VoiceArousal

Abstract

This study examines the effect of voice pitch and phonation on the arousal of heterosexual men and women when being read an erotic passage by a voice of the opposite sex. The study will be conducted using 80 women and 80 men between the age of 25 and 45. The participants will listen to a series of erotic passages that are recorded using breathy or creaky phonation as well as high or low pitch. The activity in the sexual region of the brain will be recorded using an fMRI scan. The scans will then be compared within each of the male and female groups to determine which voice pitch and phonation is preferred by each group. In order to have a starting point for the brain activity of each participant there will first be a scan done with the participant being read a ‘control’ passage of non-sexual writing in a medium pitch and modal phonation. This sort of research has been conducted to find out the attractiveness of voice and phonation in the context of physical attractiveness but not in regard to erotic situations. The results of this study will contribute to erotic audiobooks, virtual reality and a variety of other areas. It is predicted that women will find a low-pitched voice and breathy phonation more arousing, while men will find a high-pitched voice and breathy phonation more arousing.

Introduction

There are many internal and external factors that contribute to a person's attractiveness such as intelligence, attitude, and physical appearance. However, voice is an external factor that has a great impact on a person's attractiveness (Oguchi & Kikuchi, 1997). For example, most radio stations choose their hosts because their listeners find a particular voice pitch more attractive than another. In the study done by Oguchi and Kikuchi, it was found that voice pitch contributes significantly to a person's perceived attractiveness. As a result, they have concluded that when someone finds another person's voice attractive, it makes the person seem more attractive overall. In addition, they have concluded that regardless of the person's gender, "a bright, generous, and low-toned voice with a small range of pitch" was considered the most attractive. However, other studies have found different results. In a similar study to Oguchi and Kikuchi's, it was found that on average, females preferred men with low-pitched voices while males preferred women with high-pitched voices (Re, O'Connor, Bennett & Feinberg, 2012). This can be explained by a study performed by the Department of Psychology of Technische Universität Braunschweig. The researchers suggest that women prefer men with lower fundamental frequency (f0) because it is related to high levels of testosterone and strong male fertility. On the other hand, men prefer women with higher fundamental frequency (f0) because it is linked to greater amounts of estrogen which indicates good fertility in women.

Another aspect of the voice that contributes to a person's attractiveness is phonation. The Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Science of the University College London performed an experiment where the voice pitch and phonation were manipulated. In their research they used three phonations: normal, breathy and pressed (creaky). They evaluated the results for each gender, and found that men preferred women with a high-pitched voices and breathy phonation. Meanwhile, women preferred men with low-pitched voices and breathy phonation. The pitch preference results found in this particular study match those found in previous studies, however, in this case, the preferred phonation is the same for both genders.

Our study aims to determine the effect of voice pitch and phonation on both men and women when being read an erotic passage. The main objective is to determine the most arousing voice pitch and phonation which could be used for erotic audiobooks and artificial intelligence such as the most recent sex doll called Harmony 2.0. Because we are studying both women and men separately, we have two distinct hypotheses for this study. For the men, we hypothesize that they would prefer women with a high-pitched voice and breathy phonation. For women, we hypothesize that they would prefer men with a low-pitched voice and breathy phonation. Our study’s findings will be relevant to creating future technologies and the enhancement and development of existing ones. As our society struggles more and more to make human connections, the Internet and robotics are beginning to play a larger role in how we communicate and interact with one another. With programs like Siri, which talk back to you, and sex dolls with programmable personalities, as a company called Realbotix came out with just this year, it is becoming extremely useful to understand how voices affect our brains. We hope to be a part of a number of growing fields as well as already established ones by finding out what the most commonly liked voice is for sexual situations. The study deals with two COGS fields as it utilizes both linguistics and psychology. It applies to psychology because psychology is a field that is concerned with mental processes and behaviour. In this study, we are interested in sexual desire and neuropsychology, which is the study of the structure and the function of the brain using MRI scans. On the other hand, it also applies the field of Linguistics because we are studying the effect of voice pitch and phonation, both fall in the linguistics branch of linguistics called phonetics. If this research study will be used in future projects or works, computer science could also be involved. For example, software designs and modification of virtual reality.

Methods

Participant Pool

We plan to use 160 subjects in this study, where 80 are heterosexual men and 80 are heterosexual women. We decided to focus on heterosexual men and women in our study to prevent any confounding variables, such as sexual preferences, from affecting the results. We will also use participants between 25 and 45 years of age. This will help to keep the study from being skewed by differences in sexual drive and potential hormone fluctuations in people under the age of 25 as well as people over the age of 45, especially for women who may be going through menopause after this age. All participants will be prescreened for any excessively irregular sexual behaviour so that our results can be most accurate for the average adult and will not be skewed by outliers. All participant information will be kept confidential and names will not be printed in the findings.

Design

In this study, we plan to use a randomized block design with gender as the blocking factor. This will allow us to control for gender and more accurately understand the attraction levels to vocal attributes for each gender individually. Within each block we will use two factors with two levels each. For the first factor, the pitch, the levels are high-pitched and low-pitch. For the second factor, the phonation, the levels are breathy and creaky. This leads to a total of 8 treatments, four for each gender. The four main treatments for each gender block are high-pitched with breathy phonation, high-pitched with creaky phonation, low-pitched with breathy phonation and low-pitched with creaky phonation.

Materials

To determine the effect of voice pitch and phonation on arousal, audio recordings of erotic passages will be used. Before beginning the study we will need to prepare 26 audio recordings. These 26 audio recordings will consist of 13 male voice recordings and 13 female voice recordings.

