Towards a vocal typology for American English

Abstract

Individual voices are not uniformly similar to others, even when excluding speaker characteristics such as gender, age, and dialect. Some speakers share common features, cohering into groups based on gross vocal similarity. To date, no attempt has been made to describe these features systematically or to generate a taxonomy based on such "voice types". For this purpose, perceived similarity judgments of voice pairs, using a database of sentences produced by 100 American English voices, were submitted to a hierarchical clustering analysis to generate the initial groupings of individual voices into types, separately for male and female voices. These types, in turn, were labeled based on auditory judgments by expert listeners on multiple criteria (voice quality, articulatory effort, mean pitch, pitch variability, and speaking rate) as well as a corresponding acoustic analysis. The new typology revealed a total of nine female and nine male voice types, with speaking rate, pitch variability, and mean pitch playing the largest roles in their determination. For female voices, chronological age influenced distribution of voices into types, with younger voices grouped separately from middle aged voices. Male voice types were not blocked by age, although two types were disproportionately larger than the others. © 2013 Acoustical Society of America.