out by monotones.... I can BEAR it if they don't care”.
Cross cultural reactions are dealt with, for example in the chapter on “preserving vocal emotions while dubbing into Brazilian Portuguese,” and in “perceptions of Japanese 'anime' (cartoon) voices by Hebrew Speakers”.Another contributor examines his own subjective responses to radio actors depicting tough virile characters and the vocal means they have used.
There is an interesting chapter describing a computerised analysis of the voice in English and Spanish speakers using a digitized interviewer as a means of identifying depression. The issues here seem so varied and complex that it is reassuring to read that more research is needed before the system is viable.
To the simple Voice Coach accustomed to using the ears rather than a computer, Chapter 18 comes as a breath of fresh air, a philosophical imaginative view of the voice and the human being, as does the comment of the Voice-Over Artist: “it is what causes you to smile that changes the tone of voice”
This is an interesting book based on serious research. Having absorbed what the future holds for us my only fear is that rather than teaching robotic voices to speak like us, we may find we are adopting robotic voices ourselves.
Angela Devaney
Voice Coach
London