What Makes a Female Voice Attractive?

Vocal attractiveness is highly relevant both for speech technology and for our basic understanding of speech prosody. Yet our knowledge about it is still very limited, and this is particularly true in regard to female voice. The present study explores the nature of female vocal attractiveness by exploring a mechanism that has been shown to be effective in encoding emotions. In a perception experiment, we used utterances produced by a female English speaker with normal, breathy and pressed voice, and acoustically modified them along the size projection dimension which has been previously found to be emotionally relevant. Ten male subjects judged the attractiveness of the utterances, and the results show that a) the most attractive female voice is one that projects a small body size, and b) the most effective acoustic cue for female vocal attractiveness is voice quality.

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