Summary:
A study published in JASA Express Letters found that twangy female voices are more easily understood than neutral voices in noisy environments, suggesting potential applications for voice therapy and speech intelligibility in challenging listening conditions.
Key Takeaways:
- Improved Clarity in Noise: Twangy voices, especially female ones, are easier to understand than neutral voices in noisy settings due to their higher pitch and reduced masking by low-frequency sounds.
- Clinical Implications: The findings may encourage speech-language pathologists to incorporate twangy speech techniques in therapy, addressing previous hesitations due to limited perceptual data.
- Future Research: Researchers plan to investigate how twangy speech performs in other noise environments and explore its practicality and social perception in clinical use.
Twangy voices are a hallmark of country music and many regional accents. However, this speech type, often described as “brassy” and “bright,” can also be used to get a message across in a noisy environment.
In JASA Express Letters, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, researchers from Indiana University found that it was easier to understand twangy female voices compared to neutral voices when surrounded by noise.
Found in accents in American cities such as Chicago, Boston, New York, and Dallas, “twangy” voices are used by speech pathologists to help increase their understandability when working with patients.
“While the acoustic properties of twangy voice have been studied for their potential to enhance intelligibility, the perceptual effect of twangy timbre on speech intelligibility is not well understood,” says author Tzu-Pei Tsai. “This lack of evidence has led to clinicians’ hesitance in recommending a twangy voice for therapy, and the major motivation for our study is so we can provide speech-language pathologists with the confidence to use this tool.”
To explore this, the researchers recruited four male and four female participants to record twangy speech samples, which they then used to create a text-to-speech system that could be used in the experiments. The generated speech samples were then played over noisy environment sounds, which were created from ambient train and plane recordings.
Participants listened to both male and female twangy speakers and neutral speakers, then rated their listening efforts and how well they could understand the spoken words. The researchers found that in general, twangy voices were understood more than neutral voices, but participants had the easiest time understanding twangy female voices.
This could arise thanks to a few reasons — firstly, twangy speech is usually higher-pitched than neutral speech, giving it a perceived loudness. It is also less masked by low-frequency sounds such as traffic noises.
In the future, the researchers want to explore the impact of twangy speech on intelligibility in different noise environments.
“We would also like to explore the clinical applicability of twang in voice therapy, including its social perception and the effort required for its production,” Tsai says.
The article “How vocal timbre impacts word identification and listening effort in traffic-shaped noises” is authored by Tzu-Pei Tsai, Tessa Bent, and Malachi Henry. It will appear in JASA Express Letters on July 29, 2025 (DOI: 10.1121/10.0037043). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037043.
Featured image: A study by Tsai et al. showed that twangy, female voices are best understood amongst plane and train sounds. Image: AIP
