(via readings for Linguistics 156: Language and Gender)
Sweet voice: The role of voice quality in a Japanese feminine style
"As observed by Lise Skov and Brian Moeran in Women, media, and consumption in Japan, Japanese public life is saturated with female voices.We hear women everywhere. So audible that we hardly listen to their carefully enunciated voices greeting us at the end of almost every telephone line, and on every visit to every commercial building in every city in Japan.... Female are the voices of instruction, warning mothers and children to mind their hands and feet on the escalator, reminding passengers not to forget their belongings on the train, recommending consumers to purchase this detergent, that wine, those contact lenses, cleansing creams or leopard-spotted leotards. Anonymous images, anonymous voices, yet ever present. (Skov & Moeran 1995b:1–2)
The ubiquity of these voices, however, is not their only distinctive quality. The voices sound extraordinarily similar, as if one determined woman were following you around the city of Tokyo with a megaphone. But there is something else, as well: the voices sound oddly alien, and completely unlike announcement voices in other countries. Visitors to Japan often remark that they sound ‘high’ (Miller 2004:151). What they are attempting to describe has, in fact, little to do with pitch—rather, these voices are all produced using a distinctive voice quality, resulting in a vocal style I refer to here as ‘sweet voice’...
The voices of Japanese women have been persistent targets of popular interest and generalization, particularly in the area of pitch, which is closely intertwined with voice quality both in physical and perceptual terms. The current common wisdom on Japanese women’s pitch was codified in 1995 by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who declared that certain enlightened Japanese women were rebelling against squeaky-high pitch norms in a piece entitled, ‘Japan’s feminine falsetto falls right out of favor’ (Kristof 1995). In the Kristofian view, traditional Japanese femininity requires high pitch, and women who do not use high pitch are therefore challenging the status quo. This view appeared once again on the front page of the New York Times in Hiroko Tabuchi’s (2013) article about the All-Japan Phone Answering Competition, titled ‘Japan’s top voice: high, polite and on the phone’. She reports that ‘some experts explicitly tell women to speak in a higher voice than usual to sound feminine and energetic’ (A1), and portrays women who reject high pitch as modern and untraditional (Tabuchi 2013). In the following analysis, I suggest that the characterization of traditional feminine voices as ‘high’ is problematic in a few respects: most crucially, the confusion of voice quality and pitch has led to a broader conflation of distinct Japanese feminine styles that index different social meanings...
Sweet voice is an example of a stylized, professional voice. In other words, sweet voice is largely the province of professional announcers and voice actors, and is rarely if ever produced by ‘ordinary’ women. Addressed later in the discussion of the voice’s physiological properties, the absence of sweet voice in nonprofessional speech is not merely a matter of convention, but of physical limitation; the sweet voice is difficult to produce, and only those who have trained extensively are able to consistently replicate it. Native Japanese listeners exposed to sweet voice are immediately able to recognize it as a professional voice, often describing it as anime no koe, ‘voice from Japanese animation’. As a result, issues of exaggeration or fakeness that apply to other vocal styles that are used by real women, such as the cute burikko vocal style described in Miller (2004), do not apply here—the sweet voice is always ‘fake’ in some sense. Nonetheless, I argue here that sweet voice plays a crucial role in establishing authenticity within the frame of the fictional world in which it occurs...
The sweet voice can be heard in a vast array of contexts—from video games, to television commercials, to public announcements. This analysis, however, focuses on the role of sweet voice in anime (Japanese animated films and television programs). Anime is a particularly suitable format in which to examine the sweet voice style for a number of reasons. From a practical perspective, it is difficult to acquire a large amount of high-quality data from other sources, such as public announcements. Anime has the advantage of not only providing a lot of speech data, but also data from many different speakers, and data from the same speakers using different styles as they portray different characters. Moreover, many of the professional voice actresses, or seiyuu, who perform in anime are also involved in producing sweet voice in other contexts; Ouhara Sayaka, for example, performs one of the voices included in the present anime study, does announcements for multiple train lines, and works as a radio DJ (Haikyou 2008)...
