Spontaneous Voice Gender Imitation Abilities in Adult Speakers

Valentina Cartei,David Reby,Heidi Wind Cowles,Nicolas Mathevon

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0031353

Abstract

BackgroundThe frequency components of the human voice play a major role in signalling the gender of the speaker. A voice imitation study was conducted to investigate individuals' ability to make behavioural adjustments to fundamental frequency (F0), and formants (Fi) in order to manipulate their expression of voice gender.Methodology/Principal FindingsThirty-two native British-English adult speakers were asked to read out loud different types of text (words, sentence, passage) using their normal voice and then while sounding as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as possible. Overall, the results show that both men and women raised their F0 and Fi when feminising their voice, and lowered their F0 and Fi when masculinising their voice.Conclusions/SignificanceThese observations suggest that adult speakers are capable of spontaneous glottal and vocal tract length adjustments to express masculinity and femininity in their voice. These results point to a “gender code”, where speakers make a conventionalized use of the existing sex dimorphism to vary the expression of their gender and gender-related attributes.

Highlights

The human voice is highly sexually dimorphic
Hypotheses The current study explores the ability of adult speakers to alter the femininity and masculinity of their voices during an imitation experiment, as well as the extent to which they are aware of the nature of the underlying articulatory gestures that they use to make these alterations
It is consistent with perceptual observations: Smith and Patterson [25] report that DF differences re-synthesised via linear compression/ expansion of the vowel spectral envelope correlate strongly with listeners’ cross-class judgments of speaker’s age, sex and size

Summary

Introduction

The human voice is highly sexually dimorphic. Alongside other properties that distinguish male from female voices, such as intonation [1], duration [2,3] and speech rate [4,5], the main cues to speaker gender are fundamental frequency (F0 - or its perceptual correlate ‘‘pitch’’) and formant frequencies (Fi - mainly responsible for the perception of ‘‘timbre’’), which together account for 98.8% of the perceived voice dimorphism [6]. Acoustic analyses [15,16,17,18,19] of pre-pubertal children’s voices consistently show that boys speak with lower formants than girls, while perceptual studies [18] show that children’s voice gender can be identified in children as young as 4 years old, despite the fact that the anatomy of the vocal apparatus does not significantly differ between the two sexes until the pubertal age [14,20] These observations suggest that children acquire (consciously or unconsciously) genderspecific articulatory behaviours during development, and that speakers develop a knowledge of how a ‘‘male’’ or a ‘‘female’’ should sound, with male voices being low-pitched and ‘‘deeper’’, while female voices being high-pitched and ‘‘lighter’’. We investigate male and female speakers’ awareness of the contribution of F0, formant shifts and related articulatory gestures (lip/laryngeal movements) to the vocal exaggeration of masculinity and femininity

Materials and Methods

Results

Discussion