Voice Attractiveness - Studies on Sexy, Likable, and Charismatic Speakers

This book addresses various aspects of acoustic-phonetic analysis, including voice quality and fundamental frequency, and the effects of speech fluency and non-native accents, by examining read speech, public speech, and conversations. Voice is a sexually dimorphic trait that can convey important biological and social information about the speaker, and empirical findings suggest that voice characteristics and preferences play an important role in both intra- and intersexual selection, such as competition and mating, and social evaluation. Discussing evaluation criteria like physical attractiveness, pleasantness, likability, and even persuasiveness and charisma, the book bridges the gap between social and biological views on voice attractiveness. It presents conceptual, methodological and empirical work applying methods such as passive listening tests, psychoacoustic rating experiments, and crowd-sourced and interactive scenarios and highlights the diversity not only of the methods usedwhen studying voice attractiveness, but also of the domains investigated, such as politicians' speech, experimental speed dating, speech synthesis, vocal pathology, and voice preferences in human interactions as well as in human-computer and human-robot interactions. By doing so, it identifies widespread and complementary approaches and establishes common ground for further research.

Inhaltsverzeichnis:

Part 1: General Considerations.- Chapter 1. Voice Attractiveness: Concepts, Methods, and Data.- Chapter 2. Prosodic Aspects of the Attractive Voice.- Chapter 3. The Vocal Attractiveness of Charismatic Leaders.- Chapter 4. Vocal Preferences in Humans: A Systematic Review.- Part 2: Voice.- Chapter 5. What Does it Mean for a Voice to Sound "Normal"?.- Chapter 6. The Role of Voice Evaluation in Voice Recall.- Chapter 7. Voice, Sexual Selection and Reproductive Success.- Chapter 8. On Voice Averaging and Attractiveness.- Part 3: Prosody.- Chapter 9. Attractiveness of Male Speakers: E ects of Pitch and Tempo.- Chapter 10. "The Contribution of Amplitude Modulations in Speech to Perceived Charisma".- Chapter 11. "Dress to Impress? On the Interaction of Attire with Prosody and Gender in the Perception of Speaker Charisma".- Chapter 12. "Birds of a feather ock together but opposites attract! On the interaction of f0 entrainment, perceived attractiveness, and conversational quality in datin g conversations".- Part 4: Databases.- Chapter 13. Acoustic Correlates of Likable Speakers in the NSC Database.- Chapter 14. "Ranking and Comparing Speakers based on Crowdsourced Pairwise Listener Ratings".- Chapter 15. "Multidimensional Mapping of Voice Attractiveness and Listener's Preference: Optimization and Estimation from Audio Signal".- Part 5: Technological applications.- Chapter 16. "Trust in Vocal Human-Robot Interaction: Implications for Robot Voice Design".- Chapter 17. "Exploring Verbal Uncanny Valley E ects with Vague Language in Computer Speech".