Colloque Didier Demolin 2023 - Jody Kreiman, "Reconciling quantification and meaning in voice quality"

The problem of characterizing voice quality has long caused debate and frustration. The richness of the available descriptive vocabulary is overwhelming, but the density of information voices convey leads some to conclude that language can never adequately specify what we hear. Others argue that terminology lacks an empirical basis, so that language-based scales are inadequate a priori. Finally, efforts to link terms to acoustic signal characteristics have had limited success. On reexamination, however, some terms continually reappear across studies. These terms align with dimensions accounting for acoustic voice variance across speakers, and correlate with size and arousal across many species. This suggests that talk about voices rests on a bedrock of biology: We have evolved to perceive voices in terms of size/arousal, and these factors structure both voice acoustics and descriptive language. Such linkages could help integrate studies of signals and their meaning, producing a truly interdisciplinary approach to voice.