Vocal communication of simulated pain

A Moan of Pleasure Should Be Breathy: The Effect of Voice Quality on the Meaning of Human Nonverbal Vocalizations

“…Apart from laughs, some measures of voice quality have been reported in human screams. Mostly these relate to the presence of nonlinear phenomena (Arnal, Flinker, Kleinschmidt, Giraud, & Poeppel, 2015;Raine et al, 2019), but Hansen, Nandwana, and Shokouhi (2017) also report more high-frequency energy and flatter spectral slopes in screams compared to neutral speech. This evidence is not suf-ficiently detailed to make specific predictions regarding the perceptual effects of breathiness in different call types.…”

“…Keeping in mind these limitations of nonspecific spectral measures, such as peak frequency or spectral centroid, there are several reports that listeners interpret high-frequency spectral energy as a sign of high arousal in speech (Johnstone & Scherer, 1999;Schröder et al, 2001) and in nonverbal vocalizations (Lima et al, 2013;Lavan et al, 2016). Raine, Pisanski, Simner, and Reby (2019) also report that listeners associate breathy voices with low pain intensity. In addition, there is extensive evidence from ethological literature that the spectrum contains more high-frequency energy when the animal is highly aroused (Fichtel Briefer, 2012) or distressed (Lingle, Wyman, Kotrba, Teichroeb, & Romanow, 2012).…”

The perceptual effects of manipulating nonlinear phenomena in synthetic nonverbal vocalizations

“…In fact, vocalizations with more nonlinearities may have a higher, not lower, harmonicity. For example, Raine et al (2018) report the seemingly paradoxical observation that the intensity of pain correlated with both the presence of nonlinearities and higher HNR. The likely explanation is that mild moans had a breathy voice quality, with weak harmonics and low HNR; screams of intense pain, on the other hand, were delivered in a bright voice with strong harmonics, making HNR higher despite episodes of chaos.…”

“…In humans, the perceived intensity of pain or distress correlates with the presence of nonlinearities in the cries of infants (Facchini et al 2005;Koutseff et al 2018) and adult actors (Raine et al 2018), although it is not clear whether the effect is driven by high arousal, negative valence, or both. (2) High dominance.…”

“…Nonlinear vocal phenomena, which can be roughly defined as various irregularities in the vibration of vocal folds (Riede et al 2005), are common in the vocal repertoire of many avian (Fee et al 1998) and mammalian species, including meerkats (Townsend and Manser 2011;Karp et al 2014), whales (Tyson et al 2007;Cazau et al 2016), manatees (Mann et al 2006), deer (Reby et al 2005(Reby et al , 2016, canids (Wilden et al 1998;Riede et al 2000;Schneider and Anderson 2011), chimpanzees (Riede et al 2007), and humans (Robb and Saxman 1988;Mende et al 1990;Bachorowski et al 2001;Facchini et al 2005;Koutseff et al 2018;Raine et al 2018). Major advances have recently been made in providing mathematical (Mende et al 1990;Herzel et al 1995;Mergell and Herzel 1997;Tokuda et al 2002;Herbst et al 2013), physiological (Wilden et al 1998;Titze 2008), and acoustic (Riede et al 2000(Riede et al , 2005Fitch et al 2002) descriptions of these complex sounds, but their evolutionary significance and communicative roles are still debated (Fitch et al 2002;Riede et al 2007;Karp et al 2014).…”