Perception and analysis of “Moe “voice
Sayoko Takano, Masashi Yamada · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2016
The term “Moe” is used in Japanese animation and cartoons. “Moe” mainly refers to cute young girls, but it does include direct sexual desire. We investigated the “Moe” voice using “onichan CD” which includes 1200 different utterance from 12 voice actress. “Onichan” means brother in Japanese, and the voice actress says the word with happiness, anger, sadness, adding up to 100 different situations. In experiment one, the impressions of the “Moe” voice was examined using Semantic Differential Method. The subjects answer revealed that Moe is not related to the emotions such as happiness or sadness, but “Moe” is comfort to the listener. Furthermore, “Moe” is mostly associated with the voice actress. This indicates that “Moe” voice is mainly related to the personality. In experiment two, the speech voice was analyzed to measure the acoustic characters. In experiment three, the voice was resynthesized using TANDEM-STRAIGHT. All the results showed that the “Moe” voice is associated with the young girl as small, energetic hypertension.