Towards a more nuanced view of vocal attractiveness

Abstract

This study reports on male and female Californians' ratings of vocal attractiveness for 30 male and 30 female voices reading isolated words. While ratings by both sexes were highly correlated, males generally rated fellow males as less attractive than females did, but both females and males had similar ratings of female voices. Detailed acoustic analyses of multiple parameters followed by principal component analyses on vowel and voice quality measures were conducted. Relevant principal components, along with additional independent acoustic measures, were entered into regression models to assess which acoustic properties predict attractiveness ratings. These models suggest that a constellation of acoustic features which indicate apparent talker size and conformity to community speech norms contribute to perceived vocal attractiveness. These results suggest that judgments of vocal attractiveness are more complex than previously described. © 2014 Babel et al.