December debate prosody
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The sixth (of 10) scheduled Democratic presidential debate took place on 12/19/2019. There's video on YouTube here, and a WaPo transcript here. As a start on various forms of analysis, I thought I'd take a look at some simple phonetic characteristics of the candidates' answers to the first question, which was about the current impeachment process.
What does it all mean? More on that later — for now, just enjoy the pictures…
Here's the audio:
| Biden |
Buttigieg |
|
| Klobuchar |
Sanders |
|
| Steyer |
Warren |
|
| Yang |
A table of speaking rates (based on the WaPo transcript, which as usual has removed filled pauses and so on):
| NAME | Speech | Silence | Sum | Words | WPM (speech) | WPM (all) |
| Biden_Q1 | 43.97 | 9.33 | 53.30 | 186 | 209 | 254 |
| Buttigieg_Q1 | 64.60 | 14.26 | 78.86 | 223 | 170 | 207 |
| Klobuchar_Q1 | 78.29 | 14.79 | 93.08 | 280 | 180 | 215 |
| Sanders_Q1 | 54.99 | 18.69 | 73.68 | 170 | 138 | 185 |
| Steyer_Q1 | 65.51 | 14.73 | 80.24 | 222 | 166 | 203 |
| Warren_Q1 | 67.12 | 13.46 | 80.58 | 204 | 152 | 182 |
| Yang_Q1 | 70.04 | 15.61 | 85.65 | 261 | 183 | 224 |
Here's a graph of f0 quantiles:
Rates of f0 and amplitude change (Hz/second and rms/second):
Biden |
Buttigieg |
|
Klobuchar |
Sanders |
|
Steyer |
Warren |
|
Yang |
Distribution of speech and (adjacent) silence segment durations:
Biden |
Buttigieg |
|
Klobuchar |
Sanders |
|
Steyer |
Warren |
|
Yang |
Jake said,
December 22, 2019 @ 1:10 pm
"Saunders"?
[(myl) Oops. Mostly fixed. The danger of generating everything from a script — one misspelling propagates…]
John Swindle said,
December 22, 2019 @ 11:25 pm
It's possible to play the examples all at once. It takes a few seconds to get them all started.