Evolution of Voices in French Audiovisual Media Across Genders and Age in a Diachronic Perspective

TL;DR

This study analyzes how voices in French media have evolved over time across genders and ages, revealing a trend towards lower pitch levels and differences influenced by age and gender over multiple decades.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive diachronic acoustic analysis of French media voices, highlighting changes in pitch and vocal tract length across different periods, ages, and genders.

Findings

Voices tend to be lower in pitch over time.

Pitch decreases with age in females, but not in males.

Vocal tract length estimates vary across periods and genders.

Abstract

We present a diachronic acoustic analysis of the voice of 1023 speakers from French media archives. The speakers are spread across 32 categories based on four periods (years 1955/56, 1975/76, 1995/96, 2015/16), four age groups (20-35; 36-50; 51-65, >65), and two genders. The fundamental frequency ($F_0$) and the first four formants (F1-4) were estimated. Procedures used to ensure the quality of these estimations on heterogeneous data are described. From each speaker's $F_0$ distribution, the base-$F_0$ value was calculated to estimate the register. Average vocal tract length was estimated from formant frequencies. Base-$F_0$ and vocal tract length were fit by linear mixed models to evaluate how they may have changed across time periods and genders, corrected for age effects. Results show an effect of the period with a tendency to lower voices, independently of gender. A lowering of pitch is observed with age for female but not male speakers.