The sound of silence: Breathing analysis for finding traces of trauma and depression in oral history archives

Abstract

Many people experience a traumatic event during their lifetime. In some extraordinary situations, such as natural disasters, war, massacres, terrorism, or mass migration, the traumatic event is shared by a community and the effects go beyond those directly affected. Today, thanks to recorded interviews and testimonials, many archives and collections exist that are open to researchers of trauma studies, holocaust studies, and historians, among others. These archives act as vital testimonials for oral history, politics, and human rights. As such, they are usually either transcribed or meticulously indexed. In this work, we propose to look at the nonverbal signals emitted by victims of various traumatic events when they describe the trauma and we seek to render these for novel representations without taking into account the explicit verbal content. Our preliminary paralinguistic analysis on a manually annotated collection of testimonials from different archives, as well as on a corpus prepared for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder detection indicates a tentative connection between breathing and emotional states of speakers, which opens up new possibilities of exploring oral history archives.