Rendering of gender when reading fiction aloud

Abstract

The height of the fundamental frequency (F0) is frequently cited as the major acoustic feature that distinguishes the female voice from the male voice. Women tend to have a signi fi cantly higher mean F0 than men. Some studies have indicated that the variability of the fundamental frequency also differs between the two genders and women’s voices may involve higher prosodic explicitness than men’s voices. This study investigates the way in which these features are utilised in rendering the voice of male and female characters in the reading aloud of fi ction. To achieve this aim, a representative sample of dialogues selected from audiobooks was analysed acous-tically. The results reveal that the reader’s F0 tends to slightly increase in fragments with female characters, but other predictions have not been con fi rmed. There is no decrease of F0 in dialogues with male characters and, in general, the reader’s variability of F0 seems not to be in fl uenced by the character’s gender.