7 ms·

A Century of “Shrill”: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices

Nition 7y ago
It's a bit of a stretch to connect such ancient data on recording and playback technology - their most recent citation is from 1933! - with a drop in female voice pitch. Microphones and playback quality have come a long way (tinny phone speakers notwithstanding). If there has been a desire to lower voice pitch to sound more authoritative/less "shrill", I suspect it's much more of a general social issue than a technological one.
- Anechoic 7y ago
  Microphones and playback quality have come a long way The technology has come a long way (or at least some way in the case of microphones), but we still deal with the choices that recording engineers make. Recording microphones are not flat, they are treated as musical instruments -- whether you chose a mic from Shure, Rode, Audio Technica, Blue, AKG, Neumann, Beyerdynamic, etc, they all color the sound in different ways that sound pleasing to when exposed to different sounds. If a microphone is chosen because it has a nice low/mid frequency boost that makes accentuates a male speaking voice, it's not surprising that a female voice may not sound as pleasing when using the same recording setup. The reason that we don't use "flat" microphones (a measurement microphone for example) for recording is that they basically sound terrible to the casual ear. There's a demo on the Stereophile test CD that demonstrates this (if you can find it).
  - Nition 7y ago
    It's just that the article is mostly talking about AM radio, and they'd be dealing with stuff like 1920s carbon mics. So maybe modern mics could still be causing issues if they're chosen for a specific male voice type, but it's a stretch to apply 1920s data directly to the modern day. Everything's still a lot more accurate overall.
    - Anechoic 7y ago
      They also reference modern lossy compression which also predominately affects very low and very high frequencies.
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    Why wouldn't flat response through 20 kHz sound like the performer is in the room with you? Are these mics compensating for speakers that also don't have flat response?
    - Anechoic 7y ago
      The directivity of a microphone (no matter the pickup pattern) is not the same as the human ear so it either picks up or leaves out sounds that human ears would normally hear.
WalterBright 7y ago
Men are also frequently advised to lower the tone of their voice to convey more gravitas. This is for personal interactions - nothing to do with electronic bandwidth. Besides, electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so should be ample for higher voices. (I have noticed that VOIP is much easier for me to understand than POTS, and cell phones are the worst. Cell phone voice quality hasn't improved since I got my first cell phone in the early 90's.)
- icebraining 7y ago
  I don't think the idea is so much that current technology has much influence, but that the decades of hearing everyone on radio talk with a low tone has influenced that perception of gravitas, up to the current day. And more generally, that cultural biases can effect technological changes that reinforce those biases.
- acqq 7y ago
  > electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so should be ample for higher voices. (I have noticed that VOIP is much easier for me to understand than POTS Then you give exactly an example where it is not ample (and matches the topic of the article): POTS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service "Restricted to a narrow frequency range of 300–3,300 Hz, called the voiceband, which is much less than the human hearing range of 20–20,000 Hz"
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    True, but POTS isn't used for mass media. Politicians have never phoned me to campaign for my vote.
    - acqq 7y ago
      > but POTS isn't used for mass media. Yes. Still, also if one would measure the response curves of the sound reproductions of most of mass media available to most of the listeners, one would again find that the curves are never flat. And there are indeed a lot of devices that behave worse in the range related to female voices than to some bass voice ranges. Even the so called Hi-Fi equipment is never "flat" (i.e. it never passes different frequencies the same). A lot of people claim to prefer stronger basses, a lot of products are made to amplify them more, and even relative expensive speakers can sound worse for female voice frequency ranges. Not to mention that most of the conditions where the sound is eventually heard are extremely far from the conditions under which the products are evaluated by the reviewers.
yowlingcat 7y ago
> A century of negative commentary on the female voice has had wide-ranging effects: a 1998 study of young Australian women found that the average frequency of female speech dropped twenty-three hertz between 1945 and 1993. Margaret Thatcher famously worked with voice coaches to hone her auditory image, dropping her voice sixty hertz between the nineteen-sixties and the nineteen-eighties. One of the most notable of the many bizarre deceptions in the Theranos saga involved Elizabeth Holmes’s deep voice; when I analyzed recordings of her speaking I found that the disparity between what is likely her real voice and her performative one is around a hundred hertz, which, in that range, is equivalent to nearly half an octave. Wow -- this is absolutely fascinating. I always dismissed Elizabeth Holmes' low voice as a weird quirk, but now I realize there's actually a pretty concrete (and sad) historical rationale to it.
_Codemonkeyism 7y ago
What I always found interesting how children in the US sound "shrill" to my European ear, I think children have much lower voices here in Europe (Germany). Anyone else with the same perception? Or is it just in my imagination?
- devnulloverflow 7y ago
  Most versions of the American accent are a bit nasal compared to other English speakers, so I guess that makes it higher pitched on average -- even if I wouldn't call it "shrill". Also, there is no a neat separation between nasal Americans and other English speakers. Many Australians are also quite nasal, whereas black Americans (unless you count Steve Urkel) don't strike me as nasal at all. On the third hand: I find the Irish accent is higher pitched than most, without sounding either nasal or shrill. But Americans often sound a lot like the Irish, so that might also make them higher pitched.
- froh 7y ago
  Indeed there seem to be pitch differences between languages, and between regions of the same language. Don't know about kids, but here is some data for adults: https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01 https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01 /language-pitch.html
  - bonoboTP 7y ago
    Interesting link. As a Hungarian I can definitely confirm that foreign women's speech does seem overly high-pitched. Especially in English, but also in German to some degree. In a similar way as Americans in general come across as overly fakey-smiley positive, to me, subjectively, women's speech in English feels over-the-top. (Don't get offended, I'm just describing perceptions) To be more concrete, here's a random example of what sounds natural in Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s
deogeo 7y ago
In related news, there was an experiment where Hillary and Trump's genders were swapped - it turned out a female Trump was more popular than the male version: https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-woman-youd-like-him-more.html https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-wom...
crazygringo 7y ago
This is a fascinating article historically, but I find it hard to believe it has much relevance to how women speak or are perceived today. I've done a lot of voice coaching, and a lot of people -- men and women -- don't speak at the pitch that is healthiest and most relaxed for their vocal apparatus. Some are higher, some are lower. Because pitch is often very cultural and emotional. People's pitch varies when they speak different languages, or even dialects/accents. And everyone's pitch increases when they're more emotional, and decreases when they're more relaxed -- a deeper, more relaxed voice relative to your normal pitch conveys confidence and control in both men and women. Actors learn to change their pitch (and breathing, volume, resonance, etc.) to whatever is called for in the part. I appreciate that early telephones may have clipped consonants for women, being designed for men's voices -- but if anything that's the opposite of "shrill". In any case, audio quality today is spectacular so it's certainly no longer the case. So while pitch is a fascinating subject, I don't really find myself buying into the notion that female speech patterns are a result of pressure from male norms, whether technological or otherwise.
byproxy 7y ago
If anyone thinks the sound of one's voice has anything to do with how seriously one ought to be taken.... listen to these bad dude's speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-xC8Mu6SM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-xC8Mu6SM
baxrob 7y ago
Related: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-radio-made-female-voices-sound-shrill https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-radio-...

