Voice quality and gender: some insights on correlations between perceptual and acoustic dimensions

The present study aims at characterizing, from the perceptual and acoustic points of view, differences in voice quality settings related to gender. The corpus was composed by speech samples recorded by 38 subjects (19 male and 19 female), aging from 20 to 58 years-old. The audio samples were analyzed in PRAAT by means of the SG Expression Evaluator Script, which extracts f0 and f0 first derivate, intensity, spectral slope and long-term average spectrum measures. The same samples were perceptually evaluated by means of the Vocal Profile Analysis Scheme. The acoustic measures and voice quality settings judgments were statistically analyzed by means of discriminant analysis and cluster agglomerative hierarchical analysis procedures. The statistical data showed the power of f0 and spectral slope measures as well as the influence of some supralaryngeal voice quality settings in differentiating speaker`s gender. Gender was found to be an influential variable.