The voice acting industry in Japan is highly developed, and seiyuu can achieve a level of prominence comparable to ‘live’ actors or pop idols. Seiyuu are involved in voiceover work of all types, including dubbing for foreign films and the adult entertainment industry, but the heart of the profession lies in performing voices for anime; it is their association with particular anime characters that leads to a seiyuu’s popularity. While seiyuu can follow multiple paths to entering the profession, they are generally the products of two years at a specialized training school followed by another few years of apprenticeship at their talent agency. This extensive, centralized training may account for how the sweet voice has emerged as a distinctive and uniform style...
From a perceptual perspective, the sweet voice style is dramatically distinctive. It has a light timbre and the tense resonance of a singing voice; the speaker sounds as though she is smiling. While speakers shift between different levels of breathiness, a unifying voice quality is retained throughout the performance...
Rather than only comparing the pitch of these sweet voice characters to the pitch of ordinary Japanese women, it seems most relevant to first interpret them in relation to the other voice types that commonly appear in anime. In Teshigawara’s (2003) study of the voices of anime heroes and villains, she finds two groups of pitch targets for female heroic characters: 320 Hz and 400 Hz. As shown in Figure 3, the pitch of sweet voice characters is generally lower than both of these targets. Removing the exceptionally high Touma Yumi and Satou Ai, who average at 307.92 Hz, the mean pitch of the sweet voice characters is 262.7 Hz. This finding is consistent with the intuition that, while sweet voice can occur at a range of pitches, it is most often distinctively low by female anime voice standards. As discussed in the following section on the function of sweet voice within the anime setting, sweet voice characters are not heroines but rather are used to portray older-sister types; this lower pitch target helps distinguish them from main characters and establishes their relative maturity.
In comparison to the speech of ordinary Japanese women, sweet voice is relatively high: Masataka (1992) finds that Japanese mothers have an average pitch of 177 Hz when speaking to adults. When addressing children, however, their pitch increases gradually from 175 Hz to 252 Hz as they produce more utterances trying to elicit a child response. By contrast, Ohara (1999) finds a much higher average pitch for adult women, with her population of five female university students using an average F0 of 261.6 Hz when addressing a professor and 253.2 Hz when addressing friends...
Female characters with sweet voices appear in various genres of anime, including both male-oriented (shounen) and female-oriented (shoujo) programs, targeting multiple age ranges. In spite of this, certain commonalities exist among the characters who have sweet voices. Four general principles concerning sweet voice character traits can be outlined as follows.
i. Sweet voice characters are primarily (relatively) older women in positions of traditional female authority...
ii. Sweet voice characters are extraordinarily beautiful...
iii. Sweet voice characters are neither villainesses nor heroines...
iv. Sweet voice characters are sexualized yet ladylike...
Readers familiar with anime tropes will recognize that the character qualities described above are not representative of the average female anime character...
In addition to the distinctive behaviors and character traits associated with the sweet voice, the use of sweet voice in anime is accompanied by a set of linguistic features known as Japanese Women’s Language (JWL). Contrary to what its name suggests, scholars agree that JWL is not commonly used today by most Japanese women, but rather only by a subset, and only in certain contexts (Okamoto & Shibamoto Smith 2004:3). Nevertheless, JWL continues to be associated with women’s speech in Japan, and carries pragmatic implications of supposedly traditional Japanese feminine features including softness and nonassertiveness (Inoue 2006:12)...
As described in Okamoto & Shibamoto Smith (2008), two discourses are relevant in the discussion of JWL: norms dictating that women should use ‘polite, gentle, and refined’ speech and norms regarding which linguistic features index these traits (Okamoto & Shibamoto Smith 2008:88). Within this framework, the authors observe that various linguistic features may be identified as contributing to a feminine style: for example, while many linguistic norms for JWL relate to using features from standard Japanese, viewed as more refined than dialects, feminine styles can also be indexed using certain regional dialects. Specifically, the authors observe cases in which polite forms of the Kyoto dialect are used to con- struct a feminine style on television dramas (Okamoto & Shibamoto Smith 2008:102)...
