Beyond speech: Exploring diversity in the human voice
Andrey Anikin,
Valentina Canessa-Pollard,
Katarzyna Pisanski,
Mathilde Massenet,
David Reby
Affiliations
Andrey Anikin
Division of Cognitive Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden; ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab, CRNL, University of Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Inserm, 23 rue Michelon, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France; Corresponding author
Valentina Canessa-Pollard
ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab, CRNL, University of Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Inserm, 23 rue Michelon, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France; Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Business and Human Sciences, University of Chichester, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 6PE, UK
Katarzyna Pisanski
ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab, CRNL, University of Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Inserm, 23 rue Michelon, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France; CNRS French National Centre for Scientific Research, DDL Dynamics of Language Lab, University of Lyon 2, 69007 Lyon, France; Institute of Psychology, University of Wrocław, Dawida 1, 50-527 Wrocław, Poland
Mathilde Massenet
ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab, CRNL, University of Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Inserm, 23 rue Michelon, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France
David Reby
ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab, CRNL, University of Saint-Etienne, CNRS, Inserm, 23 rue Michelon, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France
Summary: Humans have evolved voluntary control over vocal production for speaking and singing, while preserving the phylogenetically older system of spontaneous nonverbal vocalizations such as laughs and screams. To test for systematic acoustic differences between these vocal domains, we analyzed a broad, cross-cultural corpus representing over 2 h of speech, singing, and nonverbal vocalizations. We show that, while speech is relatively low-pitched and tonal with mostly regular phonation, singing and especially nonverbal vocalizations vary enormously in pitch and often display harsh-sounding, irregular phonation owing to nonlinear phenomena. The evolution of complex supralaryngeal articulatory spectro-temporal modulation has been critical for speech, yet has not significantly constrained laryngeal source modulation. In contrast, articulation is very limited in nonverbal vocalizations, which predominantly contain minimally articulated open vowels and rapid temporal modulation in the roughness range. We infer that vocal source modulation works best for conveying affect, while vocal filter modulation mainly facilitates semantic communication.
