Dennis Budde

4.30.13
Linguistics 415 Final Project

Do We Hear Ourselves How We'd Like to Sound?

There are very few things that most all members of the modern world have in common,
but one of them is the following quote:
Is that really what I sound like?!
Such is our reaction when we first hear ourselves through some recorded medium,
whether it be an answering machine, computer, or video. And even after those around us tell us
that yes, you really do sound like that, we are all guilty of secretly ignoring the clear majority
because we couldn't possibly sound that ridiculous.
I decided to look into this phenomenon, centered around speakers' perceptions of their
own pitch. My hypothesis was that while a lot of speakers' ideas about their own voices might be
correct or incorrect due to hard scientific factors, some of it might also be due to their ideas and
attitudes about themselves. More importantly, real pitch versus self-identified pitch could be
indicative of an individual's gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic class.
To test this, I used the internal microphone of my computer to record speakers saying the
following sentence:
People don't say the word 'often' as often as they used to.
The content of the sentence is fairly unnecessary in my view, so I used a sentence that
would throw people off the scent of the particular linguistic factors that I was interested in

(people trying to guess what I was up to always jumped to syntactic effects on the pronunciation
of often).
I then altered the pitch of their speech on my computer using the Change Pitch function
in Audacity. This program changes the average pitch of the recording by a percentage of the
user's choice. For example, if I were to raise the pitch by 10%, and the average pitch was 1150
Hertz, it would raise the pitch of everything in the recording by 115 Hertz. I decided that I felt
that this was a better method than a hard change of some number of Hertz, because the human
ear can more acutely pick up on pitch differences at lower frequencies. Changing it by a
percentage keeps this issue from interfering, because the lower the frequency the less it is
changed.
Using this method, I raised and lowered the pitch of each speaker's voice by 5% and
10%, resulting in four altered recordings in addition to the original recording. I ordered these
recordings as such ('-' means lowered, + means raised): -5%, 0%, +10%, -10%, +5%. This
ordering seemed logical to me, because the first and last are the most like the original, and
making them first and last gives them relatively equal psychological weight. It was also
important to me that the original sentence was not in the center, because I feared that that would
make it more obviously the real one. Even with these preparations, though, there is an choiceweight aspect involved in the design of my study. I still have not managed to come up with a
method that would avoid this eventuality.
I approached my study with some predictions. First, I predicted that many speakers
would choose a lower frequency than their own due to the effects of the recording process and
lack of bone resonance. I also predicted that gender would have an effect on speakers'
perceptions of their own voice; that is, I hoped to see men choosing lower pitches than their own

and women choosing higher ones. Lastly, and similarly, I hoped to see a difference based on the
pitch at which people speak. For example, those that speak at an identifiably low pitch would
maybe assume an even lower pitch upon playback. At the same time, those like myself who
speak at a higher pitch than they ought might hear an even higher one.
As previously mentioned, there are certain scientific factors that really do cause
recordings to sound slightly different than the actual speaker. Recording devices never pick up
the full range of sound; they instead only pick up the functional, central frequencies. This
changes the quality slightly, as very high pitches that the human ear can vaguely pick up on are
lost. The true effect of this is hard to say, but it is existent. Recording devices also don't have the
same freedom of amplitude and clarity that our ears and mouths do (especially less professional
devices, like a computer microphone). While these do affect the way voices sound, though, most
of it is the sort of thing that the human brain can subconsciously account for. In other words,
recording quality doesn't greatly affect the ability of a listener to pick out an individual's voice 1.
On the other hand, the Pitch Change effect has some side effects that could be audible on
some level2. The program works by slowing or speeding up the audio to get the desired pitch
change, and then by re-clipping and spacing to give each spectral slice the same time weight as
before the change. Lowering the pitch thus gives the speaker less literal sound information,
while raising it gives him or her more, as seen in the following spectrograms (courtesy of
Audacity):

1 Why Live-versus-Recorded Listening Tests Don't Work

2 Change Pitch

Sentence at +10%

Sentence at -10%

Upon close observation, there are visibly fewer spectral slices available for an artificially
lowered pitch. This accounts for the thinner and less substantial color patterns.

Even though this is clear at a scientific level, it is hard to say whether this effects a
listener or is even sub-consciously audible. If it is something the listener responds to, it would
most likely cause a response of choosing recordings with more information. Listeners would
probably then choose the pitch 5% higher than their own as often as the original pitch, as that
allows for a balance of accuracy and desire for information.
There are also physical factors that cause a voice to sound different when it is coming
from one's own head. Sound resonates in the bones of the skull, and this causes the frequency to
sound lower in our own ears. This bone resonance is known as damping3. It causes higher
frequencies to be absorbed, and especially reduces sound on it's way to the speaker's ear canal.
3

Resonance frequencies of the human skull in vivo

The results of my study were successful to a small degree:

