Perceived loudness and voice quality in affect cueing

Abstract

The paper describes an auditory experiment aimed at testing whether the intrinsic loudness of a stimulus with a given voice quality influences the way in which it signals affect. Synthesised voice quality stimuli in which intrinsic loudness was systematically manipulated were presented to listeners to test the effect of this manipulation on the affective colouring of the stimuli. The results showed that even when devoid of intrinsic loudness variation, non-modal voice quality stimuli were capable of communicating affect. However, changing the loudness of a non-modal voice quality stimulus towards its intrinsic loudness resulted in the increase of affective ratings.