Voice Quality and Loudness in Affect Perception

Different voice qualities tend to vary in terms of their intrinsic loudness. Perceptual experiments have shown that voice quality variation can be strongly associated with the affective colouring of an utterance. The question addressed in this paper concerns the role that the intrinsic loudness variation might play in this voice quality-to-affect mapping. To test the hypothesis that the intrinsic loudness variation is not a major determinant of the perceived affective colouring, listeners rated the affective colouring of two series of stimuli: one series varied in voice quality and contained intrinsic loudness variation; the other series were of a constant voice quality, but matched loudness variations of the first series. The results overall support the hypothesis that loudness contributes relatively little to the perceived affective colouring of specific voice qualities. But variation in loudness (in the absence of voice quality variation) is not entirely irrelevant: some contribution of loudness to certain high activation affects was also found.