Voice actors simulating small vocal tracts: A study using 3-D ultrasound

Abstract

Voice actors are an interesting population for linguistic study because their professional field requires them to perform complex vocal tract manipulations in order to consistently and believably convey many different character types. Previous investigations have looked at how voice actors manipulate laryngeal setting and voice quality, to portray specific types of characters in animation (Teshigawara and Murano, 2004; Starr, 2015), but investigations of articulatory manipulations employed by voice actors are rare. This study uses 3-D ultrasound and acoustic analyses to compare the different kinds of articulatory and phonatory strategies that different actors use in order to approximate a smaller vocal tract and achieve a similar ‘childlike’ percept. Preliminary analysis shows that one amateur actor relies on manipulation of articulatory setting by implementing hyoid bone raising, gesture fronting, and tongue grooving, whereas one professional actor relies more on manipulation of laryngeal structures and prosody. Despite these differences in approach, the two actors still achieve similar child-like percepts. This poster will compare strategies from two female and two male subjects as well as describe within-subject variation across each actor’s adult and imitated child voices.