It's a bit of a stretch to connect such ancient data on recording and playback technology - their most recent citation is from 1933! - with a drop in female voice pitch. Microphones and playback quality have come a long way (tinny phone speakers notwithstanding). If there has been a desire to lower voice pitch to sound more authoritative/less "shrill", I suspect it's much more of a general social issue than a technological one.

Anechoic 7y ago
Microphones and playback quality have come a long way The technology has come a long way (or at least some way in the case of microphones), but we still deal with the choices that recording engineers make. Recording microphones are not flat, they are treated as musical instruments -- whether you chose a mic from Shure, Rode, Audio Technica, Blue, AKG, Neumann, Beyerdynamic, etc, they all color the sound in different ways that sound pleasing to when exposed to different sounds. If a microphone is chosen because it has a nice low/mid frequency boost that makes accentuates a male speaking voice, it's not surprising that a female voice may not sound as pleasing when using the same recording setup. The reason that we don't use "flat" microphones (a measurement microphone for example) for recording is that they basically sound terrible to the casual ear. There's a demo on the Stereophile test CD that demonstrates this (if you can find it).
- Nition 7y ago
  It's just that the article is mostly talking about AM radio, and they'd be dealing with stuff like 1920s carbon mics. So maybe modern mics could still be causing issues if they're chosen for a specific male voice type, but it's a stretch to apply 1920s data directly to the modern day. Everything's still a lot more accurate overall.
  - Anechoic 7y ago
    They also reference modern lossy compression which also predominately affects very low and very high frequencies.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  Why wouldn't flat response through 20 kHz sound like the performer is in the room with you? Are these mics compensating for speakers that also don't have flat response?
  - Anechoic 7y ago
    The directivity of a microphone (no matter the pickup pattern) is not the same as the human ear so it either picks up or leaves out sounds that human ears would normally hear.

