Gender differences in children’s singing voices: Acoustic analyses and results of a listening test

Abstract

This study tested the hypothesis that acoustic parameters exist which are specific to gender in children's singing voices, and that these parameters are relevant to listeners' identification of gender of children's singing voices. A listening test was run with examples of singing produced by children belonging to different singing cultures, six boys and six girls from a Swedish music school and six boys from an elite German boys' choir. Sustained vowels were analyzed with regard to formants and voice source properties (jitter, shimmer and glottal-to-noise-excitation rate, closed quotient, and normalized amplitude quotient). Most of the measured parameters differed significantly between the boys belonging to the two different singing cultures. Regarding boys and girls from the same choir, only the closed quotient and the fourth formant frequency differed significantly. The listening test was carried out by an expert panel. The listeners correctly identified the gender of the singer in 66.0% of the cases, i.e., far better than chance. A multiple linear regression analysis revealed that the listener's answers correlated well with the formant frequencies, with the fourth formant showing the highest correlation.

Perception of pitch location within a speaker’s range: Fundamental frequency, voice quality and speaker sex

“…Indeed, Shue (2010) found that voice measures can improve automatic sex classification, though significantly so only for 10-to-14-year-old children's voices. Similarly, Mecke and Sundberg (2010) found that listeners' judgments of the sex of 10-to-13-year-old singing children correlated well with the Closed Quotient from electroglottographic signals. However, vowel F4 correlated best, and F2, F3 and F5 were also correlated with the responses, suggesting that listeners use vocal tract information more than voice quality information in this decision.…”

Spectrographic analysis of the effect of vocal warm-up on the voice of choir girls

“…For example, boys tend to present vocal hyperfunctionality with greater respiratory intake for more intense voice production, while girls show more breathiness (17)(18)(19) . Although these data are observed in the clinical setting as well as the studies cited, there is no consensus regarding children's voices; some authors do not confirm a higher occurrence of breathiness in girls' voices when compared to boys' voices in the same choir (20) .…”

Dedication to Johan E. F. Sundberg.

“…Johan Sundberg has published over 300 journal articles (not including technical papers produced in house at KTH). These articles touch on an enormous variety of topics from basic music acoustics to such areas as the sensitivity of musicians to cues of depression reflected in the voice (Nilsonne & Sundberg, 1985), the acoustics of barbershop singing (Hagerman & Sundberg, 1980), child singers (McAllister, Sederholm, & Sundberg, 1994;Mecke & Sundberg, 2010), older singers (Sundberg, Niska-Thörnvik, & Söderström, 1998), opera singers (Echternach, Sundberg, Baumann, Markl, & Richter, 2011), music-theatre singers (Sundberg, Thalén, & Popeil, 2010), and country singers (Stone, Cleveland, & Sundberg, 1999) as only some examples. Other research deals with the synthesis of the singing voice from vowels to the emotional aspects (Sundberg, 1988(Sundberg, , 1989Sundberg, Askenfelt, & Frydén, 1983).…”