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Cover letter Abby you will probably be mad or displeased with me, because I did not change a lot of things that my peer reviewer wanted me to change. I corrected all spelling errors of course, but sentence structure issues, and questions that needed to be answered I did not correct all of them. I really liked how my paper was structured for the most part. Being a woman I have grown up trying to make my language and writing significant, and better than the average man's. This peer review was almost trying to strip some of those things from me. I love the use of 'if and which,' but I agreed to take it out for the reader's sake on the second page. I also like to emphasize on meanings. I love using two words that mean similar things when describing something. For example, the reviewer did not like a part of a sentence where I said 'giving men their lower, deeper voice.' I use things like that to draw empathize. The sentence means very deep. My reviewer asked a lot of questions about my open ending questions. He or she wanted me to answer them. I as just the article reviewer of an article myself do not have those answers, hints to why I'm asking them. All in all my reviewer did give me some positive feedback, and help to better my writing so I took some of the ideas. I tried to correct everything that you wanted, but somethings once again I believed were right, or I just needed to explain them better. So I explained somethings more in depth so I could keep them

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in my paper. Abby, I did not cite the Kardashian creakiness thing, because I just came up with that. There is no way to cite that. I moved paragraphs around, and explained things in depth more. I honestly didn't read much of the Kira Hall article when I first wrote this so I went back and added more from that article for you where I thought it was lacking material. You wanted me to also take out a paragraph, but I did not. It was the paragraph about being able to guess someone's size and stature, but I found that to be important so I just explained that section better in hopes that it is now satisfying. I took out anything that I was unsure of how to go about fixing it so that there would be no questions. So I hope my review is better explained this time.

Kleptz Charlie Kleptz Prof. Abby Walker Linguistics Final Draft October 20, 2012

Article Review by C. Kleptz, The Ohio State University Acoustics of Vocal Attractiveness by Babel, King, McGuire

Molly Babel, an author of this article works at the Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia. The other two authors Joesph King, and Grant McGuire work at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California Santa Cruz. The dominant purpose of this study and article was to show that people can assume what someone looks like just by the way he or she talks. In this paper, I summarize the article and offer comments about selected information, and offer changes that could have been taken. I also suggest areas where additional research findings would assist in understanding what it takes to make a person sound attractive. Babel, King, and McGuire surveyed 25 native english speakers from California. Twelve

Kleptz females, and thirteen males rated recorded male and female voices at random. Both sexes rated the same voices as being attractive and not attractive. Men rated the male recorded voices more harshly than women did though. The men rated their fellow male voices as less attractive than the females ranked them. Another question that the reader gets is if women have to decide between sounding powerful or feminine when speaking. Is it attractive for a woman to sound powerful? When Hilary Clinton addresses a crowd in a political setting is she changing her voice to sound more powerful? Sarah Palin is another female political speaker who is often made fun of, because she looks silly trying to be serious and powerful. Robin Lakoff (1975 Language and Women's place) identifies women's language as 'powerless' and men's language as 'powerful'. How do women go about changing their way of speech to sound better for different settings? It would have been interesting if the authors could have found out the ways to make a woman sound attractive. Prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Britain's most powerful post-war Prime Minister, her adviser Gordon Reece was traveling by train when he bumped into the legendary actor Laurence Olivier. Olivier agreed to give Thatcher vocal lessons. Thatcher had the housewife voice and was never taken seriously until Olivier got ahold of her. She used to speak like a mother just caring, and considerate, and always sweet with her words. Soon the original voice gave way to softer notes and a smoothness that seldom cracked except under extreme provocation. Thatcher learned what it took to 4

Kleptz sound powerful and fearless, but once again the reader wants to know what makes a voice sound powerful and can it still be attractive then? (Dunbar, Polly, How Laurence Olivier Gave Margaret Thatcher the Voice That Went down in History) Phone sex lines consist of women who act out men's fantasies through just a hand held telephone. It is interesting to find through Hall's piece (Lip Service on the Fantasy Line 1998) that women are making their voices sound sexy. What makes a sexy voice? Obviously, breathy voice helps in this category. Hall argued that with-out the image of someone the dialer can imagine what ever he wants to see on the other end of the line (pg.193) Hall also said that the women use a dynamic voice and they move up and down from high pitch to low pitch while always being breathy (pg. 193). Women can make their voices sound sexy even if they are not, but why isn't society deciding what makes a women sound powerful or fearless? There was very small evidence and tests done on what makes a voice sound attractive before Babel, McGuire, and King. Vocal folds with a larger mass tend to vibrate slower (men have larger vocal folds), typically giving men their lower deep voice, where the vocal folds of females vibrant faster giving them a higher pitch sound (p. 4). Within the study they found that a slightly higher than average F0 is to be more attractive when it comes to females and less attractive when it comes to males. Males are rated more attractive when their F0 is lower so they sound manly and protective (Ohala, Cambridge University Press, 325-347, 1994).

