Production Strategies of Vocal Attitudes

Humans have an impressive ability to communicate precise social intentions and desires with their voice - through vocal attitudes. Previous studies have shown how isolated acoustic features such as pitch can convey social attitudes, but have mostly worked with single attitudes and have not controlled for inter-speaker variability. Thus, the vocal behaviours used to produce social attitudes remain mostly unknown. That is the aim of the current study, to uncover the anatomic production strategies that speakers use to communicate vocal attitudes. To do this, we analysed recordings from N=20 French speakers producing dominant, friendly, seductive and distant speech. For each of these attitudes, we investigated their vocal fold behaviour, vocal tract actuation and phonetic speech structure, with the support of deep alignment methods, and compared them with group statistics. We notably produced high-level representations of speakers' articulation (e.g. Vowel Space Density) and speech rhythm. Our results reveal speakers' prototypical strategies to produce vocal attitudes, and highlight how vocal behaviours can communicate social signals. We expect these results to provide an objective validation method for deep voice attitude conversions.