Acoustic analyses of the RAVDESS corpus of emotional stimuli

Freely available online emotional stimuli allow researchers to conduct emotional perception research without needing to record their own and easily compare findings across studies; however, the acoustic properties, specifically the prosodic cues, are frequently unreported. Prosodic cues are important for a listener to contrast between the talker's emotional tone. Thus, understanding how these cues differ among an emotional stimuli database allows for a nuanced interpretation of findings for emotion perception researchers. This paper analyzes the prosodic cues (fundamental frequency, duration, and loudness) of the speech stimuli in The Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song (RAVDESS).