A Century of “Shrill”: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
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).
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.
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.)
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
"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"
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.
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?
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).
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
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
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO-E7zOHHp0
Also, there is no a neat separation between nasal Americans and other English speakers. Many Australians are also quite nasal, whereas black Americans (unless you count Steve Urkel) don't strike me as nasal at all.
On the third hand: I find the Irish accent is higher pitched than most, without sounding either nasal or shrill. But Americans often sound a lot like the Irish, so that might also make them higher pitched.
https://erikbern.com/2017/02/01 /language-pitch.html
To be more concrete, here's a random example of what sounds natural in Hungarian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm0DWhDk06s