The Power of Prosody and Prosody of Power: An Acoustic Analysis of Finnish Parliamentary Speech

Abstract: Parliamentary recordings provide a rich source of data for studying how politicians use speech to convey their messages and influence their audience. This provides a unique context for studying how politicians use speech, especially prosody, to achieve their goals. Here we analyzed a corpus of parliamentary speeches in the Finnish parliament between the years 2008-2020 and highlight methodological considerations related to the robustness of signal based features with respect to varying recording conditions and corpus design. We also present results of long term changes pertaining to speakers' status with respect to their party being in government or in opposition. Looking at large scale averages of fundamental frequency - a robust prosodic feature - we found systematic changes in speech prosody with respect opposition status and the election term. Reflecting a different level of urgency, members of the parliament have higher f0 at the beginning of the term or when they are in opposition.