voicemood

Voicemood refers to the perceived emotional state or attitude conveyed by a speaker's voice, independent of text. It encompasses cues such as pitch, loudness, tempo, rhythm, timbre, and articulation, and is considered a component of voice prosody studied in linguistics, affective computing, and media analysis.

To measure voicemood, researchers analyze acoustic features such as fundamental frequency (F0), energy, speaking rate, pitch variation, spectral tilt, and voice quality. Machine learning models map these features to emotion labels or mood dimensions, sometimes incorporating context and speaker identity.

The concept developed from studies of emotional prosody in linguistics and affective computing since the late 20th century. Voicemood is not universally standardized and is sometimes used interchangeably with emotional prosody or voice emotion.

Applications include customer service analytics to assess satisfaction, adaptive or tonal telephony and virtual assistants, media analysis for character mood, and speech synthesis to produce more natural prosody.

Limitations include subjectivity and cultural variation in mood interpretation, potential bias in models, privacy concerns, and confounding factors such as environment, speech disorders, or language. Ethical use requires transparency and consent.

See also: emotional prosody, affective computing, emotion recognition, speech synthesis.