Name(s): Akash Krishnan and Matthew Fernandez

1. Name(s): Akash Krishnan and Matthew Fernandez High School(s): Oregon Episcopal School, Portland, OR Mentor: Dr. Bevin Daglen Project Title: The Recognition of Emotion in Human Speech Using Matlab, a German emotional speech database with 18216 files and five emotions (anger, positive, neutral, emphatic, rest), we developed, trained, and tested a classification engine to determine emotions from an input signal. Emotion recognition has applications in security, gaming, user-computer interactions, lie-detection, enhancing synthesized speech, and autism research. After our speech isolation algorithm and normalization was applied, 57 features were extracted, consisting of the minimum, mean, and maximum values of fundamental frequency, first three formant frequencies, log energy, average magnitude difference, 13 Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), and its first and second derivatives. Clusters of the first 18 features were grouped and, in conjunction with a weighting system, were used to train and classify features of every emotion. In addition, an MFCC input feature matrix was compared against each emotion’s MFCC feature matrix with a novel weighting system that gives importance to dissimilarity among emotions. Overall, our program was 60% accurate, well above other researchers’ results for the same tests. Future work will involve training our program with new speech databases. We have also developed a successful real time system in hopes for helping autistic children.