
A Century of “Shrill”: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices - augustocallejas
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century-of-shrill-how-bias-in-technology-has-hurt-womens-voices
======
Nition
It's a bit of a stretch to connect such ancient data on recording and playback
technology - their _most recent_ citation is from 1933! - with a drop in
female voice pitch. Microphones and playback quality have come a long way
(tinny phone speakers notwithstanding).

If there has been a desire to lower voice pitch to sound more
authoritative/less "shrill", I suspect it's much more of a general social
issue than a technological one.

~~~
Anechoic
_Microphones and playback quality have come a long way_

The _technology_ has come a long way (or at least some way in the case of
microphones), but we still deal with the choices that recording engineers
make. Recording microphones are _not_ flat, they are treated as musical
instruments -- whether you chose a mic from Shure, Rode, Audio Technica, Blue,
AKG, Neumann, Beyerdynamic, etc, they all color the sound in different ways
that sound pleasing to when exposed to different sounds. If a microphone is
chosen because it has a nice low/mid frequency boost that makes accentuates a
male speaking voice, it's not surprising that a female voice may not sound as
pleasing when using the same recording setup.

The reason that we don't use "flat" microphones (a measurement microphone for
example) for recording is that they basically sound terrible to the casual
ear. There's a demo on the Stereophile test CD that demonstrates this (if you
can find it).

~~~
Nition
It's just that the article is mostly talking about AM radio, and they'd be
dealing with stuff like 1920s carbon mics. So maybe modern mics could still be
causing issues if they're chosen for a specific male voice type, but it's a
stretch to apply 1920s data directly to the modern day. Everything's still a
lot more accurate overall.

~~~
Anechoic
They also reference modern lossy compression which also predominately affects
very low and very high frequencies.

------
crazygringo
This is a fascinating article historically, but I find it hard to believe it
has much relevance to how women speak or are perceived today.

I've done a lot of voice coaching, and a _lot_ of people -- men and women --
don't speak at the pitch that is healthiest and most relaxed for their vocal
apparatus. Some are higher, some are lower.

Because pitch is often very cultural _and_ emotional. People's pitch varies
when they speak different languages, or even dialects/accents. And _everyone
's_ pitch increases when they're more emotional, and decreases when they're
more relaxed -- a deeper, more relaxed voice _relative to your normal pitch_
conveys confidence and control in both men _and_ women. Actors learn to change
their pitch (and breathing, volume, resonance, etc.) to whatever is called for
in the part.

I appreciate that early telephones may have clipped consonants for women,
being designed for men's voices -- but if anything that's the _opposite_ of
"shrill". In any case, audio quality today is spectacular so it's certainly no
longer the case.

So while pitch is a fascinating subject, I don't really find myself buying
into the notion that female speech patterns are a result of pressure from male
norms, whether technological or otherwise.

------
WalterBright
Men are also frequently advised to lower the tone of their voice to convey
more gravitas. This is for personal interactions - nothing to do with
electronic bandwidth.

Besides, electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and
so should be ample for higher voices.

(I have noticed that VOIP is much easier for me to understand than POTS, and
cell phones are the worst. Cell phone voice quality hasn't improved since I
got my first cell phone in the early 90's.)

~~~
acqq
> electronic bandwidth these days is of necessity set up for music, and so
> should be ample for higher voices. (I have noticed that VOIP is much easier
> for me to understand than POTS

Then you give exactly an example where it is not ample (and matches the topic
of the article):

POTS:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service)

"Restricted to a narrow frequency range of 300–3,300 Hz, called the voiceband,
which is much less than the human hearing range of 20–20,000 Hz"

~~~
WalterBright
True, but POTS isn't used for mass media. Politicians have never phoned me to
campaign for my vote.

~~~
acqq
> but POTS isn't used for mass media.

Yes. Still, also if one would measure the response curves of the sound
reproductions of most of mass media available to most of the listeners, one
would again find that the curves are never flat.

And there are indeed a lot of devices that behave worse in the range related
to female voices than to some bass voice ranges. Even the so called Hi-Fi
equipment is never "flat" (i.e. it never passes different frequencies the
same). A lot of people claim to prefer stronger basses, a lot of products are
made to amplify them more, and even relative expensive speakers can sound
worse for female voice frequency ranges. Not to mention that most of the
conditions where the sound is eventually heard are extremely far from the
conditions under which the products are evaluated by the reviewers.

~~~
WalterBright
I listen to a lot of music on my stereo, including many female singers with
lovely voices, and do not notice any bias or shrillness in them, nor with any
of the higher pitched instruments.

~~~
acqq
I have a counterexample which I think is more telling: never when I listen to
music I recognize the relevant bias in sound equipment or sound engineering,
it is when I listen movies that I do, and I observe it especially when I
listen to non-English female voices (which I indeed happen to listen a lot,
living where I live). But I'm sure that I'm not only one who notice that, as
well as I am sure that not everybody's going to experience it, as there are
multiple factors that allow me to be able to claim that. Human hearing has a
complex response curves itself, and age and different other conditions result
in specific curves among some people, which makes me unfortunate enough to be
one of those who are more aware of the limitations of the sound equipment and
of the ways the sound is processed by the professionals.

Once one is affected, one can more easily recognize that even professionals
are aware of many aspects the sound is not "how it should be" but that the
resulting sound is not the same as the "real thing" and also not "optimally
adjusted" for the final listening conditions.

Sound engineering, to those who aren't doing it, appears to be "simple", and
it's true that today we have much more good processing capabilities than in
the days of only analog devices, but even now there are many issues that
greatly influence the end result. And as I mentioned, not all languages and
all fashions affecting how people speak are the same, resulting in different
aspects affecting different people differently.

Did you know, for example, that women and men, on average, but even more
significantly in the "tails" of distribution not only have different voice
characteristics (how they produce the sound) but also different response
curves, that is, that they hear the sounds differently?

~~~
WalterBright
I don't dispute any of that. What I don't buy, however, is that there's some
electronic conspiracy among sound engineers to make women's voices sound bad.
I don't buy that powerful female artists (like Madonna) would put up with
that. I don't buy that the record companies, who want to sell those records by
female artists, would put up with that.

Lastly, if it takes a highly trained ear to pick up differences, then the
difference is not material to the public and it's an ineffective conspiracy
(assuming there is one).

~~~
acqq
> What I don't buy, however, is that there's some electronic conspiracy among
> sound engineers to make women's voices sound bad

It's not claiming "conspiracy" stating the facts that the sound transmission
was almost always not optimized to produce best result for female voices and
that male voices were more lucky. I studied electrical engineering and I can
confirm that the simplified claims were taught as:

"voice frequency is 300 to 3400 Hz"

which effectively misses the higher frequencies that unfortunately disfavors
understanding of female voices, but nobody learns _that_ detail there:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_frequency)

or that most of the products sold for music also disfavor female voices versus
the "bass effect" \-- you'll find infinite amount of "bass boost" speakers and
earphones (even those that claim they don't typically do that) and much less
(I couldn't find any where it's even stated as a goal of the design) those
that allow the best understanding of voices instead of distractedly "pumping"
the bass line.

Using Madonna as an argument is weak. Compare how much actors earn compared to
the actresses and how much actresses ever could influence the movie industry
result. Music business is similar -- female artists are surely limited in what
they can achieve regarding how their music is being played, and they surely
can't change the preferences of the whole industries. I guarantee you that
female voices come worse than they should even in modern times and especially
in movies and TV (not in pop music) and that it can be easily heard by anybody
who is interested in the topic.

Do your own research about what the "industry" spreads as a "common knowledge"
and "what people want" as of today -- it's never real fidelity or a linear
response. It's primarily "how can music sound louder than the competition."
And "more bass."

Decades ago I knew an old sound engineer who always carried around his own
amplifier and earphones to compensate his hearing loss. He was showing me his
own measurements (graphs), and how almost everything claiming by the producers
of the earphones were lies (exactly regarding fidelity). He worked really hard
to select the earphones that worked "correctly enough".

The original article, the way I understood it, also doesn't claim conspiracy?
It seems like a classic straw man.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)

------
yowlingcat
> A century of negative commentary on the female voice has had wide-ranging
> effects: a 1998 study of young Australian women found that the average
> frequency of female speech dropped twenty-three hertz between 1945 and 1993.
> Margaret Thatcher famously worked with voice coaches to hone her auditory
> image, dropping her voice sixty hertz between the nineteen-sixties and the
> nineteen-eighties. One of the most notable of the many bizarre deceptions in
> the Theranos saga involved Elizabeth Holmes’s deep voice; when I analyzed
> recordings of her speaking I found that the disparity between what is likely
> her real voice and her performative one is around a hundred hertz, which, in
> that range, is equivalent to nearly half an octave.

Wow -- this is absolutely fascinating. I always dismissed Elizabeth Holmes'
low voice as a weird quirk, but now I realize there's actually a pretty
concrete (and sad) historical rationale to it.

------
byproxy
If anyone thinks the sound of one's voice has anything to do with how
seriously one ought to be taken.... listen to these bad dude's speak:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wudTamJwYAM)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-
xC8Mu6SM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG-xC8Mu6SM)

------
baxrob
Related: [https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-
radio-...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-radio-made-
female-voices-sound-shrill)

------
_Codemonkeyism
What I always found interesting how children in the US sound "shrill" to my
European ear, I think children have much lower voices here in Europe
(Germany). Anyone else with the same perception? Or is it just in my
imagination?

~~~
froh
Indeed there seem to be pitch differences between languages, and between
regions of the same language. Don't know about kids, but here is some data for
adults:

[https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01](https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01) /language-
pitch.html

~~~
bonoboTP
Interesting link. As a Hungarian I can definitely confirm that foreign women's
speech does seem overly high-pitched. Especially in English, but also in
German to some degree. In a similar way as Americans in general come across as
overly fakey-smiley positive, to me, subjectively, women's speech in English
feels over-the-top. (Don't get offended, I'm just describing perceptions)

To be more concrete, here's a random example of what sounds natural in
Hungarian:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s)

------
deogeo
In related news, there was an experiment where Hillary and Trump's genders
were swapped - it turned out a female Trump was _more_ popular than the male
version: [https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-
wom...](https://www.inc.com/suzanne-lucas/if-donald-trump-were-a-woman-youd-
like-him-more.html)

