The velvet voice

Scientists are a quixotic lot. Show them a challenging windmill and will take a tilt at it with scanners and chromatographs in hand. Yes, somewhere and somehow some optimistic scientific type has tried to come up with an explanation for just about everything. There is probably even someone who has attempted to come up with a quantum theory to explain the hairstyles of billionaires. Of all the mysteries science has attempted to unravel though, among the most complex is what it is that attracts one person to another. Any given instance of attraction is an interplay of personal psychology and evolutionary drives so while attraction is a unique phenomena at least we can try to unravel elements of it. That is what has been attempted in a new study which has focussed on what it is that makes a human voice attractive.

For the study researchers had men and women listen to voices that had been altered to specific frequencies, qualities, and formant spacing. In case you are wondering, formant spacing is a boffin’s way of referring to the gaps between emphasised sounds in speech. A formant is a part of speech that carries a lot of energy caused by resonances in the vocal chords. The aim of the research was to see what spacing and other qualities of speech would be regarded as attractive.

The results showed that men were attracted to female voices that are high pitched, breathy, and with big gaps between formants. This kind of speech pattern indicates small body size. By contrast women preferred low pitch and smaller gaps between formants, indicating larger body size. Interestingly, women also preferred breathy voices apparently because the breathy-ness softens the potential aggressiveness that can go with large body size.

This fits with studies on animals and birds showing that creatures can perceive from frequency, pitch, and formant spacing the size of the animal making the call.

Despite the complexities of human language then there are still some basic evolutionary cues that determine how attractive your voice is to the opposite sex. You can still throw in all of the witty erudition you like, but if you really want to allure then be a bit breathy about it and get your formant spacing right.