Does the mask reduce the attractiveness of your voice?: A study of voice perception from the perspective of acoustic measurements and subjective ratings

Abstract

Voice recognition plays an important role in everyday life. In this study, we sought to examine the effects of wearing a face mask on a speaker's acoustic parameters and the perceiver's evaluation of voice attractiveness. The masked and unmasked voices of 22 participants were analyzed through acoustic measures and were used as stimuli for 27 individuals to rate attractiveness. The results suggest that the mask had no noticeable impact on the time-domain glottal flow or aperiodicity parameters of the voices. However, there appears to be an influence on spectral parameters, specifically energy (for both genders) and H1–H2 (for women), as well as H1–A3 (for women). These spectral parameters were successfully identified by raters, who rated voice clips recorded without masks as significantly more attractive compared to those recorded while wearing masks. In conclusion, wearing a mask may have a slight effect on the ratings of women's voices. These ratings are congruent with acoustic measurements.