15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Voices in Japanese Animation: How People Perceive Voices of Good Guys and Bad Guys

Mihoko Teshigawara

University of Victoria, Canada

This paper attempts to correlate auditory characteristics and lay people's perceptions of the voices of heroes and villains in Japanese animated cartoons. Based on the auditory characteristics of voices of heroes and villains identified in a separate study, 27 characters were selected as target stimuli from Japanese cartoons. Thirty-two subjects listened to content-masked speech excerpts of the 27 target speakers and rated their impressions of physical and personality traits, emotional states and vocal characteristics on 7-point scales. Voices of heroes were generally rated more positively across all four categories, and voices with opposite auditory characteristics were rated more negatively. Gender also played an important role in the perception of the characters.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Teshigawara, Mihoko (2003): "Voices in Japanese animation: how people perceive voices of good guys and bad guys", In ICPhS-15, 2413-2416.