What's in a Voice? Exploring the vocal qualities of the Spanish dubbed voice in emotionally-loaded scenes

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating whether intentional efforts of voice actors to adopt different levels of naturalness when dubbing scenes portraying different emotions could be detected by the target audience. Eight scenes representative of anger (4) and sadness (4) were used in this study and two dubbed versions into Spanish (‘natural’ and play-acted) were recorded for each one of them. Firstly, an acoustic analysis was carried out to detect potential distinctive vocal patterns of natural vs. play-acted dubbed voices. Later, we carried out a reception study to find out whether viewers perceived any differences between the two versions. Although the automatic voice analysis did not account for significant differences, some differentiating traits in play-acted versions (vocal fry, elongation of sounds, breathy voice) were observed. Natural versions were perceived as more natural than play-acted versions, with higher scores in the anger scenes. Finally, while participants generally preferred the natural over the play-acted style, a relevant percentage of participants expressed a preference for the play-acted versions of sad clips.