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https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062397
Voice, as a secondary sexual characteristic, is known to affect the perceived attractiveness of human individuals. However, the underlying mechanism of vocal attractiveness has remained unclear. In this study, we presented human listeners with acoustically altered natural sentences and fully synthetic sentences, in which pitch, formants, and voice quality were systematically manipulated based on a principle of body size projection previously reported for animal calls and emotional human vocal expressions. The results show that male listeners preferred a female voice signaling a small body size, characterized by relatively high pitch, wide formant dispersion, and breathy quality, whereas female listeners preferred a male voice signaling a large body size, with low pitch and narrow formant dispersion. Interestingly, male vocal attractiveness was also enhanced by breathiness, which presumably mitigated the aggressiveness associated with a large body size. Together with the additional finding that the same vocal dimensions influence emotion judgments, these results suggest that humans continue to employ a vocal interaction strategy similar to that observed in animal calls, despite the development of complex language.
Voice, as a secondary sexual characteristic, is known to affect the perceived attractiveness of human individuals. However, the underlying mechanism of vocal attractiveness has remained unclear. In this study, we presented human listeners with acoustically altered natural sentences and fully synthetic sentences, in which pitch, formants, and voice quality were systematically manipulated based on a principle of body size projection previously reported for animal calls and emotional human vocal expressions. The results show that male listeners preferred a female voice signaling a small body size, characterized by relatively high pitch, wide formant dispersion, and breathy quality, whereas female listeners preferred a male voice signaling a large body size, with low pitch and narrow formant dispersion. Interestingly, male vocal attractiveness was also enhanced by breathiness, which presumably mitigated the aggressiveness associated with a large body size. Together with the additional finding that the same vocal dimensions influence emotion judgments, these results suggest that humans continue to employ a vocal interaction strategy similar to that observed in animal calls, despite the development of complex language.