Percent alteration _-10%

_-5%

Original pitch _+5%

_+10%

Men

_50%

_50%

Women

_33.33%

_33.33%

_33.33%

Caucasian

_33.33%

_50%

_16.66%

African-American

_100%

South Asian

_50%

_50%

Hispanic

_100%

Low pitch speech

_100%

Medium pitch

_40%

_60%

High pitch
All

_40%

_33.33%

_66.66%

_40%

_20%

All
High pitch
Medium pitch
Low pitch speech
Hispanic

-5%
Original Pitch
+10%

South Asian
African-American
Caucasian
Women
Men
0

10

20

30

40

% Selected

50

60

70

80

90

100

Many people chose a pitch slightly lower than their own; this was expected due to the
internal resonators such as the skull that no longer played a factor, as well as the effects of the
recording system.
It seems that the side effects of the Pitch Change effect have had little to no effect on
listeners, other than perhaps choosing the original pitch more often than the lower one. This
could, though, simply be because people can identify the right pitch. In fact, for the most part, it
seems that people hear enough of their own voice and are self-obsessed enough to choose their
voice correctly.
However, this fact makes some of the unusual results especially noteworthy.
The suggestion of trends for gender was one of the clearest results that I received on this
project. Men were more likely to choose a lower frequency than their own, while only women
ever chose a frequency higher than their own. On top of this fact, some girls chose the highest
possible frequency they could.
These results are clearly a result of gender stereotypes. The girls who chose the highest
frequency option also claimed that they have often been told that they have a childish or
annoying voice. This, combined with a voice that is already of a high frequency, caused the
speakers to have less confidence in their ability to identify their own voice.
This factor is more common in women, I theorize, for two reasons: first, as lines up with
my third prediction, women have voices of a higher frequency. The human ear also has more
trouble distinguishing high frequencies, and so raising the frequency is already more of a
biological challenge for the listener than it is for most men (even though the change is by a
percentage).

Secondly, women are more commonly victims of gender stereotype. The conscious link
people have between pitch and gender would cause this minority concept in women to be
awakened for this study, and as such to show itself to some degree in the results. The results are
thusly not surprising, and I would be curious to see if they continued to show themselves on a
larger scale.
What this trend really shows, and hopefully would show on a larger scale, is one of the
self-attitudes from exterior influence that have caused the ideological self-perception that some
speakers exhibit. The women who chose the highest frequency also speak at the highest
frequency of any recorded speakers, so this also lines up with my third prediction: that speakers
displayed trends evident in their speech by exaggerating them in observation.
In a continuation of this study, there are very many other variables worth looking at in
their relation to pitch. Socio-economic class would be very interesting to look at. Using location
as the solid variable, one could in the future collect data similar to what I have collected in large
numbers in defined areas. Working with previous SEC assignments to different parts of Houston
and previous research on covertly and overtly esteemed pitch norms, one could possibly find a
correlation that would strongly prove the existence or lack of psychological effects on how we
hear ourselves.
This observation of SEC could also be thought of as an observation of covert and overt
prestige. The speech of individuals in lower socio-economic situations often lines up with covert
principles, while that of higher classes often lines up with overt norms. Based on the results of
my study, the covertly prestigious attitude is to speak at a low pitch. Low pitch directly implies a
greater sized individual, and larger individuals are the most physically powerful. Physical power
is often the center of covert prestige, and my study in greater depth might show this stretching

through to the covert attitude having a psychological effect. The same could happen with high
SEC and overt prestige. This would be especially likely to see in cross-over classes; this study
could in fact be an interesting way to possibly identify what groups the cross-over class consists
of today in Houston, and whether they have the clearest display of overt prestige via pitch.
This study is an interesting continuation on the depth of the target pitch norms of
different ethnicities. Just as stereotyping caused the two girls in my study to be unsure of their
own voice, ethnicities and social groups could as a whole have the wrong idea of how they
sound based on how they are supposed to sound. The African American and South Asian
males that took part in this survey chose a lower pitch than their own, while the Caucasian males
chose the correct one. The Hispanic female chose the highest frequency. While this was only on
a small scale, it does reflect the pitches that these speakers speak at. It also probably reflects the
pitch norms of the ethnicities under stereotype threat. Further research might show more certain
results in these categories.
This study was certainly a pilot study, and there is much more to be discovered. While it
is a pilot study, it also seems to be in some sense a continuation of studies done on pitch norms
for different genders, ethnicities, and socio-economic classes. It is also a continuation of studies
done on the differences in perception of pitch and pitch itself. While there is certainly much to
be discovered, the end result will always have to include the stereotyping that individuals
undergo simply due to the pitch at which they speak. This fact is, in my opinion, the most
interesting avenue of study, as it is a window into the psychological depth that social judgement
can have on an individual.

Bibliography
Olive, Sean. "Why Live-versus-Recorded Listening Tests Don't Work." Audio Musings by Sean Olive: Why
Live-versus-Recorded Listening Tests Don't Work. Sean Olive, 9 July 2010. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.
"Change Pitch." - Audacity Manual. Audacity, n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2013.
Brandt, Anders. "Resonance Frequencies of the Human Skull in Vivo." The Journal of the Acoustical Society
of America 84.S1 (1988): S144. Http://scitation.aip.org. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.