Prosodic Aspects of the Attractive Voice

A speaker’s voice impacts listeners’ perceptions of its owner, leading to inference of gender, age, personality, and even height and weight. In this chapter, we describe research into the qualities of speech that are deemed “attractive” by a listener. There are a number of ways that a person can be found attractive. We will review the research into what makes speakers attractive in the political and business domains, and what vocal properties lead to perceptions of trust. We then turn our attention to research into “likeability” and romantic attraction. While the lexical content of a speaker’s speech is important to their attractiveness, we focus this survey on prosodic qualities, those acoustic properties that describe “how” the words are said rather than “what” the words are. Of course, attractiveness is subjective; what is attractive to one listener may not be to another. Properties of the listener and other contextual qualities can have a significant impact on the voices which are found to be attractive. The most comprehensive research in this topic includes analyses of both the speaker and the listener, since attraction is frequently a mutual phenomenon; when people are attracted to someone, they want to be found attractive in return. We will also summarize work that has investigated attraction dynamics in two-party conversations.