Summary

This is a project begun as a joint research venture with my classmate Rebecca Greene, focusing on the role played by voice quality in the creation of style. Voice quality has a unique role to play in style, in that the perception exists that there is a lack of volitional control over one's voice quality, as compared to lexical choice or even phonetic variation. In the course of my research on voice quality, I have found that it can serve as a marker of authenticity that licenses the use of other linguistic features that would otherwise be seen as inauthentic or fake.

This voice quality project focuses on particular stylized, exaggerated voice types found in Japanese media. The first voice type I started examining with Rebecca Greene is a style we dubbed "sweet voice." The goals of our research on sweet voice are to acoustically describe sweet voice, understand its social and stylistic significance, and examine how its social meaning connects to broader ideologies of linguistic meaning and ideologies of the ideal "Yamato Nadeshiko" woman in Japan.

Here is a sample of sweet voice. Our acoustic study involved inter and intra-speaker comparisons -- in other words, we looked at samples of several voice actresses performing sweet voice, and at individual voice actresses doing sweet and non-sweet voice styles.

You can read our full conclusions about sweet voice in the pdf version of our NWAV presentation. Note: I also have a full OpenOffice .odp version of the presentation that includes our sounds, please email me and ask for it if you can view OpenOffice files.

Papers

• NWAV 2006: pdf version of odp presentation