Is My Voice Attractive?

By Edith ZimmermanFor years, I’ve thought dating apps should come with a little widget so people can record themselves saying hello or counting to ten. There are some dates I wouldn’t have gone on had I heard the person’s voice beforehand, and I’m sure the reverse is true. Sometimes a voice just sounds “right,” and sometimes it doesn’t, in the same way that sometimes a person smells “right,” for whatever reason, and sometimes they don’t.

I once became infatuated with someone I thought I knew through the internet, but when we met and I heard his voice, everything changed. Longfellow wrote: “The human voice is the organ of the soul,” which I cribbed from a Psychology Today post on how to improve your own speaking voice — apparently a diaphragm voice is better than a chest voice, which is better than a mouth voice, all of which are better than a nasal voice.

Although studies have found that both men and women with “attractive voices” are thought to be “warmer, more likable, honest, dominant, and more likely to achieve” — and they also have more sexual partners and may be more likely to engage in infidelity — the qualities that make a voice attractive are slightly less clear.

PlayStop

For men, an attractive voice is fairly straightforward: a lower one is good, as it indicates size, strength, and reproductive prowess (or does it?), while hints of breathiness also seem to be preferable. But for women, it seems to be more complicated. Higher voices signal reproductive fitness, femininity, and smaller body size, and while it stands to reason that women would try to accentuate these qualities by speaking in correspondingly high voices — and some studies confirm this — other studies find that women tend to speak in lower voices around men they’re trying to attract.

Why is this? No one is entirely sure.

PlayStop

Researchers in a 2010 study published in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior puzzled over this seeming paradox, after their study found that women went against the high-voice hypothesis and lowered their voices around men they liked. They speculated that speaking in a lower voice might be a learned thing, based on stereotypes: There “appears to be a common stereotype in our culture that deems a sexy female voice as one that sounds husky, breathy, and lower-pitched,” they write. And “voice manipulation may be a learned behavior based on sexual voice stereotypes rather than actual vocal characteristics of attractiveness.” (Also: “Perhaps when a woman naturally lowers her voice, it may be perceived as her attempt to sound more seductive or attractive, and therefore serves as a signal of her romantic interest.” The motivation to “display a sexy/seductive female voice,” they go on, “may conflict with the motivation to sound more feminine and/or reproductively fit.”)

Is this a new, cultural thing? Or have we always been trying to talk low and seductively? As far back as 1979, at least, it was demonstrated that a “sexy voice” is a lower one: In a study where participants were asked to speak sexily, both men and women “greatly decreased the pitch of the voices,” with women lowering theirs even more dramatically than men did.

PlayStop

In general, women speak with lower voices today than we did 50 years ago, apparently, which some researchers credit to shifting male-female power dynamics. (Also, fun voice fact: Swedish women speak in lower voices than American women do, while Dutch women may speak with the lowest voices of all, and Japanese women the highest.)

But what is the point of all this? While lower voices correspond to more success at work, do they correspond to sexual/reproductive attraction, too? Do men prefer women with lower voices or what? Or are all of our sultry efforts misguided?

A 2013 PLoS One study suggest our efforts may indeed be misguided, finding that while women consistently prefer men with low voices (indicating strength and virility, theoretically) men prefer women with high voices (indicating femininity and smallness, theoretically). A huge caveat for that study, however, is that they used robotic voice samples, and those samples were insane.

On the other hand, a few weeks ago, the latest study on voice attractiveness and manipulation, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, found that men preferred women with lower voices — as did outside voice “raters” (something I’d love to be).

PlayStop

It was the first study on voices to take the subjects out of the laboratory and into a real-world attraction scenario: a speed-dating event. Like some of the earlier studies, this one found that everyone — men and women — lowered their voices when talking to potential mates, but that women did so in a more confounding way.

The women in the study tended to speak in higher voices “toward men they selected as potential mates,” but in lower ones “toward men who were most desired by other women and whom they also personally preferred.” In other words, they used higher voices on the men they said “yes” to but who had less than 50 percent desirability ratings from the rest of the women, but lower voices for the men they also said yes to, but who had higher than 50 percent desirability ratings among the rest of the women there. If that makes sense, which it kind of doesn’t.

PlayStop

Hmm. It’s complicated, although the complication squares with the mystery of attraction itself.

