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Since I have been really terrible at updating the blog (but pretty good at keeping up with the facebook blog posts) I've added the widget below so that facebook cross posts to the blog.

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Saturday, September 24, 2011

Do Women's Voices Provide Cues of the Likelihood of Ovulation? The Importance of Sampling Regime

Congrats to my friend and colleague Gisela F!

Citation:
Fischer J, Semple S, Fickenscher G, Jürgens R, Kruse E, et al. (2011) Do Women's Voices Provide Cues of the Likelihood of Ovulation? The Importance of Sampling Regime. PLoS ONE 6(9): e24490. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0024490

Abstract:
The human voice provides a rich source of information about individual attributes such as body size, developmental stability and emotional state. Moreover, there is evidence that female voice characteristics change across the menstrual cycle. A previous study reported that women speak with higher fundamental frequency (F0) in the high-fertility compared to the low-fertility phase. To gain further insights into the mechanisms underlying this variation in perceived attractiveness and the relationship between vocal quality and the timing of ovulation, we combined hormone measurements and acoustic analyses, to characterize voice changes on a day-to-day basis throughout the menstrual cycle. Voice characteristics were measured from free speech as well as sustained vowels. In addition, we asked men to rate vocal attractiveness from selected samples. The free speech samples revealed marginally significant variation in F0 with an increase prior to and a distinct drop during ovulation. Overall variation throughout the cycle, however, precluded unequivocal identification of the period with the highest conception risk. The analysis of vowel samples revealed a significant increase in degree of unvoiceness and noise-to-harmonic ratio during menstruation, possibly related to an increase in tissue water content. Neither estrogen nor progestogen levels predicted the observed changes in acoustic characteristics. The perceptual experiments revealed a preference by males for voice samples recorded during the pre-ovulatory period compared to other periods in the cycle. While overall we confirm earlier findings in that women speak with a higher and more variable fundamental frequency just prior to ovulation, the present study highlights the importance of taking the full range of variation into account before drawing conclusions about the value of these cues for the detection of ovulation.

1 comment:

Andrea Muhrrteyn said...

Were all the women in this experiment taken from 'normal western civilisation' culture of females who are for the most part nothing more than walking vagina's, in search of walking penises with a wallet? Put differently totally unconscious women who don't even notice the tone of their own voices, who are not conscious of the words they use, of how they communicate, how two-faced they communicate, how fake they are, etc?

If so; your experiment is only relevant to such walking vagina's; and considering their total lack of consciousness probably is worth sweet fuck all. That is if the scientists are interested in real evolutionary science. But such scientists are rare, most scientists these days are nothing more than intellectual prostitutes publishing bullshit corporations want them to say is 'science'.

I doubt there is a university on the face of the earth who would employ Galileo or any scientist of comparison; whose science exposes the real root cause fundamental lies of the system.