Does anyone speak female

But you can predict, with a high degree of accuracy, what pitch a man's voice will be throughout their lives based on what it was at the age of seven. The children's pitch pre-puberty was a good predictor of their pitch in adulthood. We know that voice pitch is linked to testosterone levels , which might be more important to romantic choice, as from an evolutionary point of view stronger men would be more sexually desirable. In the case of the Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, a deep voice might be acting as a proxy for other skills that require more testosterone.

The pitch of the voice itself means nothing, but it gives a clue as to how capable a hunter the speaker is, and therefore how well he will provide for his children and how good a chance those children will have to pass on their genes in the future.

Men's adult testosterone levels are determined by their exposure to their mothers' androgens the group of hormones to which testosterone belongs during weeks of pregnancy. This suggests that something that could play an important role in our reproductive success is largely set from childhood and linked to our mothers' pre-natal hormone levels, says Pisanski. Men's preferences for women are a little more complex. For a long time it was thought men prefer women with high-pitch voices which, if voices deepen over time, might be acting as a proxy for youth and therefore the number of future years of fertility.

When looked at purely in terms of reproductive success, it pays for a man to find a woman who can potentially have more children. The fact that women, too, are seen as more competent if they have a deep voice provokes an interesting thought for both Pisanski and Barkat-Defradas: can we manipulate our pitch in the right setting to adapt to our needs?

When we have a good conversation with someone, we tend to adjust the pitch of our own voice towards theirs — something called prosodic entrainment. But when we find someone attractive, the opposite is true. For men, their pitch goes down, while for women, their pitch goes up — playing up to our gender stereotypes.

The more attractive we find someone the greater the difference. You might wonder how these two opposite behaviours unfold on a date — surely a good date, and the sign we are attracted to someone, comes from a good conversation? Over the course of a date prosodic entrainment comes and goes.

At times of entertaining conversation we match our pitches, and at others, when we want to show our attraction we go in the opposite direction. Also, generally, women prioritise good conversation over attraction and vice versa, says Pisanski. What is more, lowering or raising your pitch might be a sign of how attractive we find our date, but it also makes the other person more attracted to us.

We can use our pitch to manipulate others. The one exception to this rule is that sometimes women's voice pitch goes down when they find a man attractive — particularly if it's a man who is popular with other women.

In a speed dating scenario, some women lowered their voice on their dates with the most popular men. Like our politicians, it might be that they were trying to appear more serious and less naive than their competitors, suggests Pisanski, who led the study. This same speed dating experiment, conducted on a small sample of French adults, found that the men also preferred those women with deeper voices — something that Pisanski says might be indicative of changing tastes as men look for serious, ambitious, career-driven women.

Women are starting to speak lower," says Pisanski. Barkat-Defradas agrees, though points out these trends have only been seen in French adults so far.

Maybe there is something to the "bedroom voice" after all. Perhaps, unlike the rest of the world, French men have a slightly different taste when it comes to accents. Or is there just something about the French — and the way they speak?

It often ranks highly on unscientific accent preference polls. Barkat-Defradas suggests that French speakers pout more to form words, which might be seen as attractive.

The difficulty when looking at languages rather than specific qualities of speech is that languages also communicate national stereotypes. For French natives, of course, these associations are much more accent-specific. But could putting on an accent help you to appear younger or more masculine? Humans have a remarkable vocal range, but also a good ability to detect fakers and are not easily deceived, says Pisanski, referring to data from an as-yet-unpublished study.

A desire to give the impression of competence might be one reason behind the rise of "vocal fry" among young American women, says Pisanski. Vocal fry is where the pitch of our voice falls below a natural level, creating a sound that is rough.

Men can go much lower essentially. For example, if your voice goes too low, vocal fry might harm your job prospects , maybe because the trope of women speaking with rough voices is culturally associated with unseriousness, suggest the authors.

If you need another reason not to put on an accent, there is evidence it pays to be completely average. People with average looks and average voices are thought to have more heterozygous major histocompatibility complexes MHCs. This is a sequence of DNA that codes for cell-surface proteins that help our immune systems detect which cells in our bodies belong to us and which are outsiders.

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