A Multidimensional Scaling Study of Voice Quality in Females

Abstract In this study, a multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis was performed to investigate perceptual discrimination by listeners among normal female voices. Speech pathologists and untrained listeners rated the similarity of all possible pairings of 20 female voices presented in sentences. MDS analyses were performed on these data. To interpret the resulting dimensions, listeners additionally evaluated each voice on each of 17 rating scales. For each listener group, the normalized and averaged perceptual ratings were correlated with MDS stimulus coordinates for the 20 voices. This procedure resulted in a five-dimensional solution which best explained the speech pathologists’ similarity-dissimilarity judgements, with the following perceptual correlates for each dimension: (1) perceived pitch, (2) perceived loudness, (3) perceived age and duration of the speakers’ stimulus sentence, (4) perceived variability, and (5) perceived quality. The untrained listeners’ judgements were best explained by a two-dimensional solution. Comparisons with other MDS studies were made, and the need for new acoustic measures was discussed.