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. 2009 Mar 6;5(3):e1000302. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000302

Figure 2. Spectral modulations differ in male and female speech.

Figure 2

(A,B) The MPS of the 50 corpus sentences spoken by males (A), and of the 50 spoken by females (B), with black contour lines as in Figure 1. White parenthetical labels on the y-axes of (A) and (B) show related frequencies demarcating the male and female vocal registers; they correspond to spectral modulations based on harmonic spacing. (C,D) Modulation filters that resulted in misidentification of the speaker's gender. (C) the speech MPS for female speakers is overlapped with the boundaries of the low-pass spectrotemporal filter. In this condition, speaker gender was misidentified in a quarter of the sentences, with 91% of those errors being females misidentified as male. (D) the same female speech MPS overlapped with a notch filter that removed modulations from 3 to 7 cycles/kHz. Of the 21% gender errors in this condition, 95% were female speakers misidentified as male.