The relationship between perception of cuteness and duration of voices
Ryohei Ohno, Masanori Morise, Tetsuro Kitahara · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2016
The “cuteness” is one of the most important features in female voices. In fact, voice actresses who are known as cute voice holders are very popular in Japan, particularly for Japanese anime freaks. We have therefore been investigating the relationship between the perception of the cuteness of voices and their acoustic features. Here, we focus on the duration of voices. We hypothesized that it is difficult to perceive cuteness when the voice is short, and we conducted a listening test using voice stimuli with various durations. Given voices (around 1 sec) saying “oniichan” (older brother) by 12 actresses, we extracted 75-ms, 150-ms, 300-ms, and 600-ms parts from them. Participants listened to each stimulus three times and rated their cuteness on a scale of 1 to 5. Experimental results show the following two findings: 1) The stability of ratings for the same voice (i.e., the difference between the highest and lowest ratings for the same voice within each participant) tends to become lower as the voice is shorter. 2) Regarding actresses whose full-version voices are rated 4 or higher by each participant, the participant also rated more than half of the shortened voices (even 75-ms ones) 4 or higher.