A twangy timbre cuts through the noise

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2025 — Twangy voices are a hallmark of country music and many regional accents. However, this speech type, often described as “brassy” and “bright,” can also be used to get a message across in a noisy environment.

In JASA Express Letters, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, researchers from Indiana University found that it was easier to understand twangy female voices compared to neutral voices when surrounded by noise.

Found in accents in American cities such as Chicago, Boston, New York, and Dallas, “twangy” voices are used by speech pathologists to help increase their understandability when working with patients.

“While the acoustic properties of twangy voice have been studied for their potential to enhance intelligibility, the perceptual effect of twangy timbre on speech intelligibility is not well understood,” said author Tzu-Pei Tsai. “This lack of evidence has led to clinicians' hesitance in recommending a twangy voice for therapy, and the major motivation for our study is so we can provide speech-language pathologists with the confidence to use this tool.”

To explore this, the researchers recruited four male and four female participants to record twangy speech samples, which they then used to create a text-to-speech system that could be used in the experiments. The generated speech samples were then played over noisy environment sounds, which were created from ambient train and plane recordings.

Participants listened to both male and female twangy speakers and neutral speakers, then rated their listening efforts and how well they could understand the spoken words. The researchers found that in general, twangy voices were understood more than neutral voices, but participants had the easiest time understanding twangy female voices.

This could arise thanks to a few reasons — firstly, twangy speech is usually higher-pitched than neutral speech, giving it a perceived loudness. It is also less masked by low-frequency sounds such as traffic noises.

In the future, the researchers want to explore the impact of twangy speech on intelligibility in different noise environments.

“We would also like to explore the clinical applicability of twang in voice therapy, including its social perception and the effort required for its production,” Tsai said.

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The article “How vocal timbre impacts word identification and listening effort in traffic-shaped noises” is authored by Tzu-Pei Tsai, Tessa Bent, and Malachi Henry. It will appear in JASA Express Letters on July 29, 2025 (DOI: 10.1121/10.0037043). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0037043.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

JASA Express Letters is a gold open-access journal devoted to the rapid and open dissemination of important new research results and technical discussion in all fields of acoustics. It serves physical scientists, life scientists, engineers, psychologists, physiologists, architects, musicians, and speech communication specialists who wish to quickly report the results of their acoustical research in letter-sized contributions. See https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jel.

ABOUT ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.

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