Actors and other vocal performers vary their speech across the continuum of vocal effort to
express ideas, emphasize thoughts, communicate emotions, and create drama. They are
experts at vocal expression. To analyze this range of expression across effort levels, we
curated a corpus of professional actors' Hamlet soliloquy performances and present an
acoustic feature set and classification model suitable for tracking actors' expressive speech
from extreme to extreme–from whispered, to breathy, through modal, to resonant speech.