The Preference For Natural Voice:Effects And Reasons

Focused on natural human voice, the present study intends to explore two questions:first, whether subjects agree on the preference of the natural vocal attractiveness; second, what makes a natural voice sounds attractive. In study1, we tested whether subjects agree on the preference of the natural vocal attractiveness without controlling the semantic; in study2, we changed the condition by controlling the content of the sentence, besides, we added a small group of elder subjects to test whether the age will influence the preference of the natural vocal attractiveness; in study3, we used subjective ratings (tone, pitch, loudness and rhythm) and speech analysis (fundamental frequency, intensity, formant dispersion) to find the variables that will influence the preference of the subjects.Principal results and conclusions are as followed:(1) Without controlling the semantic, there is no agreement on the preference of the natural vocal attractiveness among subjects.(2) After controlling the semantic, subjects agree on the preference of the natural vocal attractiveness.(3) There is no agreement on on the preference of the natural vocal attractiveness among elder subjects group, implying that age may be an influential variable.(4) The tone and rhythm of a natural voice are two variables that mainly affect the subjective ratings of the vocal attractiveness.(5) Speech analysis show that the voice that most attractive has low fundamental frequency, low intensity, high clarity and obvious rhythm feature.