Feminize Me – How Anatomy Influences the Sound of a Voice
* Presenting author
Abstract:
Each vocal tract is unique and so is the sound of a voice. The perception not only of personality traits and emotional states in speech, but also of the speaker‘s gender can be predicted more accurately by timbre rather than fundamental frequency. Also, voices that are either perceived as male or female show significant differences in timbre features such as formant structures and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients.The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the underlying connections between the vocal anatomy and the sound it produces.N=40 (and counting) recordings of patients who underwent so called „Voice Feminization Surgery“ (vocal fold webbing, cricothyroidale approximation, and/or laryngoplasty) are being analyzed using music information retrieval software. The data show significant differences not only for the fundamental frequencies, but more importantly between the timbre features before and after surgery. To reliably state which changes in timbre can be predicted by which type of anatomic alteration, more data are currently being collected. For example, it will be analyzed whether the shortening of the vocal tract will have a greater influence on shifting formants and other timbre features rather than the shortening of the vocal folds, which mainly influences frequency.