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2. PROSODY AND AFFECT

The current task of speech recognition is only to decode the orthographic representationof phonetic sound units. Prosodic Font requires the linguistic function of language onlyinsofar as obtaining the orthographic representation. Prosodic Font’s focus continuesbeyond to that of prosody – the paralinguistic features of speech that convey amultiplicity of emotional, informational and situated meanings.

Prosody is a paralinguistic category that can describe the song – or intonation, rhythm, andvocal timbre (or voice quality) found in all spoken utterances of all languages. Prosodyfunctions above the linguistic function of language, meaning, prosodic meaning does notbear a one-to-one relationship to semantic meaning. It is a non-arbitrary use of vocalfeatures to convey the way we feel about what we are saying, as well as how we are

feeling when we say anything. A number of primitive features interact within any spokenutterance to create a uniquely phrased and emphasized utterance. A spoken utterance,then, conveys two simultaneous channels of communication – the linguistic andparalinguistic. Written language represents the linguistic channel. Prosodic Font goesfurther to represent the paralinguistic channel on top of the visual linguisticrepresentations.

Dr. Robert Ladd describes the coordination of the paralinguistic and linguistic:

“The central difference between paralinguistic and linguistic messages resides in the quantal or categoricalstructure of linguistic signalling and the scalar or gradient nature of paralanguage. In linguistic signalling,physical continua are partitioned into categories, so that close similarity of phonetic form is generally of norelevance for meaning: that is /th/ and /f/ are different phonemes in English, despite their close phoneticsimilarity, and pairs of words like thin and fin are not only clearly distinct but also semantically unrelated.In paralinguistic signalling, by contrast, semantic continua are matched by phonetic ones. If raising thevoice can be used to signal anger or surprise, raising the voice a lot can signal violent anger or great

surprise. Paralinguistic signals that are phonetically similar generally mean similar things.... The differencebetween language and paralanguage is a matter of the way the sound-meaning relation is structured” (1996,p. 36).

Defining prosody is a difficult and contentious task since there is no common agreement.Further, each discipline places different vocal features into the prosodic feature putational linguists and speech communication researchers identify intonation andprominence as the major prosodic feature set items, while poets and poetry critics

the Space between the Spoken and the Written tara michelle graber rosenberger The advent of automated speech recognition opens up new possibilities for design of new typographic forms. Graphic designers have long been designing text to evoke the sound of a

associate prosody with rate of speaking and metrical rhythm. Experimental psychologistshave studied vocal prosody for how it can inform research on emotion. Some findings goso far as to integrate prosodic parameters of voice quality, range, and speaking durationdifferences along axes of emotion; however, there are fundamental disagreements abouthow emotional space is defined. Some anthropologists have looked at how vocal timbrechanges across context, building upon the work of linguistic anthropologist JohnGumperz in contextualized vocal prosody (1982). Yet this work is not complete norsystematized.

Not only is the definition and what constitutes the prosodic feature in question, but thebasic function of prosody within and across languages is in dispute. Prosody may haveuniversal import to humans, irrespective of which language is spoken. The universality ofprosody is often borne out in psychological tests in which subjects identify the primaryemotion in a voice speaking a language unknown to them (Scherer 1981). Intonationalphonology’s primary goal is to discover the universal functions of prosody. On the otherhand, linguists often subjugate prosody to the status of a linguistic amplifier, believingthat prosody is used by speakers to foreground certain linguistic items introduced intothe conversation, amongst other things.

The field of prosody varies across three dimensions:

Affective versus Syntactic Ontology: those who hold that intonation and patterns of

prominence developed as an extension of grammar and discourse structure versus thosethat believe prosody has non-linguistic roots in affect and emotion that develop inconventionally understood ways, dependent upon sociological and linguistic factors.Phonetic versus Phonological Goals: those who use low-level descriptions of the voice signalversus those who characterize the signals in universal terms that enable comparison andgeneration of phonological rules across individual speakers’ production. (Another way ofdescribing this difference is low to mid-level descriptions versus high-level descriptions.)Linear versus Layered Descriptions: those who believe that prosody is constructed of a linearsequence of events versus those who believe that prosody consists of layers of signals ofgreater or lesser range which interact to produce a composite effect.

My approach to Prosodic Font involves a combination of approaches. Prosodic Fontuses low- to mid-level signal characterizations of voice in order to represent individualdifferences between speakers. However, these events are understood as linear sequencesof meaningful events in order to capture the emotional intention of the song and rhythmapart from the pronunciation requirements of particular words. This serves to smooththe low-level signals and foreground higher level changes and trends. For example,

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