For each gender, we will record 7 readings, all in a neutral pitch. One of these readings will be of a non-sexual, conversational passage which we can use as a control reading. This passage will be read with modal phonation. We will also record three different passages being read using breathy phonation and three being read with creaky phonation. All recordings of the same gender will be read by the same speaker with as similar intonation as possible to maintain consistency and avoid creating confounding variables. All passages will be read from the third person perspective and should be considered equally erotic or arousing.

After creating these recordings we will digitally alter the 12 non-control recordings so that we have one copy of recordings that with the pitch increased and one copy with the pitch decreased. By doing this we will ensure that the recordings are as similar as possible between pitches and control for any other factors that could affect the arousal levels of participants. This will leave us with 12 erotic readings, with three passages for each of the four voice types, and one conversational control reading for each gender.

Procedure

For this research study, the subjects within each blocking will be randomly assigned to one of the four treatments: high-pitched with breathy phonation, high-pitched with creaky phonation, low-pitched with breathy phonation, or low-pitched with creaky phonation. They will not be told the purpose of the study in advance so as not to affect the results.

The participants will come in on three consecutive days. Each day, they will be placed in an fMRI machine which will record their brain activity, in particular focusing on the level of arousal displayed by the participants. They will begin by listening to the control passage so that we can see their brain activity when listening to a non-sexual passage with neutral pitch and phonation. After this they will be played their subgroup’s erotic audio recording for that day. While the subjects are listening to the audio recording, we will observe the arousal of the participant with the fMRI machine, and record this for analysis. After listening to the recording, participants will complete a short survey where they will self-report the level of arousal that they experienced.

After the third day of the study, each participant will complete a survey about his or her personal sexual history, demographics, and personal factors like fetishes or other sexual preferences which might affect the data and results. We plan to wait until after the evaluations are complete before giving participants the survey because it will ask questions which may hint at the purpose of the study, such as asking if the participant has any known preference for a certain voice type. We may also ask the participants to reflect on the voice they heard during the readings and describe any features of the voice or speaker they found attractive.

Analysis

In order to analyse our results we will compare the fMRI scans within the two blocks and look for any significant differences in arousal between the two pitches and two phonation types for men or women. We will compare how the pitch and phonation affect the level of arousal individually, as well as how the two variables affect and interact with each other. Following the comparison of the fMRI scans we hope to be able to draw a conclusion about which voice pitch and phonation type are found most attractive by heterosexual men and women. We will also compare this to what the participant self-reports to see if the level of arousal is similar.

Discussion

We have chosen to use an fMRI scan because of its accurate representation of brain activity. Though there are other common devices for detecting arousal we thought that they may produce problems. The polygraph machine, though designed to detect when someone is aroused by measuring heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and skin conductivity or sweating may be problematic as these rates in any given person may change with a variety of emotions, one potentially being discomfort at being read an erotic passage that they do not find arousing. This sort of information would not be helpful to us as it would not show us arousal and would therefore skew results. Another similar problem would arise if we were to use insertable devices that measure blood flow as participants may feel uncomfortable wearing such a device and furthermore may be distracting for participants and therefore take away from the sexual arousal that the passages may evoke. By using a fMRI we will be able to look at the part of the brain that deals with sexual activity and not be swayed by thoughts provoking activity in other areas. For these reasons a fMRI and a control paragraph would best let us track the arousal of the participants in both the male and female groups. We predict that our study will find that both heterosexual males and and females will prefer breathy phonation in sexual settings and that heterosexual males will prefer high-pitched voices more attractive and that heterosexual females will prefer lower-pitched voices. We will evaluate our findings by comparing the scans of all the female participants to each other and looking for the most activity in the sexual regions of the brain. We will do the same comparison for the male participants scans. Following the comparison of the fMRI scans we hope to be able to draw a conclusion about which voice pitch and phonation type are found most attractive for the opposite sex of heterosexual men and women.

Conclusion

Our study hopes to find the most liked voice pitch and phonation type for heterosexual men and women listening to the opposite sex. The findings will be applied to a range of fields in all areas of sexual interest. Some of these including the making of erotic audiobooks and porn for the blind and visually impaired. The study’s findings may also be used for programs that could screen for particular voice pitch and phonation when conducting interviews for employees that will be hired into jobs like sex call centers and other voice particular positions. The findings may also play a role in programming artificial voices for sex robots like the Harmony 2.0, as well as the up and coming virtual realities games that may include sexual encounters. We also foresee our study’s findings being used to determine the best voice to conduct advertising and promotions for sex-related products for the target audience. Our study may be reproduced with different age groups, social classes, ethnic groups and accents to see if results change and to produce more specific results in particular areas. Our project helped to show us how the different areas of COGS work together, especially psychology and linguistics and their possible use in computer science. Through our project we were able to understand how linguistics is more than just how words are used and that there are many different aspects of linguistics, like phonation and voice pitch, that can change the way people understand and process information. We were also able to gain experience in developing our own ideas through a field we are not entirely familiar with. By searching through articles and research done by others we were able to see what kind of research projects may be considered in the COGS discipline and how all the knowledge we have gained in this class may be used in other areas. We also came across some complications that may be attributed to the difficulties in working with psychology. Though it is an interesting field of study we are now able to understand just how hard it is to conduct a study that works with psychology as there are so many factors that come into play. This realization helped us all to understand how difficult it is to come up with a study that is both interesting and realistic.

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