Perceived vocal attractiveness of breathiness in Danish

The present study focuses on the area of vocal attractiveness (VA). Namely, it examines the role of breathy voice in terms of its perceived physical attractiveness in Danish, a language that has not been the subject of research in this domain so far. In our experiment, we exposed listeners to 9 target vocal stimuli (3 female/male speakers, 3 different breathiness conditions) and 18 distractor voices. We conducted acoustic measurements to quantify the degree of breathiness (CPP and H1*-H2* parameters) and voice pitch (f0) in our speakers. Our findings provide evidence that breathiness can indeed cue perceived physical attractiveness. We report a facilitative effect of perceived breathiness on the evaluation of female voices but an adverse effect on male voice evaluation. We also add to the relatively few studies which consider the role of more than one cue to VA by looking at interactions between breathiness and f0. Breathier female voices were perceived as more physically attractive when lower-pitched but as less attractive when higher-pitched, which is not in line with sex-typical preferences in terms of voice pitch in women (i.e., higher-pitched voices) commonly reported by VA studies. Implications of the findings are discussed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to report that both breathiness and fundamental frequency can function as a cue to perceived physical attractiveness in Danish speakers.