Voice quality, pitch and the perception of gender

The study in a sentence

When we hear a voice, we usually have an idea of whether a man or a woman is speaking – even if we’re hearing a stranger and can’t see their face. But what do we use in a person’s voice to help us make these decisions?

In this study, we look at how listeners use voice features known as voice quality alongside pitch to make assumptions about the person speaking.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

The question

How do listeners use voice quality alongside pitch to attribute gender to a speaker?

Key concept

Voice quality refers to the characteristic features of a speaker’s voice – what makes your voice sound like you!

We use labels like ‘breathy’, ‘creaky’, ‘modal’ and ‘whispery’ to describe these features.

Research questions

How does voice quality affect how listeners perceive a speaker’s gender?

Is the perception of gender affected by the regional background of the listener?

Photo by C D-X on Unsplash

Methods

Participants took part in a perception experiment where they heard audio recordings of a Scottish speaker with different voice qualities and at different pitch levels. The listeners answered questions about the gender of the speaker.

Some of the recordings had high pitch (in the usual range of female speakers), while others had low pitch (in the usual range of male speakers), and some were at an ambiguous pitch level.

We looked at how the listeners' answers about the gender of a voice changed when the pitch and voice quality of stimuli changed, and at differences between the answers of listeners from North America and Scotland.

The answer

The ‘gender’ of a voice does not depend only on a speaker's pitch range.
Your own background as a listener - and other features of a voice, such as voice quality - also play a role in how you attribute gender to a voice.

Classroom activities

Lead in task

Reflecting on what we perceive from someone's voice

Extension task

A gendered voices survey and reflection on AI assistant voices

In more detail

Workshop talk (video)

CPD2024_gendered_voices_workshop_talk_slides.pdf

Workshop talk (slides)

Meet the author

Joe Pearce is a Research Associate at the University of York and the University of Glasgow. Their PhD research looks at gender and age variation in voice quality in Scottish accents.

Read the paper

Pearce, J., Setter, J. & Arvaniti, A. (in press) Voice quality, pitch and gender discrimination. In: Setter, J., Dovcin, S & Ramjattan, V (eds). The Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice. Oxford University Press, USA. [email us if you would like a copy of the paper]

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