Evolution of Voices in French Audiovisual Media Across Genders and Age in a Diachronic Perspective

We present a diachronic acoustic analysis of the voice of 1023 speakers from French media archives. The speakers are spread across 32 categories based on four periods (years 1955/56, 1975/76, 1995/96, 2015/16), four age groups (20-35; 36-50; 51-65, >65), and two genders. The fundamental frequency (F_0) and the first four formants (F1-4) were estimated. Procedures used to ensure the quality of these estimations on heterogeneous data are described. From each speaker's F_0 distribution, the base-F_0 value was calculated to estimate the register. Average vocal tract length was estimated from formant frequencies. Base-F_0 and vocal tract length were fit by linear mixed models to evaluate how they may have changed across time periods and genders, corrected for age effects. Results show an effect of the period with a tendency to lower voices, independently of gender. A lowering of pitch is observed with age for female but not male speakers.