Sound of Beauty-Beauty Of Sound

According to a new study and another sutdy (who actaully gets paid to do some of these experiments, some results are very obvious, I would have thought?)

I merged the two for a blog

Besides the face, which is the first thing you notice on a newly met person? It’s his/her voice.

Apart from the face or facial expression, the voice is the most important signal whether the person is friend or foe, bland or tough, hot or disgusting.

And the physical appearance may offer clues to his/her sexuality.

“Voice is a profound difference between men and women, and it colors every human interaction we have,” said David Puts, an anthropologist at Michigan State University.

He made a study revealing that men with deeper voices had more luck with women. The main difference between male and female voices is pitch: men, on average, speak with an octave lower than women.

But it’s even harder to say what makes a woman’s voice attractive to men. It is said that men prefer high-pitched female voices, but there’s no study made on this and many men complain that a too high one, when the voice turns from sweet into shrill, is annoying.

In fact, men don’t find high voices sexy; a deep and sultry voice like that of Marylin Monroe is what turns them on.

“We might think of (Kathleen) Turner’s voice as deep, what actually characterizes it is breathiness. Breathiness comes from air whistling through a gap at the back of the vocal cords. The gap is larger in women, giving them a breathier voice. Men might find a super-breathy voice sexy because it accentuates this naturally female trait,” said Harvard psychologist David Feinberg.

“Men tend to agree strongly about which voices are attractive. But, men have trouble pinpointing exactly what makes them swoon,” said psychologist Susan Hughes of Albright College.

Susan Hughes recent study snippets from the article are here…

“The sound of a person’s voice reveals a considerable amount of biological information,” said Susan Hughes, an evolutionary psychologist from Albright College in Reading, Pa. “It can reflect the mate value of a person.”

Hughes, whose new study is detailed in the June 2008 edition of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, cautions that an attractive voice does not necessarily indicate that this person has an attractive face, (a bit like Sex-Telephone workers)

A symmetric body is genetically sound, scientists say, and in evolutionary terms, in the wild, it can be an important factor when selecting a mate. But sometimes changes during prenatal development can slightly skew this balance.

For instance, the length ratio between index and ring fingers, known as the digit ratio, is fixed by the first trimester, a time that corresponds with vocal cord and larynx development.

If the hormone surge that affects vocal development also affects finger growth, there should be a connection between an individual’s voice and digit ratio.

Hughes could not demonstrate a connection between voice attractiveness and digit ratio in her previous work, possibly due to vocal changes that occur during puberty.

So in the new study, about 100 individuals listened to previously recorded voices and independently rated them on nine traits important during mate selection: approachability, dominance, healthiness, honesty, intelligence, likelihood to get dates, maturity, sexiness and warmth.

Study participants generally agreed on what made a voice attractive. But when Hughes used a spectrogram to analyze these voice ratings according to different acoustic properties such as pitch, intensity, jitter and shimmer, she could not find a common feature that made these voices seem attractive.

A throat diagram

This indicates our perceptual system may be more advanced than expected.

“We can agree on what’s an attractive voice yet I can’t capture it with a computer,” Hughes told LiveScience.said.

Investigating if a combination of these properties can define an attractive voice may shed light on a connection, she said.

Hughes also focused on “formant dispersion”. We regularly hit on different frequencies while we speak. Formant dispersion refers to whether our usual frequencies are spaced closely together (a shrill or monotone voice) or far apart (an NPR host). The broader the range, the “fuller” the voices.

But how do fullness, breathiness and pitch combine to deliver a sexy female voice?

“There’s a mysterious vocal quality that men seem to recognize by ear but that is tough to identify using computer programs alone. What’s even stranger is that both men and women with sexy voices also tend to be more symmetrical and have traditionally sexy body types: the men in my studies tended to have broad shoulders and narrow hips, and the women tended to have hourglass-shaped figures.” said Hughes.

“In men, these differences could be chalked up to testosterone. During puberty, testosterone helps boys build broad shoulders and big muscles. It also helps lower their voice. Sex hormones may also account for a woman’s sexy voice and curvy figure,” she added.

As voice development is linked to sex hormones, it reveals sexual maturity, easing the find of a mate for reproduction. A deep male voice acted like a testosterone advertisement. Hughes also found that people with attractive voices tend to have more sex partners over their lifetimes.

“They’re chosen as affair partners more often, and they’ll lose their virginity at an earlier age.” said Hughes.

Perhaps the hormones that induced the sexy voice also mean high sex drive, or the sexiness of the voice attracts more partners. In the end, Barry White was called “The Walrus of Love”, while Chris Tucker…hmmmm…. Let’s forget it …

So after all that work and their is no full conclusion apart from an opinion and whether this is the truth remaisn to be seen, my suggestion would be for no fee of paying a scientist is try this yourself and see what reactions you get…

Also if you do have a fascination with the voice and dating by phone (or as Spike Lee describes it in Girl 6 ‘Bone Phone’)

Check this link

http://dating.personals.yahoo.com/singles/datingtips/86225/five-dating-phone-rules