Speech Science Forum -- Jay Marchand Knight

Past literature has focused on pitch and timbre cues as the main determinants of the gendered voice. However, in real situations, judges also rely on non-auditory cues such as the actor’s facial features, height, body size and shape. Resisting these visual biases could result in more accurate assessment of a voice but requires a stronger dissociation between auditory attributes and physical appearance, an ability hypothetically acquired by gender-expansive participants through their lived experience.

In three online studies, we examined Faching (allocating voices into traditional categories such as soprano, alto, tenor, and bass). In study 1, 166 participants (85 cis, 81 gender-expansive) rated 144 audio (A) samples from 18 different actors (3 from each major Fach category, excluding countertenor) along a slider labeled low/dark to high/bright. Participants then guessed the voice types of the same actors in silent videos (V), before rating them in AV combinations. The cis group exhibited 30% more visual bias than the gender-expansive group. To further understand this phenomenon, we manipulated the fundamental frequency (in study 2) or the vocal tract length (in study 3) by +/-3 semitones from the original stimuli. Preliminary findings suggest that the two groups differ in timbral evaluations but not in those of pitch.  

These studies, though focused on gender-perception, inadvertently opened further questions of AV-integration and visual bias in the evaluation of racialized women’s voices. This intersected with other in progress work on the treatment of Black women’s voices in opera and Black men’s voices in the real world, portrayal of the ‘Other’ in the mezzo-soprano singing voice, and the timbral metaphor of the Zwischenstufe (a Weimar era term approaching queer) in the Zwischenfach singer, who sits between voice types.