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

Abstract

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.