This article describes the first emotional corpus, named EMOVO, applicable to Italian language,. It is a database built from the voices of up to 6 actors who played 14 sentences simulating 6 emotional states (disgust, fear, anger, joy, surprise, sadness) plus the neutral state. These emotions are the well-known Big Six found in most of the literature related to emotional speech. The recordings were made with professional equipment in the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni laboratories. The paper also describes a subjective validation test of the corpus, based on emotion-discrimination of two sentences carried out by two different groups of 24 listeners. The test was successful because it yielded an overall recognition accuracy of 80%. It is observed that emotions less easy to recognize are joy and disgust, whereas the most easy to detect are anger, sadness and the neutral state.

In the context of forensic phonetics the transcription of intercepted signals is particularly important. However, these signals are often degraded and the transcript may not reflect what was actually pronounced. In the absence of the original signal, the only way to see the level of accuracy that can be obtained in the transcription of poor recordings is to develop an objective methodology for intelligibility measurements. This study has been carried out on a corpus specially built to simulate the real conditions of forensic signals. With reference to this corpus a measurement system of intelligibility based on STI (Speech Transmission Index) has been evaluated so as to assess its performance. The result of the experiment shows a high correlation between objective measurements and subjective evaluations. Therefore it is recommended to use the proposed methodology in order to establish whether a given intercepted signal can be transcribed with sufficient reliability.