Individual differences in human voice pitch are preserved from speech to screams, roars and pain cries

Abstract

Fundamental frequency ( F 0, perceived as voice pitch) predicts sex and age, hormonal status, mating success and a range of social traits, and thus functions as an important biosocial marker in modal speech. Yet, the role of F 0 in human nonverbal vocalizations remains unclear, and given considerable variability in F 0 across call types, it is not known whether F 0 cues to vocalizer attributes are shared across speech and nonverbal vocalizations. Here, using a corpus of vocal sounds from 51 men and women, we examined whether individual differences in F 0 are retained across neutral speech, valenced speech and nonverbal vocalizations (screams, roars and pain cries). Acoustic analyses revealed substantial variability in F 0 across vocal types, with mean F 0 increasing as much as 10-fold in screams compared to speech in the same individual. Despite these extreme pitch differences, sexual dimorphism was preserved within call types and, critically, inter-individual differences in F 0 correlated across vocal types ( r = 0.36–0.80) with stronger relationships between vocal types of the same valence (e.g. 38% of the variance in roar F 0 was predicted by aggressive speech F 0). Our results indicate that biologically and socially relevant indexical cues in the human voice are preserved in simulated valenced speech and vocalizations, including vocalizations characterized by extreme F 0 modulation, suggesting that voice pitch may function as a reliable individual and biosocial marker across disparate communication contexts.

Human voice pitch measures are robust across a variety of speech recordings: methodological and theoretical implications

“…Beyond these methodological implications, our results corroborate a growing number of studies showing that individual differences in voice pitch emerge early in life and are remarkably stable across an individual's lifetime [19,20], across diverse neutral speech utterances (this study), and even when comparing neutral speech with singing [37], with emotional speech [29,38] or with volitional nonverbal vocalizations such as screams and aggressive roars [29]. Thus, while the present study focuses on affectively neutral speech, past studies provide further evidence that betweenperson differences in voice pitch also generalize to emotional voice stimuli and remain stable as people age.…”

“…Participants were recruited from the local community in a large European city (Wroclaw, Poland) using online and public adverts. While, based on previous work, strong effect sizes may be obtained with 25 vocalizers per sex and of a similar age [29], sample sizes here were increased to accommodate a much broader age range (18-67 years). No participant reported acute conditions that could affect their voice (e.g.…”

“…These established protocols have been successfully applied in numerous studies (e.g. [29,31,32]). All acoustic parameters are summarized in the electronic supplementary material, table S1.…”

Low fundamental and formant frequencies predict fighting ability among male mixed martial arts fighters

“…Our use of unstandardized, spontaneous speech samples also offered enhanced ecological validity 47 , and although this approach adds noise to the measurement of individual differences in acoustic parameters, previous research shows strong correspondence across speech and/or vocalization types for both fundamental 52 and formant 10 frequencies. Moreover, the best linear unbiased composite estimates of acoustic measures from multiple voice recordings of each fighter, along with relatively long (> 85 s) average total speech samples from individual fighters, provided reliable estimates of individual differences in acoustic features.…”

Electro-Haptic Stimulation: A New Approach for Improving Cochlear-Implant Listening

“…However, F_0 changes in speech over time or between talkers are not well coded by CIs. This is because the F_0 for speech typically varies within the frequency range coded by a single CI electrode, preventing the use of across-electrode pitch cues ( Swanson et al, 2019 ; Pisanski et al, 2020 ).…”