Kleptz The authors described that voice can be a rich source of information for listeners (p. 3). Physiological details can be assumed through someone speaking, such as height and weight for men. Race can also be guessed through someone's speech. The authors described that voice can be a rich source of information for listeners (p. 3). Physiological details can be assumed through someone speaking, such as height and weight for men. Race can also be guessed through someone's speech. Raters could also guess the talker's size, their health, and membership in the community. Yet the paper does not go into detail about the membership in the community. Does a lawyer sound like a low life of the community or does he sound how he should? The authors should have went more in depth about community membership. I would assume a lawyer to sound very sophisticated, and smart. While I would assume that a guy that worked at McDonald's to sound much dumber. The authors should have discussed this part in their article more. The reader wants to fully understand what makes someone sound the way they do, and if its attractive or not. Humans are like animals in the way that their voice can attract a potential mate. A man with a much higher F0 was assumed to not be attractive, and most likely was mateless. A lower F1 helped make a male sound more attractive, while a higher F1 (first format) helped make a female sound more attractive. The higher the F1 value, the lower (more open) the vowel sounds. However, A breathier voice was found to be more attractive in both male and females. What was found about female voices

Kleptz was the difference in F0 (how fast your vocal folds vibrant aka pitch). Females with a smaller pitch range were rated as more attractive (p. 15). The role of F0 in attractiveness is highly variable by culture (Bezooijen, 1995). So are females with a high sounding voice not as attractive as people thought they were? The study demonstrates that male and females perceptions of attractiveness are closely related and are mediated by cultural factors like dialect (p.18). "The frequency codes underlies the sound symbolic use of voice pitch" (Ohala, Cambridge University Press, 325-347, 1994). People expect a smaller pitched voice to come out of a smaller object. A bird is expected to have a high chirp while a bear is expected to have a very deep growl. Its human nature. Big things talk large, and small things sound smaller. A higher pitch is more attractive for females, and a lower pitch is more attractive for males. The authors also should have talked about vocal fry (creakiness) in voices. Is it attractive for women to creak in their voices? Creakiness is tied right along a breathy voice, and by this study it is said to be more attractive. Vocal fry is something that women now do with-out even knowing it. Creakiness is something that the pop stars are even incorporating into their style of music. Creakiness is something that even the Kardashian sisters use. The reader must assume that creakiness has to be attractive since high pop stars are using it in their day to day vocabulary. In the word table experiment, the audience has to ask themselves at what speed did the recorded 7

Kleptz voices say the list of words. Was it more or less attractive when they read the word lists fast or slow? What does it say about someone if they speak faster or slower? The article did not go into detail on how the word lists were read aloud to the readers. Also were the recorded voices rated word by word? The authors should have went word by word and asked the raters to rate the speakers by every word. A recorded voice could have said 'dune' differently than everyone else, and maybe that would have been an interesting finding to see whether or not each word made a difference. Vocal attractiveness does exist. The authors should have taken a closer look on how the recorded voices pronounced certain vowel sounds. That would have caused a different outcome. Do longer 'A's make a person sound more or less attractive? The reader has no idea, because the information wasn't provided. More than three years has passed since the article was written. Technology has advanced, style of clothes has changed, and even the way people talk is slowly changing over time. Tests and data was not really collected before this article was conducted. So I as a reader believe that the authors should redo the experiment, and hope that other people have since done studies on what makes a vocal attractive or not. Data on vocal attractiveness needs to be updated as much as possible. Speech is changing as fast as style of clothes, which is very fast. Three years ago it was okay to say 'fetch' and fetch is so not accepted now a days according to the movie Mean Girls (2004). Speech and how people talk is

Kleptz changing all the time, what people find attractive is changing from day to day.

References

Dunbar, Polly. "How Laurence Olivier Gave Margaret Thatcher the Voice That Went down in History." Mail Online. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2012.

Kleptz <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2055214/How-Laurence-Olivier-gaveMargaret-Thatcher-voice-went-history.html>. Hall, Kira. "Lip Service on the Fantasy Lines." (1995): n. pag. Web. 20 Sept. 2012. <http://dirwww.colorado.edu/linguistics/faculty/kira_hall/articles/HALL1995.pdf>. Lakoff, Robin. "Language and Women's Place." (1975): n. pag. Web. 21 Sept. 2012. <http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=D787E27C873F A9F21CAA7348D6752B6C.journals?fromPage=online&aid=2645868>. Mean Girls. Dir. Mark Waters. Perf. Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams. 2004. DVD. Ohala, J. J. (1995). The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints. In P. F. MacNeilage (ed.), The production of speech. New York: Springer-Verlag. 189-216. Van Bezooijen, R. 1995. Sociocultural aspects of pitch differences between Japanese and Dutch women. Language and Speech, 38, 2535. 10

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