The use of JWL in anime is particularly significant in that it introduces these features to young viewers who do not necessarily hear JWL from speakers in their everyday lives. In her account of her own experiences with JWL, for example, Inoue (2006:8) identifies particular television characters, including a teacher and an older-sister character, as the earliest speakers of JWL she ever encountered. Thus, JWL’s function in anime is not merely interesting as a reflection of societal patterns, but may be crucial in the creation and perpetuation of second-order indices that connect linguistic features with particular feminine traits in Japanese society...
Characters who use JWL but lack a sweet voice often fall into the category of the spoiled oujousama, or princess. The spoiled princess is a comedic villain, a girl with money to burn on expensive feminine clothing and a fancy education, who seeks to portray herself as proper and refined, but is inevitably revealed to have violent, unladylike tendencies under the surface...
The sexual appeal of the older woman in Japan was noted by Clammer (1995:210) in his study of men’s magazines, in which he observed a contrast between cute younger girls and the ‘true sensuality’ embodied by more mature women. This opposition of cuteness and mature beauty is one of the central distinctions that forms the structure of classification of sexually attractive women negotiated in the discourse of moe...
The phenomenon of categorizing the sexual appeal of women is hardly exclusive to anime fans, but moetic discourse is part of a distinctive subculture that engages in extensive quantification and standardization of the consumption of female characters, to the point of developing notions such as the zettai ryouiki, ‘absolute area’, meaning the distance of bare skin between the hem of the skirt and the top of the socks, for which the ideal ratio has been calculated to be 4:1:2.5 with a margin of error of ±25% (Dark Mirage 2008)...
While not all successful seiyuu become big stars, some of them are able to parlay their success in performing particular roles into personal fame, moving from voice acting into recording music and making personal appearances. One seiyuu who has managed this feat particularly well is Inoue Kikuko, who has carved a successful niche for herself based on her sweet voice performances. Accounts of Inoue’s voice written by fans commonly include both perceptual descriptors (e.g. ‘soft’, ‘sweet’) and descriptors which reference typical sweet voice roles (e.g. ‘motherly’, ‘angelic’)...
It is no accident that fans draw this association between Inoue and the roles she performs; Inoue has deliberately created a public persona for herself that evokes the qualities of the sweet voice characters she has portrayed. As noted in the Seiyuu Directory quote above, Inoue has adopted the nickname onee-chan, a familiar term for older sister. She also, with much tongue-in-cheek fanfare, claims to be only seventeen years old, although she has been a professional seiyuu for longer than that (Manbow 2008). Like her characters, Inoue wears her hair long and dresses conservatively, preferring long skirts and long sleeves. The voice she uses for public events and interviews is not the sweet voice, but it is extremely breathy; we might call it a real-world approximation of the sweet voice...
While it is far more rare than the female sweet voice, a male version of sweet voice does appear in certain settings. One notable use of male sweet voice in anime is in the series Death note (2006), in which the main character, Yagami Light (voiced by actor Mamoru Miyano), has a sweet voice. While most anime featuring male protagonists tell the tales of average young men who are marked for greatness, Death note tells the story of a boy who is far from average, and the use of sweet voice contributes crucially to viewers’ understanding of his character...
What happens to a sweet voice when it is dubbed into another language? In the case of English, at least, dubbers are faced with a dilemma; on the one hand, the sweet voice or anything resembling it would sound exaggerated and bizarre in English, but on the other hand, dubbing with a less stylized voice often results in a loss of characterization and emotional intensity. Dubbers generally opt for the latter of these two options, resulting in English versions with relatively lackluster vocal performances that compare poorly with the originals. (This is one of the reasons why non-Japanese-speaking fans prefer subtitles to dubbing."
