Shifting voices with participant roles: Voice qualities and speech registers in Mesoamerica

Although an increasing number of sociolinguistic researchers consider functions of voice qualities as stylistic features, few studies consider cases where voice qualities serve as the primary signs of speech registers. This article addresses this gap through the presentation of a case study of Lachixio Zapotec speech registers indexed though falsetto, breathy, creaky, modal, and whispered voice qualities. I describe the system of contrastive speech registers in Lachixio Zapotec and then track a speaker on a single evening where she switches between three of these registers. Analyzing line-by-line conversational structure I show both obligatory and creative shifts between registers that co-occur with shifts in the participant structures of the situated social interactions. I then examine similar uses of voice qualities in other Zapotec languages and in the two unrelated language families Nahuatl and Mayan to suggest the possibility that such voice registers are a feature of the Mesoamerican culture area

Gender and the social meaning of non-modal phonation types

Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2013), pp. 427-44

Breathy Voice and Fundamental Frequency: Portraying Gender in The Danish Girl

This paper investigated how breathy voice and fundamental frequency relate to perceptions of gender and femininity, and how this is portrayed in the movie The Danish Girl. The aim of analysing The Danish Girl was to investigate whether Eddy Redmayne, who plays the main character, a male-to-female transgender person, uses breathy voice and F0 to portray a transition in gender and femininity in the character. While results were not clear-cut, they indicate that Eddy Redmayne has made alterations to his F0 and amount of breathiness. The investigation of how these phenomena are used in The Danish Girl may provide further evidence of how the investigated phenomena are used in real-life, however, it should be acknowledged that The Danish Girl shows merely a portrayal of how these phenomena are used by a character and thus does not necessarily represent how females and male-to-female individuals actually use F0 and breathy voice

Harsh voice quality and its association with blackness in popular American media

Performers use various laryngeal settings to create voices for characters and personas they portray. Although some research demonstrates the sociophonetic associations of laryngeal voice quality, few studies have documented or examined the role of harsh voice quality, particularly with vibration of the epilaryngeal structures (growling). This article qualitatively examines phonetic properties of vocal performances in a corpus of popular American media and evaluates the association of voice qualities in these performances with representations of social identity and stereotype. In several cases, contrasting laryngeal states create sociophonetic contrast, and harsh voice quality is paired with the portrayal of racial stereotypes of black people. These cases indicate exaggerated emotional states and are associated with yelling/shouting modes of expression. Overall, however, the functioning of harsh voice quality as it occurs in the data is broader and may involve aggressive posturing, comedic inversion of aggressiveness, vocal pathology, and vocal homag

Ahots murmurikatuaren zenbait ezaugarri akustikoz

Ikerketa honen helburu nagusia ahots murmurikatuaren zenbait ezaugarri akustiko aztertzea da. Horretarako, lagina 36 esaldik osatzen dute, horietako 18 ahots arruntean gauzatuak eta beste 18ak ahots murmurikatuan. 12 galdera azentuen gauzapena ikertzeko erabili dira eta 6 intonazioarena ikertzeko. [a] bokalaren formakinak aztertzeko esaldi mota guztiak erabili dira (datuen azterketaren atalaren azpiataletan esaldi zehatzak agertuko dira). Inkesta egiteko eduki dugun informatzailea Igorreko 23 urteko andrazko bat izan da. Berorren ama-hizkuntza bertako euskararen barietate tradizionala izan da eta ikasketa guztiak euskaraz egin ditu. Emaitzen artean, hurrengoak dauzkagu: (1) ahots murmurikatuaren ezaugarririk nabarmenenak, ahots arruntaren aldean, f0rik ez egotea eta intonazioa apalagoa izatea dira; (2) iraupenari dagokionez, ahots murmurikatuan eginiko esaldiak luzexeagoak dira, berau estatistikoki esanguratsua izan ez arren; (3) [a] bokalaren formakinen azterketan ahots mota estatistikoki esanguratsua da bokalaren f1 eta f2 formakinei dagokienez; horrela bada, ahots murmurikatuan [a] bokala irekiagoa eta aurreratuagoa da ahots arruntean baino; (4) ahots murmurikatuan azentuaren korrelatu akustiko nagusia iraupena da; (5) silaba azentuduna luzeagoa da azentu bakoa baino; azkenik, (6) adierazpenezkoen eta bai/ez erako galderen bereizkuntzan iraupena eta intonazioa biak erabiltzen dira, baina esaldiaren azken silaban kontraste handiagoa gertatzen da gainerako egonguneetan baino. Bai/ez erako galderen azken silabak luzeagoak eta intentsitate altuagokoak dira adierazpen-esaldienak baino.; The main objective of this research is to analyze the acoustic characteristics of whispered voice. To this end, the sample consists of 36 phrases, of which 18 are produced in modal voice and the other 18 in a whispered voice. We used 12 questions to observe the accent placement and 6 to examine the intonational proprieties and, along with the analysis of vowel formants for [a]. The informant who answered the survey was a 23-year old woman from Igorre. Sentences were produced in her mother tongue, namely, the local variety of Igorre. Results can be summarized as follows: (1) whispered voice shows no f0 along with lower rates of intensity. The most notable characteristics of the murmured voice, compared to the common voice, are the absence of f0 and a lower intonation; (2) with respect to duration, whispered voiced were longer than modal voice; (3) The mean average for vowel formants F1 and F2 were higher for whispered voice, suggesting that [a] is produced more opened and fronted than in modal voice. (4) the main acoustic correlate is duration for whispered voice; (5) the stressed syllable is always longer than the unstressed syllable; finally, (6) in the expressive phrases and in the distinction of the yes / no questions, duration and intensity are used as acoustic correlates of pitch, but in the last syllable of the phrase there is greater contrast. The last syllables of the yes / no questions show longer and with higher intensity than the declarative sentences

