Speechvoice

Speechvoice is the characteristic sound of spoken language produced by the human vocal apparatus that listeners perceive as voice identity, tone, and emotion. The term can refer to a speaker's natural vocal quality as well as the distinct voices produced by speech synthesis systems. A speechvoice includes both physiological production and acoustic realization of speech, combining phonation, resonant filtering, and prosody.

The main components include phonation (how the vocal folds vibrate), pitch or fundamental frequency (perceived highness or lowness), loudness, and timbre (spectral qualities that give color to the voice). Prosody—intonation, rhythm, stress, and tempo—modulates meaning and emotion beyond the spoken words. Voice quality features such as breathiness, creakiness, or harshness also shape perception. Variation arises from anatomy, health, training (e.g., singing), linguistic background, and stylistic choice.

In perception, listeners extract identity, gender cues, age, emotion, and intent from speechvoice. In language technology, a "speechvoice" often refers to a synthetic voice produced by text-to-speech systems or voice conversion, where a voice model or voice font is chosen to simulate a particular character or personality. Modern systems use neural networks to generate natural-sounding human-like voices.

Disorders of the voice, or dysphonia, affect quality and stability of the speech voice and may require medical assessment. Voice care and therapy aim to preserve clarity, range, and health across speech and singing contexts.