Dysphonia is beautiful: A perceptual and acoustic analysis of vocal roughness

Researchers as well as speech therapists are interested in the determination of reliable acoustic cues that may be useful for the evaluation of vocal quality as well as for the diagnosis of vocal pathologies and remediation. In this way, experimental phonetics can be useful to clinical practice. This work which tries to connect phonetics and logopedic science, deals with the esthetic quality of dysphonic voices. The aim of this work is to evaluate if women can judge as attractive some masculine voices in spite of their pathological dimension. The results show that voices that are slightly rough (i.e. R1 on the GRBAS scale) are evaluated as the most attractive among a set of dysphonic and non-dysphonic voices. An acoustic study was carried out to quantify the acoustic characteristics of each type of pathological voices and to examine the acoustic correlates of voices that were perceived as the most attractive.