New Year’s Day speeches of Czech presidents: phonetic analysis and text analysis

Abstract

The aim of our study is verification of programmed algorithms of phonetic analysis using concrete data, and reassurance that it works as also sought after. For our testing, the appropriate recordings of New Year’s Day speeches of Czech and Czechoslovak presidents are available. The very first available recording of presidential speech comes from 1935. All transcripts and recordings of the last 87 speeches are located on the web page www.rozhlas.cz. The primary goal of this paper is to analyze voice characteristics of the speaker (log energy, speech velocity and Zero crossing rate). Especially words "with greatest energy" will be found. There will be a list of words having the highest energy values. The most interesting results will be presented by graphical tools. Using a software, capable of text analysis, transcript characteristics such as most frequent words, length of words, total number of words and different words will be computed. The most frequent words will be presented. Political speeches often become the subject of various analyses. Our calculation allows a new perspective on speeches. It is interesting to compare the most frequent se-mantic words and words with the greatest energy. The results can be historically important. It allows an extraction of new information from available data and scientifically different approach.