High School Student doing experiment for Intel STS Science Fair on "Classifying Human Emotion Through Pre-Recorded Voice"

Hello! I am thinking of doing an experiment (as stated above) involving using 5 sets of emotions (Sad, Happy, Angry, Disgusted, and Excited) and was thinking of using MATLAB. I haven't used MATLAB, but have a lot of experience in Java (some in C++). Can someone give me a summary of where to start or some links that could help? I'm a fast learner, so I think I can finish this experiment in about a month or so. Also, which products would I get? Thanks.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Wow. I like your optimism. I'd be afraid to promise that to my boss in a month, especially since some distinctions are clearly fine and subjective (happy/excited, and Angry/disgusted). Are you also planning on having it detect these emotions in more than one speaker?

Anyway, there is a getting started section in the MATLAB help - that's usually recommended as the first place to start. You might get the Signal Processing Toolbox. And perhaps the Statistics Toolbox??

[Eadom]

Thanks for your input. I'm thinking of having multiple speakers. I'm actually expecting to do this in about 2 months. I'd also like more answers, I need as much info as possible.

[Image Analyst]

Well here's another answer: "Choose a student project that is much more achievable." If you'd be willing to change from audio to images, you can check out section 21.3.6 here: http://iris.usc.edu/Vision-Notes/bibliography/contentspeople.html#Face%20Recognition,%20Detection,%20Tracking,%20Gesture%20Recognition,%20Fingerprints,%20Biometrics

Answer 2

[bym]

the student version of Matlab contains the statistics toolbox & signal processing toolbox, that would be a start.

You have outlined quite an ambitious project; one that requires some pretty advanced conceptual knowledge.

Emotions, are well, emotional. Perhaps first starting out trying to identify the sound would give you experience in signal processing and classification.