Evolution of Voices in French Audiovisual Media Across Genders and Age in a Diachronic Perspective
This research addresses how vocal characteristics have evolved in French media, providing insights for sociolinguistics and media studies, but it is incremental as it applies established acoustic methods to new historical data.
The study analyzed acoustic changes in voices from French media archives across time, gender, and age, finding a general trend toward lower voices over time and age-related pitch lowering in females but not males.
We present a diachronic acoustic analysis of the voice of 1023 speakers from French media archives. The speakers are spread across 32 categories based on four periods (years 1955/56, 1975/76, 1995/96, 2015/16), four age groups (20-35; 36-50; 51-65, >65), and two genders. The fundamental frequency ($F_0$) and the first four formants (F1-4) were estimated. Procedures used to ensure the quality of these estimations on heterogeneous data are described. From each speaker's $F_0$ distribution, the base-$F_0$ value was calculated to estimate the register. Average vocal tract length was estimated from formant frequencies. Base-$F_0$ and vocal tract length were fit by linear mixed models to evaluate how they may have changed across time periods and genders, corrected for age effects. Results show an effect of the period with a tendency to lower voices, independently of gender. A lowering of pitch is observed with age for female but not male speakers.