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by BuenosAir 1885 days ago
I think the article totally miss the point of why we use female (high pitch) voice instead of male (low pitch) voice.

In a public environment, the majority of the lower spectrum of sound is flooded with the surrounding noise what means that if a low pitch noise is used it will barely be understable. High pitch voices are well better in theses cases because it uses the less busy part of the sound spectrum resulting in clearer sound. There is nothing to do with gender and patriarchy.

2 comments

Is that true, though? If there's automotive traffic or construction work going on, possibly, but any public space with lots of women and (especially) children won't be quiet in the high frequencies. I nonscientifically believe the booming male voices were a lot more effective at being understood and commanding attention over the din at public swimming pools back when I used to spend summers there. They also sometimes have a grumpy old guy do announcements in public transports here in case of major incidents, and I find he's much easier to understand at times than the disembodied female voice they otherwise use. Seems like subway trains and trams produce a lot of high-pitched noise.

There's also this thing with having a "soft voice", that's something much more often attributed to women than men (IME – can't remember hearing that said about a man, like, ever). But in a relatively quiet environment, I pretty much never notice any difference in loudness, nor on recordings, and it's definitely not a shyness thing. But they still get drowned out much, much easier in public spaces than my own male voice, and it's visibly frustrating having to almost scream to just be understood while I can talk normally. That was a pretty regular thing during lunch break for a while when I worked in a team with several women who had that issue.

And finally, while I may be really weird in that regard and everyone else here just processes content and not the voice that's talking, but female and male voices really do have very different emotional coloring for me. I think my native country is still a bit behind when it comes to ubiquitous disembodied female voices, but I'll readily believe it works, and I don't have difficulty imagining the emotional part of the message hinges at least partly on its femininity.

> There's also this thing with having a "soft voice", that's something much more often attributed to women than men (IME – can't remember hearing that said about a man, like, ever).

The "soft spoken" is used for men.

The question is then why hi-pitched male voice could not have been used?
Because natural male voice is generally lower than female voice. Also there is research on gender neutral voice (like this https://www.genderlessvoice.com/) but as you can hear, the voice is everything but natural and easy to understand
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Then it would sound like a female voice. That's how voice changers work
What exactly is it you're arguing for? I don't get it. What difference is there between recording a female and making a male recording sound female?
And how can you tell the difference between a high pitched male voice and a female voice? It's resonance, and it has a big effect on audibility especially in environments where the lower mids are crowded.

https://youtu.be/21ZfGPp-Ves