Introducing the Volume of Extremity (VoX) method to integrate prosodic data into discourse analysis

This study aims to integrate acoustic analysis into discourse analysis. We developed a method that targets the fifth and the ninety-fifth percentiles of acoustic parameters of the four prosodic dimensions: pitch (F0), power (amplitude), duration, and voice quality per each speaker. We then defined a new measure to express the Volume of Extremity (VoX) of a speaker's voice. To demonstrate the strength of our model, we analyzed two political interviews from the Israeli election campaign in 2019, one with Benjamin Netanyahu and the other with Benny Gantz. Findings suggest that the acoustically targeted utterances are meaningful to the speaker but in a complex manner.