Voice Gender Scoring and Independent Acoustic Characterization of Perceived Masculinity and Femininity

TL;DR

This study develops a machine learning model to score perceived masculinity and femininity in voices, identifying key acoustic features influencing social gender judgments with high correlation to human ratings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel machine scoring model for perceived vocal masculinity and femininity and characterizes independent acoustic factors affecting these perceptions.

Findings

Machine ratings correlate strongly with human ratings at 7 seconds of speech.

F0 mean is the most influential acoustic feature for gender perception.

Identified nine and eight acoustic clusters for female and male voice judgments, respectively.

Abstract

Previous research has found that voices can provide reliable information to be used for gender classification with a high level of accuracy. In social psychology, perceived masculinity and femininity (masculinity and femininity rated by humans) has often been considered an important feature when investigating the influence of vocal features on social behaviours. While previous studies have characterised the acoustic features that contributed to perceivers' judgements of speakers' masculinity or femininity, there is limited research on developing a machine masculinity/femininity scoring model and characterizing the independent acoustic factors that contribute to perceivers' masculinity and femininity judgements. In this work, we first propose a machine scoring model of perceived masculinity/femininity based on the Extreme Random Forest and then characterize the independent and meaningful acoustic factors that contribute to perceivers' judgements by using a correlation matrix based hierarchical clustering method. Our results show that the machine ratings of masculinity and femininity strongly correlated with the human ratings of masculinity and femininity when we used an optimal speech duration of 7 seconds, with a correlation coefficient of up to .63 for females and .77 for males. Nine independent clusters of acoustic measures were generated from our modelling of femininity judgements for female voices and eight clusters were found for masculinity judgements for male voices. The results revealed that, for both genders, the F0 mean is the most important acoustic measure affecting the judgement of acoustic-related masculinity and femininity. The F3 mean, F4 mean and VTL estimators were found to be highly inter-correlated and appeared in the same cluster, forming the second most significant factor in influencing the assessment of acoustic-related masculinity and femininity.