Vocal Androgyny: Speaking Voice
leotron recently posted an analysis of Chris Colfer (Kurt from Glee)’s voice that included a link to this pitch chart from transgendervoice.net and the Praat voice analyzing software that can analyse the pitch range and average pitch from a voice recording.
Using these, I put a sample of my speaking voice through the system and came out with the following result:
Object type: Pitch
Object name: nat_speaking_sample
Date: Sat May 7 20:01:39 2011
Time domain:
Start time: 0 seconds
End time: 22.221496598639455 seconds
Total duration: 22.221496598639455 seconds
Time sampling:
Number of frames: 2219 (1017 voiced)
Time step: 0.01 seconds
First frame centred at: 0.020748299319726656 seconds
Ceiling at: 350 Hertz
Estimated quantiles:
10% = 132.420083 Hz = 118.649931 Mel = 4.86146326 semitones above 100 Hz = 3.83294172 ERB
16% = 141.402679 Hz = 125.842268 Mel = 5.99771342 semitones above 100 Hz = 4.04968617 ERB
50% = 178.23178 Hz = 154.385604 Mel = 10.0050552 semitones above 100 Hz = 4.89431551 ERB
84% = 219.087299 Hz = 184.407415 Mel = 13.5780702 semitones above 100 Hz = 5.75778106 ERB
90% = 231.178886 Hz = 192.987241 Mel = 14.5081157 semitones above 100 Hz = 6.00018187 ERB
Estimated spreading:
84%-median = 40.88 Hz = 30.04 Mel = 3.575 semitones = 0.8639 ERB
median-16% = 36.85 Hz = 28.56 Mel = 4.009 semitones = 0.845 ERB
90%-10% = 98.81 Hz = 74.37 Mel = 9.651 semitones = 2.168 ERB
Minimum 112.244444 Hz = 102.144053 Mel = 1.99972847 semitones above 100 Hz = 3.32920337 ERB
Maximum 274.863663 Hz = 222.91491 Mel = 17.5045943 semitones above 100 Hz = 6.83154756 ERB
Range 162.6 Hz = 120.770857 Mel = 15.5 semitones = 3.502 ERB
Average: 181.474855 Hz = 156.157559 Mel = 9.96947309 semitones above 100 Hz = 4.93562379 ERB
Standard deviation: 36.31 Hz = 27.15 Mel = 3.485 semitones = 0.7894 ERB
Mean absolute slope: 235.1 Hz/s = 176.8 Mel/s = 23.03 semitones/s = 5.153 ERB/s
Mean absolute slope without octave jumps: 22.14 semitones/s
Which if I’m reading correctly against the pitch chart, means my average speaking pitch is 181.5Hz - firmly within ‘gender ambiguous’ range. The minimum is 112.2Hz - firmly within ‘masculine’, and the maximum is 274.8Hz - firmly within ‘feminine’.
Of course that’s only in terms of vocal pitch and doesn’t take speech patterns, cadence and intonation into account, but it explains why I can still successfully ‘pass’ as gender ambiguous/confusing even when speaking (and why when I’m read as a guy, I’m often assumed to be a teenager rather than an adult).
Thought you guys might find this interesting, there’s a full Practical Androgyny post about vocal androgyny planned for the near future!
Incidentally, the speech therapist who created the pitch chart also has a page on speech training for genderqueer people which may be of interest.
