What the study is about

Published in Frontiers in Psychology (August 2024) by Luke Holmes, Gerulf Rieger, and Silke Paulmann (University of Essex). It examines whether sexual orientation is linked to measurable differences in the acoustic properties of people’s natural speech (not recited scripts).

They recorded 142 men and 175 women of varying sexual orientations (treated as a continuous Kinsey-style scale from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual). Participants answered an open question about the weather in England, and researchers analyzed those natural answers.

Main findings

In men:

• Homosexual men had lower average pitch and a narrower pitch range than heterosexual men (opposite of the common stereotype that gay men’s voices are higher-pitched).

• Homosexual men also had less breathy voices (lower harmonics-to-noise ratio).

In women:

• Homosexual women had a lower F4 formant (a higher vocal-tract resonance/overtone) than heterosexual women.

• Homosexual women had rougher voices (higher jitter) and a less breathy / brighter quality (flatter spectral tilt).

No clear differences were found in:

• Formants F1–F3

• Cepstral peak prominence

• Shimmer

• Speech rate

(in either sex)

When effects appeared, bisexual participants generally fell in between heterosexual and homosexual speakers.

Most earlier work used small samples, recited text, or lumped bisexual and homosexual people together. This one used a larger sample, natural speech, and treated orientation as continuous — which the authors argue is more realistic.

This study helps debunk the common myth of “the gay voice.” A lot of people (and media) assume most gay men sound a certain stereotypical way — higher-pitched, more expressive, etc. But the actual data from natural speech shows the opposite pattern on average: gay men in this sample had lower pitch and a narrower pitch range than straight men. Of course some gay guys do have more stereotypically “gay-sounding” voices, but the research suggests that’s not the norm.

Bottom line

There are some average acoustic differences linked to sexual orientation, but they are modest, sometimes go against popular stereotypes (especially the pitch findings in men), and are not consistent across every voice measure. The authors note that people may also deliberately

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