English

Investigation for Relative Voice Impression Estimation

Sound 2026-02-19 v2 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

Paralinguistic and non-linguistic aspects of speech strongly influence listener impressions. While most research focuses on absolute impression scoring, this study investigates relative voice impression estimation (RIE), a framework for predicting the perceptual difference between two utterances from the same speaker. The estimation target is a low-dimensional vector derived from subjective evaluations, quantifying the perceptual shift of the second utterance relative to the first along an antonymic axis (e.g., ``Dark--Bright''). To isolate expressive and prosodic variation, we used recordings of a professional speaker reading a text in various styles. We compare three modeling approaches: classical acoustic features commonly used for speech emotion recognition, self-supervised speech representations, and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Our results demonstrate that models using self-supervised representations outperform methods with classical acoustic features, particularly in capturing complex and dynamic impressions (e.g., ``Cold--Warm'') where classical features fail. In contrast, current MLLMs prove unreliable for this fine-grained pairwise task. This study provides the first systematic investigation of RIE and demonstrates the strength of self-supervised speech models in capturing subtle perceptual variations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.14172,
  title  = {Investigation for Relative Voice Impression Estimation},
  author = {Kenichi Fujita and Yusuke Ijima},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14172},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

5 pages,3 figures, Accepted to Speech Prosody 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:37:33.274Z