14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the University of Glasgow have determined following a new investigation that people in general find average voices to be the most appealing. At the university, researchers in the Department of Psychology have studied what is known as vocal attractiveness, a field that aims at understanding precisely how a person's voice influences our idea of that certain someone's level of attractiveness. Details of the study appear in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Current Biology, PhysOrg reports.
In the experiments, the researchers used recordings of voices taken from 32 men and 32 women. They asked test participants to listen to either the clean voice samples, or to composites. The second category of sounds was produced by combining available voice samples, in groups of two, four, eight, 16 and 32. Oddly enough, the team established that the more voices were placed in the composite message, the more likely listeners were to rate that particular sample as attractive. The percentage considerably dropped as the number of voices in a sample was diminished.
One possible explanation for this, the group says, could be the fact that the composite voice samples were a lot smoother, and featured less irregularities than single voices. In other words, they had a higher harmonics-to-noise ratio. “Smoother, more regular voices may signal younger, healthier speakers,” the lead author of the investigation, professor Pascal Belin, says. It was also found that composites had a timber and pitch more closely related to those of the average human voice. This may also contribute to their overall attractiveness, the researchers add.
“The human voice, in addition to its role as the carrier of speech, reveals valuable information regarding the speaker’s biological characteristics. The attractiveness of a voice partly reflects that biological information: health, reproductive fitness, etc. Voices with pronounced gender-dimorphic features – for example, a deep voice in males – are preferred by the other gender because it may signal better reproductive potential. However our results are the first to highlight effects of vocal attractiveness that apply irrespective of [the] speaker’s or listener’s gender,” Belin adds.
“It’s worth noting that these findings were obtained using brief vowels, so they cannot be easily generalised to realistic speaking situations in which a number of additional cues are present, including intonation, speaking rate, etc. Nonetheless, these findings have important implications for voice-based technologies, suggesting simple ways of enhancing the attractiveness of synthetic voices at a time when automated voice systems are becoming increasingly prevalent,” the researchers conclude.