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Is there such thing as a phonetic Gaydar?

Apparently if you cannot get your hands on the Gaydar gadget shown below, you might still be able to detect who is homosexual or bisexual, by listening to the way they talk.

In the 1990s, researchers tackled a question that was discussed everywhere except in formal academic settings. When someone's speech "sounds gay", what makes it sound that way? Here are three pioneering studies.

In 1994, Rudolf P Gaudio, of Stanford University, published a paper called Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men. Gaudio studied the speech sounds of (a) some openly gay white American men and (b) some openly straight white American men. Then he asked volunteers to listen and see if they could identify which was which. They could.

In 1996, Jack Avery and Julie Liss produced a study called Acoustic Correlates of Less-Masculine Sounding Speech. The researchers compared recorded samples of two kinds of speech, one they called "less-masculine-sounding (LMS) male speech". The other they termed "more-masculine-sounding (MMS) male speech".

Acoustically, Avery and Liss said, there were "significant differences between measures of fundamental frequency contours, vowel formant midpoint values, and in the first, third and fourth spectral moments of two fricatives".

Nearly a decade later, Janet Pierrehumbert and four colleagues looked at a very particular aspect of the question "What, technically, is the sound of gay male American speech?" They also examined the speech of lesbian and bisexual American women.

The team published a study called The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production. One passage sings with clarity:

"Differences in the acoustic characteristics of vowels were found as a function of sexual orientation. Lesbian and bisexual women produced less fronted /u/ and /[open aye]/ vowel sounds than heterosexual women. Gay men produced a more expanded vowel space than heterosexual men. However, the vowels of gay, lesbian, bisexual speakers were not generally shifted toward vowel patterns typical of the opposite sex."

The general topic is still, academically speaking, in its early days. A few other scholars have joined Gaudio, Avery, Liss and Pierrehumbert in doing official, list-it-on-the-resumé research. But mostly, it remains a subject of informal, non-technical study.

Via the f-word. Thanks Marcell!

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