The influence of character's gender and the basic emotions of "happiness" and "sadness" on voice pitch in the reading of fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the way in which two basic emotions and the character’s gender are rendered in the reading aloud of prose in terms of the fundamental frequency and the variability of the fundamental frequency. When female characters express happiness or male characters express sadness, the effects of the two variables reinforce each other. However, when female characters express sadness or male characters express happiness, the two characteristics, theoretically, cancel each other. The results of this study indicate that the happy-sad dichotomy has priority over the character’s gender. These findings could potentially be extended to the more general claim that the broad category of emotion has a greater influence than the character’s sex on the reader’s voice.