Marchand Knight Jay, Sares Anastasia G, Deroche Mickael L D
Laboratory for Hearing and Cognition, Psychology Department, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2023 May 2;14:1046672. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1046672. eCollection 2023.
A singer's or speaker's (voice type) should be appraised based on acoustic cues characterizing their voice. Instead, in practice, it is often influenced by the individual's physical appearance. This is especially distressful for transgender people who may be excluded from formal singing because of perceived mismatch between their voice and appearance. To eventually break down these visual biases, we need a better understanding of the conditions under which they occur. Specifically, we hypothesized that trans listeners (not actors) would be better able to resist such biases, relative to cis listeners, precisely because they would be more aware of appearance-voice dissociations.
In an online study, 85 cisgender and 81 transgender participants were presented with 18 different actors singing or speaking short sentences. These actors covered six voice categories from high/bright (traditionally feminine) to low/dark (traditionally masculine) voices: namely soprano, mezzo-soprano (referred to henceforth as mezzo), contralto (referred to henceforth as alto), tenor, baritone, and bass. Every participant provided voice type ratings for (1) Audio-only (A) stimuli to get an unbiased estimate of a given actor's voice type, (2) Video-only (V) stimuli to get an estimate of the strength of the bias itself, and (3) combined Audio-Visual (AV) stimuli to see how much visual cues would affect the evaluation of the audio.
Results demonstrated that visual biases are not subtle and hold across the entire scale, shifting voice appraisal by about a third of the distance between adjacent voice types (for example, a third of the bass-to-baritone distance). This shift was 30% smaller for trans than for cis listeners, confirming our main hypothesis. This pattern was largely similar whether actors sung or spoke, though singing overall led to more feminine/high/bright ratings.
This study is one of the first demonstrations that transgender listeners are in fact better judges of a singer's or speaker's voice type because they are better able to separate the actors' voice from their appearance, a finding that opens exciting avenues to fight more generally against implicit (or sometimes explicit) biases in voice appraisal.
歌手或演讲者的（嗓音类型）应根据表征其嗓音的声学线索来评估。然而，在实际中，它常常受到个人外貌的影响。这对跨性别者来说尤其苦恼，因为他们可能因嗓音与外貌之间被认为不匹配而被排除在正式演唱之外。为了最终打破这些视觉偏见，我们需要更好地理解它们出现的条件。具体而言，我们假设跨性别听众（而非演员）相对于顺性别听众，能更好地抵制此类偏见，恰恰是因为他们会更意识到外貌与嗓音的脱节。
在一项在线研究中，向85名顺性别参与者和81名跨性别参与者展示了18名不同演员演唱或说出短句的情况。这些演员涵盖了从高/亮（传统上为女性化）到低/暗（传统上为男性化）嗓音的六个嗓音类别：即女高音、女中音（此后简称为女中）、女低音（此后简称为女低）、男高音、男中音和男低音。每位参与者针对（1）仅音频（A）刺激给出嗓音类型评分，以获得对给定演员嗓音类型的无偏估计；（2）仅视频（V）刺激给出评分，以估计偏见本身的强度；（3）音频 - 视频组合（AV）刺激给出评分，以查看视觉线索会在多大程度上影响对音频的评估。
结果表明，视觉偏见并不细微，且在整个范围内都存在，使嗓音评估偏移了相邻嗓音类型之间距离的约三分之一（例如，男低音到男中音距离的三分之一）。跨性别听众的这种偏移比顺性别听众小30%，证实了我们的主要假设。无论演员是演唱还是说话，这种模式大致相似，不过总体而言演唱导致的评分更偏向女性化/高/亮。
本研究首次证明了跨性别听众实际上是歌手或演讲者嗓音类型的更好评判者，因为他们能更好地将演员的嗓音与其外貌区分开来，这一发现为更广泛地对抗嗓音评估中的隐性（或有时是显性）偏见开辟了令人兴奋的途径。
