Intensity of the Reader’s Voice in the Reading Aloud of Fiction: Effects of the Character’s Gender

Abstract

The speaker’s gender is a crucial factor affecting the acoustic features of the voice. One such feature is voice intensity, also known as sound pressure level (SPL). Previous studies have indicated that the female voice may involve lower values of SPL than the male voice. Moreover, there are suggestions that the variability of voice intensity tends to be lower for women than for men as well. The major aim of this paper is to examine the effects of literary character’s gender on the reader’s SPL, measured in decibels (dB), and the variability of voice intensity, measured as the standard deviation (SD) of SPL, while reading prose aloud. The secondary aims are to investigate the general shifts of SPL and SD of SPL in dialogues independently of other variables and to consider the possible effects of the reader’s gender and the reader’s dialect. In order to accomplish these tasks, a representative sample of dialogue excerpts with male and female characters was used. Each fragment was located in the corresponding audiobook and analysed in terms of the two acoustic features under discussion. Typical values of SPL and the SD of SPL for different readers were measured in the entire chapters from which fragments were selected and the results were compared with those obtained from the extracts. In this way, it was possible to establish the relative shifts of SPL and the SD of SPL for each of the analysed fragments. Contrary to what had been expected, a statistical analysis of the results revealed no effects of the character’s gender on any of the response variables. However, conclusions concerning secondary aims were more definitive. A general trend to decrease the SD of SPL in dialogues in comparison to the rest of the text in a novel was observed. This tendency is independent of any of the factors included in the study. It was also observed that male American readers tend to lower their voice intensity when reading dialogues. All these findings may be applied in developing text to speech software.

Towards a vividness in synthesized speech for audiobooks

“…Stolarski 2017b). In variability of loudness, our results fell in line with Stolarski's (2017b): male and female characters' speech did not differ in loudness variability. Comparing the narrator's speech and direct speech, our results showed that loudness varied more in direct speech (see Figure 4).…”

“…Montaño and Alías (2017) have shown that the content of a book determines the mode of reading aloud, regardless of language. Yet it is clear that there exist culturally different expectations for the paralinguistic aspects of an audiobook (see, e.g., Stolarski 2017aStolarski , 2017b.…”

“…Studies by Stolarski (2017aStolarski ( , 2017b on the reading out of literary characters' direct speech have considered fundamental frequency along with intensity and their variability (standard deviation). Results showed that the speech of female characters was either read out with a slightly higher (4.7%) F0 in comparison to the participants' own mean F0 or there was no change.…”

“…Unlike American-English readers, British-English readers had a tendency to raise the fundamental frequency when reading dialogues, regardless of the characters' gender. Studying intensity and its variability, Stolarski (2017aStolarski ( , 2017b found that the characters' gender had no effect. Yet it was found that male American-English readers tended to lower their intensity when reading dialogues.…”