The role of f 0 and formant frequencies in distinguishing the voices of men and women

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to determine the contributions of fundamental frequency ( f 0 ) and formants in cuing the distinction between men's and women's voices. A source-filter synthesizer was used to create four versions of 25 sentences spoken by men: (1) unmodified synthesis, (2) f 0 only shifted up toward values typical of women, (3) formants only shifted up toward values typical of women, and (4) both f 0 and formants shifted up. Identical methods were used to generate four corresponding versions of 25 sentences spoken by women, but with downward shifts. Listening tests showed that (1) shifting both f 0 and formants was usually effective (~82%) in changing the perceived sex of the utterance, and (2) shifting either f 0 or formants alone was usually ineffective in changing the perceived sex. Both f 0 and formants are apparently needed to specify speaker sex, though even together these cues are not entirely effective. Results also suggested that f 0 is somewhat more important than formants. A second experiment used the same methods, but isolated /hVd/ syllables were used as test signals. Results were broadly similar, with the important exception that, on average, the syllables were more likely to shift perceived talker sex with shifts in f 0 and/or formants.

What makes a voice masculine: Physiological and acoustical correlates of women's ratings of men's vocal masculinity

“…Alternatively, listeners may simply take advantage of the greater sex-dimorphism in F0 compared to ΔF when assessing speakers' gender-related traits. Indeed, while, in natural voices, F0 appears to be a more salient cue to speakers' sex and masculinity than ΔF (Collins, 2000;Hillenbrand and Clark, 2009), this salience is in fact reversed when the magnitude of variation is controlled by making the two cues equally perceptually discriminable (Pisanski and Rendall, 2011).…”

Identification of speaker sex from one vowel across a range of fundamental frequencies

“…However, because previous tests used sentences with timevarying intonation contours ͑e.g., Hillenbrand and Clark, 2009͒, it is unclear whether speaker sex information is available at more extreme F0s. Furthermore, language-specific cues to sex may have been confounded with purely biological factors in the materials in those studies.…”

Voice gender and the segregation of competing talkers: Perceptual learning in cochlear implant simulations

“…Male and female voices differ in several respects, including F0, spectrum envelope properties associated with different formant frequency ranges, and additional properties associated with the voicing source (Hillenbrand and Clark, 2009). Studies of voice gender perception by CI users and in CI simulations have used either systematic parametric manipulation of F0 and spectrum envelope properties in vocoder-processed sentences (e.g., Fuller et al, 2014) or natural voices where cues for voice gender vary considerably across individuals (e.g., Visram et al, 2012).…”

“…In listeners with normal hearing, differences between males and females in fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequencies, FFs (or relational properties of the spectrum envelope) provide important cues for voice gender perception (Smith and Patterson, 2005;Hillenbrand and Clark, 2009;Skuk and Schweinberger, 2014). Men have lower FFs and lower F0s than women, on average, due in large part to differences in the length of the vocal tract and vocal folds, respectively (Fitch and Giedd, 1999;Smith and Patterson, 2005).…”