WalterBright 7y ago

Men are also frequently advised to lower the tone of their voice to convey more gravitas. This is for personal interactions - nothing to do with electronic bandwidth. Besides, electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so should be ample for higher voices. (I have noticed that VOIP is much easier for me to understand than POTS, and cell phones are the worst. Cell phone voice quality hasn't improved since I got my first cell phone in the early 90's.)

icebraining 7y ago
I don't think the idea is so much that current technology has much influence, but that the decades of hearing everyone on radio talk with a low tone has influenced that perception of gravitas, up to the current day. And more generally, that cultural biases can effect technological changes that reinforce those biases.
acqq 7y ago
> electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so should be ample for higher voices. (I have noticed that VOIP is much easier for me to understand than POTS Then you give exactly an example where it is not ample (and matches the topic of the article): POTS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service "Restricted to a narrow frequency range of 300–3,300 Hz, called the voiceband, which is much less than the human hearing range of 20–20,000 Hz"
- WalterBright 7y ago
  True, but POTS isn't used for mass media. Politicians have never phoned me to campaign for my vote.
  - acqq 7y ago
    > but POTS isn't used for mass media. Yes. Still, also if one would measure the response curves of the sound reproductions of most of mass media available to most of the listeners, one would again find that the curves are never flat. And there are indeed a lot of devices that behave worse in the range related to female voices than to some bass voice ranges. Even the so called Hi-Fi equipment is never "flat" (i.e. it never passes different frequencies the same). A lot of people claim to prefer stronger basses, a lot of products are made to amplify them more, and even relative expensive speakers can sound worse for female voice frequency ranges. Not to mention that most of the conditions where the sound is eventually heard are extremely far from the conditions under which the products are evaluated by the reviewers.

yowlingcat 7y ago

> A century of negative commentary on the female voice has had wide-ranging effects: a 1998 study of young Australian women found that the average frequency of female speech dropped twenty-three hertz between 1945 and 1993. Margaret Thatcher famously worked with voice coaches to hone her auditory image, dropping her voice sixty hertz between the nineteen-sixties and the nineteen-eighties. One of the most notable of the many bizarre deceptions in the Theranos saga involved Elizabeth Holmes’s deep voice; when I analyzed recordings of her speaking I found that the disparity between what is likely her real voice and her performative one is around a hundred hertz, which, in that range, is equivalent to nearly half an octave. Wow -- this is absolutely fascinating. I always dismissed Elizabeth Holmes' low voice as a weird quirk, but now I realize there's actually a pretty concrete (and sad) historical rationale to it.

_Codemonkeyism 7y ago

What I always found interesting how children in the US sound "shrill" to my European ear, I think children have much lower voices here in Europe (Germany). Anyone else with the same perception? Or is it just in my imagination?

devnulloverflow 7y ago
Most versions of the American accent are a bit nasal compared to other English speakers, so I guess that makes it higher pitched on average -- even if I wouldn't call it "shrill". Also, there is no a neat separation between nasal Americans and other English speakers. Many Australians are also quite nasal, whereas black Americans (unless you count Steve Urkel) don't strike me as nasal at all. On the third hand: I find the Irish accent is higher pitched than most, without sounding either nasal or shrill. But Americans often sound a lot like the Irish, so that might also make them higher pitched.
froh 7y ago
Indeed there seem to be pitch differences between languages, and between regions of the same language. Don't know about kids, but here is some data for adults: https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01 https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01 /language-pitch.html
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  Interesting link. As a Hungarian I can definitely confirm that foreign women's speech does seem overly high-pitched. Especially in English, but also in German to some degree. In a similar way as Americans in general come across as overly fakey-smiley positive, to me, subjectively, women's speech in English feels over-the-top. (Don't get offended, I'm just describing perceptions) To be more concrete, here's a random example of what sounds natural in Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s

deogeo 7y ago

In related news, there was an experiment where Hillary and Trump's genders were swapped - it turned out a female Trump was more popular than the male version: https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-woman-youd-like-him-more.html https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-wom...

crazygringo 7y ago

This is a fascinating article historically, but I find it hard to believe it has much relevance to how women speak or are perceived today. I've done a lot of voice coaching, and a lot of people -- men and women -- don't speak at the pitch that is healthiest and most relaxed for their vocal apparatus. Some are higher, some are lower. Because pitch is often very cultural and emotional. People's pitch varies when they speak different languages, or even dialects/accents. And everyone's pitch increases when they're more emotional, and decreases when they're more relaxed -- a deeper, more relaxed voice relative to your normal pitch conveys confidence and control in both men and women. Actors learn to change their pitch (and breathing, volume, resonance, etc.) to whatever is called for in the part. I appreciate that early telephones may have clipped consonants for women, being designed for men's voices -- but if anything that's the opposite of "shrill". In any case, audio quality today is spectacular so it's certainly no longer the case. So while pitch is a fascinating subject, I don't really find myself buying into the notion that female speech patterns are a result of pressure from male norms, whether technological or otherwise.

byproxy 7y ago

If anyone thinks the sound of one's voice has anything to do with how seriously one ought to be taken.... listen to these bad dude's speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-xC8Mu6SM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-xC8Mu6SM

baxrob 7y ago

Related: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-radio-made-female-voices-sound-shrill https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-radio-...