Voices in audiodescription: Neutrality and pleasantness

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the pro-sodic features of a corpus of audio descriptions in Spanish in order to determine the neutrality and the pleasantness in the prosody used by the speakers. The analysis involves a revision of the recommendations found in guidelines and standards on the voices of the audio describers. According to the Spanish standard by Asociación Española de Normalización (UNE 153020), speech in audio description (AD) must be neutral, and emotional intonation should be avoided. The corpus is obtained from professional male and female speakers. The duration, pitch and amplitude of AD units have been analysed. Then, a perception test has been carried out to assess the neutrality of the voices of the describ-ers, which were chosen by means of an acoustic analysis, and the relationship between neutrality and pleasantness. Perception tests results were analysed taking into account two separate groups: on the one hand, persons with sight loss and, on the other hand, persons without sight loss. The results of this study can help to better select audio descrip-tion voices depending on the specific task to be performed and can also help to identify differences depending on the user profile