In any case, the men preferred the women with the lower-pitched voices. The researchers don’t quite know why, although they speculate that it could be in response to a woman “signalling sexual interest and intimacy to a man,” via our society’s current socially accepted methods. Or it could be in response to a woman communicating “social dominance or a confident and mature persona, as people with low-pitched voices are often attributed traits such as competence, trustworthiness and leadership.”

The intimacy part rings true to me. My personal theory is that speaking in a low voice draws the interlocutor in, inviting them to share a private moment on a more intimate frequency.

Writing this, I realized that while I generally try to speak in a lower register, there’s one person who brings out a girlier, higher one in me, which I can always hear ringing in my own ears after we spend time together, and I wonder “what the heck was that about” — although maybe I get it more now.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You can tell if someone is attracted to you by their voiceAuthors

1. Heather Kember

   Research fellow in speech processing, Western Sydney University

2. Marina Kalashnikova

   Researcher in Infancy Studies, Western Sydney University

Disclosure statement

Heather R Kember receives funding from the Australian Research Council

Marina Kalashnikova receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

We’ve heard of the physical effects on our body when we are talking to someone we are attracted to, like pupils getting larger or butterflies in our stomach.

Numerous self-help websites offer tips on how to read body language to tell if the object of our affection is interested in us.

Apparently, if their feet are facing towards us, that’s a good sign. If their arms are folded, not so much. But you can also gauge the level of someone’s attraction by their voice.

Male and female pitch

The biological gender differences in the human voice are very clear. Female voices have higher pitch and male voices have lower pitch.

These differences are thought to be because of evolutionary pressures such as mating choices. In the animal world, pitch is associated with larger animals that can cause a bigger threat.

So by lowering their pitch, males can show their physical dominance in front of their competitors and appear more sexually fit to females. As a result, women find men with lower-pitched voices more attractive. It’s the opposite for men, who are more attracted to women with higher-pitched voices, which is perceived as a marker for femininity.

Attractiveness in the voice is important for the impressions we give our potential partners. In research settings, this is studied by asking listeners to rate voices of people they have never seen as either attractive or unattractive.

Using this method, one study showed that people who reported being more sexually experienced and sexually active were rated to have more attractive voices by strangers. That is, the specific qualities that the raters were perceiving in the voices were indicative of these people’s mating behaviours and sexual desirability.

We actually have the ability to change the attractiveness of our voice depending on our interlocutor, and we do this without knowing. Women sometimes modify their voices to sound most attractive during the most fertile part of their menstrual cycle. Men also modify the pitch in their voice, specifically when confronted with potential competitors in dating scenarios.

PlayStop

This means that just like we fix our hairstyle or clothes to look more attractive for a date, we also give our voices an unconscious makeover to sound more attractive and sexually fit.

Sounding the same

Another phenomenon that may also cause changes in the way we speak when talking to a love interest is something called “phonetic convergence”. People who talk to each other tend to start sounding more similar, completely unaware they are doing so.

This similarity can be speech rate (how fast we’re talking), the pitch or intonation patterns we use, or even the way we produce individual words or sounds. This adaption can happen over long (months or years) and even very short (one-hour lab study) periods of time.

One study compared the speech of five pairs of new roommates who had just moved in together. At the beginning and end of semester, researchers took recordings of each person and asked them to rate how they felt about their new roommate. They found that the roommates sounded more similar at the end compared to the beginning of semester and that this convergence was related to the ratings of closeness.

So how could this relate to physical attraction? One proposed explanation of phonetic convergence, the similarity attraction hypothesis, is that people try to be more similar to those they are attracted to. So, in an effort to be more similar to someone we are interested in, we may start to talk more similarly and maximise the chances they will also find us attractive.

The opposite can also happen: this is called “phonetic divergence”. Divergence may occur when we want to be more distinct, or less similar to our speaking partner, perhaps when we aren’t attracted to them.

It also doesn’t necessarily take months for this to happen. Phonetic convergence can occur in a much shorter time.

In another experiment, researchers brought previously unacquainted pairs of participants into the lab to complete a task. Both partners have a map, but only one has the route drawn on their map. Their job is to describe the route to their partner so they can draw it, without using pointing or other gestures, only words.

PlayStop

The researchers found convergence occurred in the session and even persisted after participants had completed the experimental task.

The great news is these changes happen automatically and unconsciously. When we face an attractive partner, our voices and speech are modified to sound more attractive and alike. So during a conversation with that special someone, your voice may be doing the hard work to let them know you are interested, which may increase your chances of getting a second date.