Welcome to our study on VoicePrint voices.
As a VoicePrint practitioner, you already appreciate that the way we speak can influence other people. We modulate our voices depending on context (e.g., we tend to whisper in a waiting room) and who we speak to (e.g., our boss or our friend). We also believe that the different voices associated with the VoicePrint model might be expressed somewhat differently and thus carry a distinctive tone of voice profile.
To explore this possibility systematically, we are currently recording voice samples provided by VoicePrint practitioners who are willing to donate a little of their precious time to our project. Specifically, we ask volunteers to intone a number of different sentences in each of the voices associated with VoicePrint. The key here is for us not to be prescriptive in how we think an utterance such as “You really need to finish this assignment by tonight” should be intoned. Rather, we are trying to establish how such instructions are intoned in real life by analysing the collected voice samples acoustically. We will specifically look at pitch, loudness, speech rate and voice quality. This will allow us to describe an acoustic profile for the nine different voices. Finally, we are hoping to continue our work by using some of these materials in further studies designed to test for their effectiveness and impact.
If you are interested in participating, and have not yet received your personal invitation, please contact Prof. Silke Paulmann from the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex. She will send you detailed instructions.
We look forward to welcoming you to the study and to sharing its results with you.