The SAVEE database was recorded from four native English male speakers (identified as DC, JE, JK, KL), postgraduate students and researchers at the University of Surrey aged from 27 to 31 years. Emotion has been described psychologically in discrete categories: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. This is supported by the cross-cultural studies of Ekman [6] and studies of automatic emotion recognition tended to focus on recognizing these [12]. We added neutral to provide recordings of 7 emotion categories. The text material consisted of 15 TIMIT sentences per emotion: 3 common, 2 emotion-specific and 10 generic sentences that were different for each emotion and phonetically-balanced. The 3 common and 2 × 6 = 12 emotion-specific sentences were recorded as neutral to give 30 neutral sentences.

Content

This results in a total of 120 utterances per speaker, for example:

Common: She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year.
Anger: Who authorized the unlimited expense account?
Disgust: Please take this dirty table cloth to the cleaners for me.
Fear: Call an ambulance for medical assistance.
Happiness: Those musicians harmonize marvelously.
Sadness: The prospect of cutting back spending is an unpleasant one for any governor.
Surprise: The carpet cleaners shampooed our oriental rug.
Neutral: The best way to learn is to solve extra problems.