Summary
Objectives
1) To investigate if vocal variation produced by assigned-female-at-birth (AFAB) non-binary
people differed from vocal variation produced by cisgender (cis) participants. Cue
values produced by non-binary participants were predicted to differ from those values
produced by cisgender participants. 2) To determine if previous subjective assessments
of bright voice quality in AFAB non-binary participants were quantifiable, and if
so, if non-binary and cisgender participants differed in their voice quality production.
Study Design
A quantitative comparative research design.
Methods
Phonetic and statistical analyses of continuous speech samples produced by AFAB non-binary
and cisgender participants. Vocal cues were mean fundamental frequency (F0) and bright
voice quality, measured by cepstral peak prominence-smoothed and spectral slope, with
speaker gender as the predictor.
Results
At the group level, non-binary participants produced intermediate F0 values — significantly
lower than the cis women's and significantly higher than the cis men's. Individually,
the majority of non-binary participants produced mean F0 in this intermediate range.
Non-binary participants produced significantly less negative spectral slope and higher
cepstral peak prominence-smoothed, indicative of a brighter, more resonant voice quality.
Individual-level results indicated that vocal training and vocal tract physiology
did not fully account for the results found.
Conclusion
Participants’ agency, particularly their motivation to alter vocal output to avoid
being misgendered, has an effect on the AFAB non-binary participants’ F0 production
and potentially their voice quality. The majority of AFAB non-binary participants
uniquely produced the cue combination of intermediate F0 and bright voice quality.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: October 06, 2022
Accepted:
August 2,
2022
Publication stage
In Press Corrected ProofFootnotes
This work was supported by the ANR [NoBiPho project, ANR-18-CE26-0006-01]. The stimuli came from the GenSpecS corpus, which was made possible by the NoBiPho project and by the A*MIDEX project [nº ANR-1-IDEX-0001-02] which was funded by the Investissements d'Avenir French Government program and carried out within the Institut Convergence ILCB [ANR-16-CONV-0002] [SIRL/GSS https://hdl.handle.net/11403/gender_spectrum_speech].
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© 2022 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
