The Lived Experiences of Transmasculine Speakers: A Phenomenological Investigation of Vocal Quality and Function in Relation to Gender

The objective of this study was to learn how transmasculine individuals perceive the quality and function of their voices, and how those perceptions influence how they experience gender identity and communicate with others. This qualitative study adopted a hermeneutical phenomenological approach that involved using content analysis and thematic analysis to describe and interpret phenomena. This approach assumes that the researcher is not biased, but is a part of the world being studied and, therefore, understands the phenomenon by interpretive means. Saturation was achieved when all relevant information was introduced, and patterns of information had been identified. Sixteen interviews were conducted. Five themes and 20 subthemes emerged during data analysis. Themes included: My Masculine Voice, Education and Resources, Acceptance and Support, Authenticity, and Pandemic. Subthemes included Vocal Satisfaction, Vocal Quality, Suprasegmentals and Stylistic Elements, The Voice on Testosterone, Changes to Appearance, Free to Speak Like Me, Code Switching, Access to Care, Cultural Competence, Vocabulary and Language for Self-Exploration, Family Support, Opinions of Others, Self-Acceptance, Authentic Voice, and Authentic Identity. Pitch was of primary concern for voice masculinization, however other descriptions were offered such as smooth, powerful, resonant, and commanding. The function of the voice seemed as important to the participants as the qualities of the voice itself; a voice that is perceived as masculine, taken seriously, and effective. Above all, authenticity was of primary concern, having a voice that truthfully represents the identity and experience of the individual. The mind, the body, and the voice are inextricably linked and must be considered together

Towards Measuring Uniqueness of Human Voice

2017 IEEE WORKSHOP ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY (WIFS) (2017 : Rennes; France)The use of voice as a biometric modality for user authentication and identification has grown very rapidly. It is therefore very important that we understand limitations of such systems which will ultimately depend on the discriminative power of the voice biometric. In this paper, we have contributed towards measuring distinctiveness of voice biometric by both formulating a new measure and creating a new dataset to perform more reliable measurements. For this purpose, we evaluate the prominent approaches in the field and propose a new approach that better incorporates within-user variability and is analytically more tractable. Our newly created dataset includes voice samples extracted from close to two thousand TED Talks videos. Overall our measurements on this dataset revealed a biometric information content of about 60 bits in human voice. Further, tests performed by adding some generic voice effects on the samples show that the distinctiveness reduces by almost 20 bits, implying that when true variability is reflected in user samples resulting entropy may further reduce.BİDEB-221