The perception of voice pitch by naïve and experienced listeners

Abstract

Perceptual judgments of a single speaker’s voice pitch will be characterized by any given listener along a subjective continuum. Individual listener attributes have been suggested as an explanation for this diversity in categorizing voice pitch. Professionals involved in the evaluation of voice, specifically voice pitch, are expected to possess a level of perceptual skill that reliably quantifies pitch regardless of personal attributes. Two groups of individuals, one naïve and one experienced, were asked to perceptually match voice pitch during two pitch matching tasks. The first task involved matching an audio taped voice pitch produced on the vowel /a/ to a musical note on a keyboard. The second task involved listening to an audio-taped voice producing words, then matching the voice pitch of the word to a musical note on a keyboard. Accuracy of perceptual judgments was measured upon stimuli produced and assigned musical keyboard note by master’s level opera music majors. Results indicate that a difference exists between groups in only one of the four variables measured. Individual differences varied, but appeared unrelated to previous musical experience.