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The Auditory System 95

Microphone
Emotional
acoustic Expression
signal
Low-Level net arousal,
Speech Feature net valence,
net stance
Extraction of active emotion
pitch, Emotion System
energy
Emotion Arbitration
Affective Intent Recognizer
J A F D S E
Prosodic Feature Extraction elicitor
contributions
Emotion Elicitors
Classifier
JE AE FE DE SE EE
neutral, approval, affectively
prohibition, tagged
attention, comfort perceptual
contributions
Higher-Level Perceptual System
Emotional Auditory perceptual Affective Assessment
Context, Releasers contribution
N Pr At
other Perceptual At Ap [A, V, S] [A, V, S] [A, V, S]
Features, N
Recognized Pr C Ap C
Affective Intent [A, V, S] [A, V, S]
Figure 7.6
System architecture for integrating vocal classifier input to Kismet’s emotion system. For the auditory releasers:
N = neutral, Pr = prohibition, At = attention, Ap = approval, and C = comfort. In the emotion system: J
stands for “joy,” A stands for “anger,” F stands for “fear,” D stands for “disgust,” S stands for “sorrow,” and E
stands for “excited/surprise.”

the rest of the SNS. Each releaser combines the incoming recognizer signal with contextual
information (such as the current “emotional” state) and computes its level of activation
according to the magnitude of its inputs. If its activation passes above threshold, it passes
its output on to the emotion system.
Within the emotion system, the output of each releaser must first pass through the
affective assessment subsystem in order to influence “emotional” behavior. Within this as-
sessment subsystem, each releaser is evaluated in affective terms by an associated
somatic marker (SM) process. This mechanism is inspired by the Somatic Marker Hypoth-
esis of (Damasio, 1994) where incoming perceptual information is “tagged” with affective
information. Table 7.5 summarizes how each vocal affect releaser is somatically tagged.
There are three classes of tags that the affective assessment phase uses to characterize
its perceptual, motivational, and behavioral input. Each tag has an associated intensity
that scales its contribution to the overall affective state. The arousal tag, A, specifies how