Male Vocal Quality and Its Relation to Females’ Preferences

Abstract

In both correlational and experimental settings, studies on women’s vocal preferences have reported negative relationships between perceived attractiveness and men’s vocal pitch, emphasizing the idea of an adaptive preference. However, such consensus on vocal attractiveness has been mostly conducted with native English speakers, but a few evidence suggest that it may be culture-dependent. Moreover, other overlooked acoustic components of vocal quality, such as intonation, perceived breathiness and roughness, may influence vocal attractiveness. In this context, the present study aims to contribute to the literature by investigating vocal attractiveness in an underrepresented language (i.e., French) as well as shedding light on its relationship with understudied acoustic components of vocal quality. More specifically, we investigated the relationships between attractiveness ratings as assessed by female raters and male voice pitch, its variation, the formants’ dispersion and position, and the harmonics-to-noise and jitter ratios. Results show that women were significantly more attracted to lower vocal pitch and higher intonation patterns. However, they did not show any directional preferences for all the other acoustic features. We discuss our results in light of the adaptive functions of vocal preferences in a mate choice context.

Musicality in human vocal communication: an evolutionary perspective

“…In human language contexts, musicality seems to be required to perceive f 0 contours, of which variability in fundamental frequency ( f 0 variability) modulation seems to be a good indicator [8][9][10][11]211]. While most evidence points toward an important role of f 0 modulation in courtship contexts and mate choice, new lines of evidence have highlighted the importance of f 0 variability modulation and other forms of musicality in more general contexts, including the recently reported association between f 0 variability and cooperativeness [212], and the role of musicality in allowing individuals to capture the nuances of linguistic non-verbal aspects (e.g.…”

Musicality in human vocal communication: An evolutionary perspective

“…In human language contexts, musicality seems to be required to perceive fo contours, of which variability in fundamental frequency (fo variability) modulation seems to be a good indicator [8][9][10]210]. While most evidence points toward an important role of fo modulation in courtship contexts and mate choice, new lines of evidence have highlighted the importance of fo variability modulation and other forms of musicality in more general contexts, including the recently reported association between fo variability and cooperativeness [211], and the role of musicality in allowing individuals to capture the nuances of linguistic non-verbal aspects [e.g.…”

Systematic Review of Literature on Vocal Demand Response: Understanding Physiology, Measurements, and Associated Factors

“…Therefore, proposing vocal demand (vocal requirements for a given communication scenario – external and independent of the speaker) and VDR (the way that talkers respond to the communicative context during speaking and corresponding individual factors) [2]. Within this context, VDR could be assessed through voice parameters, such as voice acoustic parameters (e.g., dB, fundamental frequency), vocal production quantities (e.g., subglottic pressure [14–16], maximum flow declination rate, nasalization) [17–19], physiological variables (e.g., lung volume [20], vocal fold length, lamina propria elasticity, hydration) [10, 21–23], personality traits and psychophysiological quantities (e.g., grit, interception, congruence) [24, 25], and some functional/behavioral elements (e.g., laryngeal hyperfunction, understood as the compression of the glottis and supraglottic structures during phonation [2, 26]), and characterized as the mechanical load on the tissue due to vocal fold vibration [2, 4, 27]. Returning to the Lombard example above, the noisy communication environment and the goal to communicate are the vocal demands where the actual vocalization reflected with increases in vocal loudness and to some extent by elevated vocal pitch would be the VDR; intrinsic factors to the individual, such as age, would be independent of the vocal demand.…”