Are attractive female voices really best characterized by feminine fundamental and formant frequencies?

Research into the characteristics of attractive women’s voices has focused almost exclusively on associations with fundamental or formant frequencies. A recent study of a small sample of voices used a bottom-up approach to identify acoustic characteristics associated with women’s vocal attractiveness, finding that many acoustic characteristics other than fundamental or formant frequencies predicted women’s vocal attractiveness. Here we will replicate their methodology with a much larger sample of voices (N = 450) in order to identify vocal characteristics that reliably predict women’s vocal attractiveness. Identifying such traits will provide new insights into and avenues for study of the possible function of vocal attractiveness.