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A phonetician's reading of Darwin's notes on the vocal
Abstract
Sexual dimorphism has played a key role in research on vocal attractiveness. This paper looks at Darwin's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871[2021]) with the following questions in mind: 1) What role does the vocal have according to Darwin?; 2) What reasons are provided for any tendencies identified by Darwin?; and 3) Have these (in humans) been supported by research conducted since? Darwin consistently acknowledges the role of the voice in sexual selection. Specific details are discussed in the paper, which further compares these with more recent research on vocal attractiveness and suggests further avenues of research from a phonetician's perspective.
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The past decades have seen an explosion of research into the psychological, cognitive, neural, biological, and technical mechanisms of voice perception. These mechanisms refer to the general ability to extract information from voices expressed by other living beings or by technical systems. Voice perception research is now a lively area of research, which is studied from many different perspectives ranging from basic research on the acoustic analysis of vocalizations and the neural and cognitive mechanisms, to comparative research across ages, species, and cultures, up to applied research in the field of machine-based generation and decoding of voices, telecommunication, psychiatry, and neurology. This handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview on all the major research fields related to voice perception, in an accessible form, for a broad readership of students, scholars, and researchers. The handbook is divided into seven major parts, each of which deals with a central perspective on voice perception, including what makes the voice special compared to other acoustic signals, the evolutionary and ontogenetic conditions of voice perception, the social cues extracted from voice signals, the machine-based recognition of voices, and the clinical disorders that affect voice perception.
Women’s average voice pitch has decreased in recent years, reducing the gap between men on this vocal dimension. The present study examined whether a woman speaking at a lower pitch would be perceived as less feminine and more masculine than a woman speaking at a higher pitch. Participants (n = 100, 67 female) listened to an audiotape of a woman in which her natural voice was manipulated to represent a pitch of either 220 Hz or 165 Hz. They then rated her on positive and negative facets of masculinity and femininity as well as competence and likeability. In addition, participants’ gendered self-concept was measured to examine potential moderator effects. As predicted, positive masculinity ratings were significantly higher, and positive and negative femininity ratings were significantly lower, in the 165 Hz than in the 220 Hz condition. The woman was also rated as more likeable in the 220 Hz than in the 165 Hz condition. No difference was found for negative masculinity and competence ratings, and no moderation effect of participants’ gendered self-concept emerged. The findings suggest that lower voice pitch is a masculinity cue that elicits stereotyped perceptions of female speakers and may have implications for impression formation in a variety of domains.
A study was conducted to determine the effects of vocal cues on judgements of dominance in an interpersonal influence context. Physical measures of human vocal cues and participant ratings of dominance were obtained from videotapes of actors delivering short influence messages. After controlling for linguistic and visual content of messages, results indicated that mean amplitude and amplitude standard deviation were positively associated with dominance judgments, whereas speech rate was negatively associated with dominance judgments. An unexpected interaction revealed that mean fundamental frequency (F0) was positively associated with dominance judgments for male speakers but not significantly associated with dominance judgments for female speakers. F0 standard deviation was not significantly associated with dominance judgments. Results support the conclusion that dominance judgments are inferred from multiple sources of information and that some vocal markers of dominance are more influential than others.
Humans and many non-human primates exhibit large sexual dimorphisms in vocalizations and vocal anatomy. In humans, same-sex competitors and potential mates attend to acoustic features of male vocalizations, but vocal masculinity especially increases perceptions of physical prowess. Yet, the information content of male vocalizations remains obscure. We therefore examined relationships between sexually dimorphic acoustic properties and men's threat potential. We first introduce a new measure of the structure of vocal formant frequencies, 'formant position' (Pf), which we show is more sexually dimorphic and more strongly related to height than is the most widely used measure of formant structure, 'formant dispersion', in both a US sample and a sample of Hadza foragers from Tanzania. We also show large sexual dimorphisms in the mean fundamental frequency (F0) and the within-utterance standard deviation in F0 (F0-s.d.) in both samples. We then explore relationships between these acoustic parameters and men's body size, strength, testosterone and physical aggressiveness. Each acoustic parameter was related to at least one measure of male threat potential. The most dimorphic parameters, F0 and Pf, were most strongly related to body size in both samples. In the US sample, F0 predicted testosterone levels, Pf predicted upper body strength and F0-s.d. predicted physical aggressiveness.
Key features of the voice--fundamental frequency (F(0)) and formant frequencies (Fn)--can vary extensively among individuals. Some of this variation might cue fitness-related, biosocial dimensions of speakers. Three experiments tested the independent, joint and relative effects of F(0) and Fn on listeners' assessments of the body size, masculinity (or femininity), and attractiveness of male and female speakers. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings concerning the joint and independent effects of F(0) and Fn on these assessments. Experiment 2 established frequency discrimination thresholds (or just-noticeable differences, JND's) for both vocal features to use in subsequent tests of their relative salience. JND's for F(0) and Fn were consistent in the range of 5%-6% for each sex. Experiment 3 put the two voice features in conflict by equally discriminable amounts and found that listeners consistently tracked Fn over F(0) in rating all three dimensions. Several non-exclusive possibilities for this outcome are considered, including that voice Fn provides more reliable cues to one or more dimensions and that listeners' assessments of the different dimensions are partially interdependent. Results highlight the value of first establishing JND's for discrimination of specific features of natural voices in future work examining their effects on voice-based social judgments.
This book addresses various aspects of acoustic–phonetic analysis, including voice quality and fundamental frequency, and the effects of speech fluency and non-native accents, by examining read speech, public speech, and conversations. Voice is a sexually dimorphic trait that can convey important biological and social information about the speaker, and empirical findings suggest that voice characteristics and preferences play an important role in both intra- and intersexual selection, such as competition and mating, and social evaluation. Discussing evaluation criteria like physical attractiveness, pleasantness, likability, and even persuasiveness and charisma, the book bridges the gap between social and biological views on voice attractiveness. It presents conceptual, methodological and empirical work applying methods such as passive listening tests, psychoacoustic rating experiments, and crowd-sourced and interactive scenarios and highlights the diversity not only of the methods used when studying voice attractiveness, but also of the domains investigated, such as politicians’ speech, experimental speed dating, speech synthesis, vocal pathology, and voice preferences in human interactions as well as in human–computer and human–robot interactions. By doing so, it identifies widespread and complementary approaches and establishes common ground for further research.
Introduction
The nature of the following work will be best understood by a brief account of how it came to be written. During many years I collected notes on the origin or descent of man, without any intention of publishing on the subject, but...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio University, 2002.
On the origin of species. London: Macmillan Collector's Library
- C Darwin
Darwin, C. (1859[2017]). On the origin of
species. London: Macmillan Collector's Library.