Some Acoustic Correlates of Perceived (Dis)Similarity between Same-accent Voices

Subjects rated the (dis)similarity of paired voice samples on a nine-point scale. The short voice samples were taken from the DyViS database of young male speakers with ‘Standard Southern British’ pronunciation. Accent was thus controlled, and ratings can be presumed to tap perceived personal voice quality differences. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) was applied to the ratings to derive five pseudo-perceptual dimensions. These were then correlated with measures of f0 and the first three formants. Significant correlations were found with all measures. The first MDS dimension correlated with f0, confirming f0’s key role in voice similarity, followed in order of importance by F3, F2, and F1.

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