Assessing the influence of phonetic variation on the perception of spoken threats

In spite of the belief that there is such a thing as a ‘threatening tone of voice’ (Watt, Kelly and Llamas, 2013), there is currently little research which explores how listeners infer traits such as threat from speakers’ voices. This thesis addresses the question of how listeners infer traits such as how threatening speakers sound, and whether phonetic aspects of speakers’ voices can play a role in shaping these evaluations. Additionally, it is sometimes the case that a victim of a crime will never see the perpetrator’s face but will hear the perpetrator’s voice. In such cases, attempts can be made to get the witness or victim to describe the offender’s voice. However, one problem with this is whether phonetically untrained listeners have the ability to accurately describe different aspects of speakers’ voices. This issue is also addressed throughout this thesis. Over five experiments, this thesis investigates the influence of a range of linguistic and phonetic variables on listeners’ evaluations of how threatening speakers sounded when producing indirect threat utterances. It also examines how accurately phonetically-untrained listeners can describe different aspects of speakers’ voices alongside their evaluative judgements of traits such as threat and intent-to-harm. As well as showing that a range of linguistic and phonetic variables can influence listeners’ threat evaluations, results support the view that caution should be adopted in over-reliance on the idea that people will “know a threat when they hear one” (Gingiss, 1986:153). This research begins to address the phonetic basis for the perceptual existence of a ‘threatening tone of voice’, along with how listeners evaluate and describe voices in earwitness contexts. Suggestions are made at the end of the thesis for improvements in the elicitation and implementation of accurate, meaningful information about speakers’ voices from linguistically-untrained listeners in evaluative settings involving spoken threats

Exposing the hidden vocal channel: Analysis of vocal expression

This dissertation explored perception and modeling of human vocal expression, and began by asking what people heard in expressive speech. To address this fundamental question, clips from Shakespearian soliloquy and from the Library of Congress Veterans Oral History Collection were presented to Mechanical Turk workers (10 per clip); and the workers were asked to provide 1-3 keywords describing the vocal expression in the voice. The resulting keywords described prosody, voice quality, nonverbal quality, and emotion in the voice, along with the conversational style, and personal qualities attributed to the speaker. More than half of the keywords described emotion, and were wide-ranging and nuanced. In contrast, keywords describing prosody and voice quality reduced to a short list of frequently-repeating vocal elements. Given this description of perceived vocal expression, a 3-step process was used to model vocal qualities which listeners most frequently perceived. This process included 1) an interactive analysis across each condition to discover its distinguishing characteristics, 2) feature selection and evaluation via unequal variance sensitivity measurements and examination of means and 2-sigma variances across conditions, and 3) iterative, incremental classifier training and validation. The resulting models performed at 2-3.5 times chance. More importantly, the analysis revealed a continuum relationship across whispering, breathiness, modal speech, and resonance, and revealed multiple spectral sub-types of breathiness, modal speech, resonance, and creaky voice. Finally, latent semantic analysis (LSA) applied to the crowdsourced keyword descriptors enabled organic discovery of expressive dimensions present in each corpus, and revealed relationships among perceived voice qualities and emotions within each dimension and across the corpora. The resulting dimensional classifiers performed at up to 3 times chance, and a second study presented a dimensional analysis of laughter. This research produced a new way of exploring emotion in the voice, and of examining relationships among emotion, prosody, voice quality, conversation quality, personal quality, and other expressive vocal elements. For future work, this perception-grounded fusion of crowdsourcing and LSA technique can be applied to anything humans can describe, in any research domain

Hearing Women's Voices in Popular Song: Analyzing Sound and Identity in Country and Soul

In this study I combine music analysis with critical theory to investigate how different conceptions of feminine identity--intersecting with race and class--are materialized through recorded sound. I present interpretive analyses of four popular songs recorded and released between 1967 and 1974: "Baby, I Love You" by Aretha Franklin, "Fist City" by Loretta Lynn, "If I Were Your Woman" by Gladys Knight and the Pips, and "Jolene" by Dolly Parton. My analyses focus on vocal performance, and vocal quality (or timbre) in particular, as I investigate the means by which the sounds of these recordings participate in cultural discourse on gender, sexuality, race, and class. These songs narrate moments in sexual love relationships (the hope of new love or the threat of infidelity), while the performances of each vocalist, the studio musicians, and the work of engineers and producers combine to create representations of black and working-class femininity that express varying degrees of assertiveness and vulnerability in the face of unequal gender power relations. I compare and contextualize these sonic expressions of identity with the personas these vocalists presented in their professional and public lives, illustrating how these recordings participate in the construction of a multi-faceted and always-emergent history of American womanhood. In order to accurately describe the relationship between musical sound and intersectional gender identity, I develop a phenomenological analytic methodology sensitive to how embodied responses (the types of physical engagements invited by sound), associative (or connotative, semiotic) responses, and social and historical context of both the recording and listener all contribute to the process of interpretation. I take my own situated listening experience as the object of study, recognizing how my listening practices and reactions, and overlapping identities--as a white, upper-middle-class woman and music scholar--impact my interpretations of these songs. My focus on the physical engagement inherent in music listening underpins the approach to vocal quality analysis I present at the outset of my study, in which I link descriptive language about voice to the physical components of vocal sound production. In my analyses of lyrics, instrumental quality, dynamics, rhythm, form, pitch, and the sonic "space" afforded by each recording, I continue to attend to the types of embodied and associative responses afforded by each element, demonstrating how an engagement with these sounds informs conceptions of gender identity