Vocal stereotypes as characterisation in animated films
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2024/15/0008/000633Keywords:
dubbing, animated films, vocal stereotype, voice quality, voice analysisAbstract
Humans have long associated voice with personality and physical traits, with consistent vocal stereotypes evident across cultures. This paper examines how vocal stereotypes influence character perception in animated films, focusing on the multilingual dubbing of Zootopia in English, Brazilian Portuguese and Swedish. Animated media provides a unique lens for studying these correlations, as character voices are intentionally matched to stereotypical features, and dubbing allows cross-language comparisons. This study considers Ohala’s Frequency Code, which links vocal pitch to size and dominance, rooted in both human and animal behaviour. The analysis includes acoustic parameters, voice quality, and listener perceptions. Results show the use of higher f0 to portray smaller characters, in contrast with larger ones, which display lower f0 across all languages.
References
Crochiquia, A., Eriksson, A., Barbosa, P. A., Madureira, S. 2022. A perceptual and acoustic study of dubbed voices in an animated film. In Frota, S., Cruz, M., Vigário, M. (eds.), Proc. 11th Intern. Conf. on Speech Prosody, 565-569, Lisbon, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2022-115.
Crochiquia, A., Eriksson, A., Madureira, S., Barbosa, P. A. 2023. Animated film character profile: the roles of voice and lexical content. In Skarnitzl, R., Volín, J. (eds.), Proc. 20th ICPHS 466-47, Prague, Czech Republic. https://guarant.cz/icphs2023/862.pdf.
Liu, W., Zhang, X., Liang, C. 2023. An acoustic study on character voices of dominators and subordinates: A case study on male characters in Empresses in the Palace. In Frontiers in Communication 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.1088170.
Ohala, J. J. 1984. An Ethological Perspective on Common Cross-Language Utilization of F0 of Voice. In Phonetica, 41(1), 1-16 https://doi.org/10.1159/000261706
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
