Voice Modulation · Faking It: The production, perception, and function of social voice modulation

Faking It: The production, perception, and function of social voice modulation

The project’s goal is to advance our understanding of the nature, functions, and social implications of voice modulation. The capacity to modulate nonverbal dimensions of the voice, including pitch and vocal tract resonances (see Figure I), requires complex neural control of the vocal anatomy. While rare in the animal kingdom, such vocal control is an essential prerequisite for articulated speech in humans. Yet, the extent to which humans modulate the nonverbal components of their voices to convey or exaggerate evolutionarily relevant traits in social contexts has scarcely been investigated. We already know from between-individual studies that nonverbal vocal parameters influence listeners’ judgments of the sex, age, body size, masculinity, dominance, competence, trustworthiness and attractiveness of different male and female speakers. Thus, we predict that within-individual modulation of these parameters could function to exploit listeners’ voice-based perceptual biases, potentially conferring social and reproductive benefits onto the speaker. In this project, we examined the extent to which people volitionally or spontaneously modulate their voices across various social contexts, from dating to board meetings, and how this influences listeners’ biosocial judgments of speakers. Voice recordings were acoustically analyzed to quantify spectrotemporal parameters, and a variety of physical and demographic measures were taken from speakers and listeners (e.g., sex, age, body size, strength, hormones, ethnicity) to Identify factors affecting the production and perception of modulated speech. We additionally examined longitudinal variability in the voice across the lifetime and following major life events. To increase the generalisability of our results and address a serious need for cross-cultural sampling in the behavioural sciences, we recorded participants’ voices in controlled lab settings and real-world social contexts, and recruited men and women from Canada, China, Cuba, Finland, India, Poland, Tanzania, United Kingdom, United States of America. In addition to providing new insight into the evolutionally functions and origins of nonverbal communication, this project is important for society because, as our results show, voice modulation is common in everyday social interactions and across diverse cultures, and can influence listeners' judgements and social decision making in personal and professional contexts.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз