What kind of voices do guys like

Also, fun voice fact: Swedish women speak in lower voices than American women do, while Dutch women may speak with the lowest voices of all, and Japanese women the highest.

But what is the point of all this? Do men prefer women with lower voices or what? Or are all of our sultry efforts misguided? A PLoS One study suggest our efforts may indeed be misguided, finding that while women consistently prefer men with low voices indicating strength and virility, theoretically men prefer women with high voices indicating femininity and smallness, theoretically. A huge caveat for that study, however, is that they used robotic voice samples, and those samples were insane.

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. The specific manipulations either conveyed a smaller body size or a larger one, based upon previous research that matched various voice qualities with different body sizes in humans.

Past a certain point, though, higher voices were judged as no more attractive that slightly deeper ones. Listen to the most and least attractive both, admittedly creepy voices below:.

They also polled the participants on whether they thought the simulated voices sounded angry or happy, and the breathy deep males voices were generally perceived as much happier and less angry than the less breathy i. Listen to the most and least attractive male voices below:. We actually have the ability to change the attractiveness of our voice depending on our interlocutor, and we do this without knowing.

Women sometimes modify their voices to sound most attractive during the most fertile part of their menstrual cycle. Men also modify the pitch in their voice, specifically when confronted with potential competitors in dating scenarios. This means that just like we fix our hairstyle or clothes to look more attractive for a date, we also give our voices an unconscious makeover to sound more attractive and sexually fit. People who talk to each other tend to start sounding more similar, completely unaware they are doing so.

This adaption can happen over long months or years and even very short one-hour lab study periods of time. One study compared the speech of five pairs of new roommates who had just moved in together.

At the beginning and end of semester, researchers took recordings of each person and asked them to rate how they felt about their new roommate. They found that the roommates sounded more similar at the end compared to the beginning of semester and that this convergence was related to the ratings of closeness.