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OBJECTIVES/HYPOTHESES: Charismatic leaders use vocal behavior to persuade their audience, achieve goals, arouse emotional states, and convey personality traits and leadership status. This study investigates voice fundamental frequency (f0) and sound pressure level (SPL) in female and male French, Italian, Brazilian, and American politicians to determine which acoustic parameters are related to cross-gender and cross-cultural common vocal abilities, and which derive from culture-, gender-, and language-specific vocal strategies used to adapt vocal behavior to listeners' culture-related expectations. STUDY DESIGN: Speech corpora were collected for two formal communicative contexts (leaders address followers or other leaders) and one informal communicative context (dyadic interaction), based on the persuasive goals inherent in each context and on the relative status of the listeners and speakers. Leaders' acoustic voice profiles were created to show differences in f0 and SPL manipulation with respect to speakers' gender and language in each communicative context. RESULTS: Cross-gender and cross-language similarities in manipulation of average f0 and in f0 and SPL ranges occurred in all communicative contexts. Patterns of f0 manipulation were shared across genders and cultures, suggesting this dimension might be biologically based and is exploited by leaders to convey dominance. Ranges for f0 and SPL seemed to be affected by the communicative context, being wider or narrower depending on the persuasive goal. Results also showed language- and speaker-specific differences in the acoustic manipulation of f0 and SPL over time. CONCLUSIONS: These findings are consistent with the idea that specific charismatic leaders' vocal behaviors depend on a fine combination of vocal abilities that are shared across cultures and genders, combined with culturally- and linguistically-filtered vocal strategies.

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Determining the starting point of frication is a complex task involving aerodynamic factors dependent on adjustments controlling articulatory and laryngeal structures and on the regulation of air pressure. This study investigates the aerodynamic characteristics of the onset and offset of Belgian French fricative consonants using direct measurements of subglottal (Ps) and intraoral (Po) air pressure. Results show a higher difference between Ps and Po at the onset of voiced fricative consonants when compared to their voiceless counterparts. This accounts for the need for high air velocity through the glottal and consonantal constrictions for voiced fricatives. The offset of voiced fricatives is also characterized by a relatively large difference between Ps and Po, still lower for voiceless equivalents.

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Experiments using animal and human larynx models are often conducted without a vocal tract. While it is often assumed that the absence of a vocal tract has only small effects on vocal fold vibration, it is not actually known how sound production and quality are affected. In this study, the validity of using data obtained in the absence of a vocal tract for voice perception studies was investigated. Using a two-layer self-oscillating physical model, three series of voice stimuli were created: one produced with conditions of left-right symmetric vocal fold stiffness, and two with left-right asymmetries in vocal fold body stiffness. Each series included a set of stimuli created with a physical vocal tract, and a second set created without a physical vocal tract. Stimuli were re-synthesized to equalize the mean F0 for each series and normalized for amplitude. Listeners were asked to evaluate the three series in a sort-and-rate task. Multidimensional scaling analysis was applied to examine the perceptual interaction between the voice source and the vocal tract resonances. The results showed that the presence or absence of a vocal tract can significantly affect perception of voice quality changes due to parametric changes in vocal fold properties, except when the parametric changes in vocal fold properties produced an abrupt shift in vocal fold vibratory pattern resulting in a salient quality change.