The Effects of Speaker Head Posture on Auditory Perception of Vocal Masculinity

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of head position on listeners' perception of vocal masculinity.

Methods: Twelve cisgender women were recorded reciting two voiced sentences with varying head positions: baseline, flexed, and extended. Voice samples were cropped and fundamental frequency (f_o) was resynthesized to control for any changes in f_o across conditions. Twelve cisgender adults were recruited as listeners. Listeners were presented with 144 paired comparisons of speaker samples and were prompted to select the sample that sounded more masculine in each presented pairing. Ratings of masculinity were analyzed using Thurstone's law of comparative judgment. A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) assessed the effects of head positioning, followed by Dunnett's posthoc tests.

Results: The ANOVA showed a statistically significant effect of head position on listener perceptions of masculinity: speech in the flexed position was perceived as statistically more masculine than that in the baseline condition.

Conclusions: The results of this study support the use of head posture manipulation to achieve increased vocal masculinity, which adds to the limited research related to voice masculinization strategies for those seeking gender-affirming voice care.