One study suggests that men may want to start whispering like Tom Hardy if they want to succeed on a date.
Researchers in California have found that men who murmur are considered more attractive to women.
Speaking less clearly, like Hollywood legends Hardy and Marlon Brando, is seen by women as attractive because it is linked to being sexist.
Men, on the other hand, find a clear pronunciation — like Elizabeth Hurley’s refined tones — attractive in the opposite sex because it indicates femininity.
Women tend to produce a speech “acoustically and phonetically more different” than that of men, the study authors say.
Tom Hardy in the 2018 film ‘Venom’. A study suggests that babbling like Hardy in his movies may be a little more for women
Attractiveness in speech patterns appears to be a form of what is known as “sexual dimorphism,” a strong difference in any characteristic between the two sexes other than the sexual organs.
“From a sexual selection standpoint, men with slightly more masculine than average traits are usually preferred,” said study author Dr. Daniel Stehr of the University of California, Irvine.
“In this context, it would make men with less clear speech more attractive.”
Hollywood boy Marlon Brando was nicknamed “Mumbles” by his fellow Guys and Dolls star Frank Sinatra.
The Oscar-winning legend put cotton in his mouth as he played Don Corleone in The Godfather to make himself less intelligible.
Other prominent men who have been accused of whispering on screen are Jeff Bridges and the late Heath Ledger, as well as Tom Hardy.
One of Hardy’s most unintelligible vocal performances was on the BBC series Taboo.
At that moment, a fan tweeted, “Tom Hardy on Taboo; his voice is sexy even I can’t understand a word he says without subs [subtitles]. ”
Pictured, Elizabeth Hurley in “Bad Boy” (2002). Hurley is known to speak English of the Queen during her film career
Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter published an article about the 2018 British actor titled “Why it can be so hard to understand Tom Hardy.”
But this new study suggests that women like to murmur, contrary to popular belief, after identifying a “considerable gender difference” in the intelligibility of speech.
“A well-received wisdom and many vocal coaches would encourage people to slow down and pronounce it carefully to make a better impression on their audience,” Dr. Stehr said.
“However, when it comes to empirical studies on how the appeal of the human voice is judged, we have not been able to find previous work investigating whether there is a real link between perceived appeal and general clarity of articulation. “.
Marlon Brando put cotton in his mouth as he played Don Corleone in The Godfather to make himself less intelligible
For the study, researchers recorded 42 individuals performing various speech tasks and used separate groups of participants to assess the vocal appeal of the recorded speakers.
They investigated how clear speech can successfully predict attractiveness indices, focusing on the concept of “vocal space area” – a quantitative index of intelligibility – as the main acoustic characteristic.
As speech becomes more coherent, the area of vocal space – represented as a peak in a graph – becomes larger.
The researchers found that the area of vocal space is strongly predictive of vocal attractiveness ratings.
The area of vocal space accounted for 73% of the variance in grades, although this result was only true for the speakers.
This graphic illustrates the area of the vocal space of a single speaker. Each peak corresponds to different vowel nuclei, and as speech increases in clarity, on average, the total area enclosed by these peaks becomes larger.
It is possible that the link between male vocal appeal and unintelligible discourse is due to a “convincing but paradoxical” evolutionary hypothesis.
“From a sexual selection standpoint, men with slightly more masculine than average traits are usually preferred, which in this context would make men with less clear speech more attractive,” Dr. Stehr said.
“At the same time, the area of restricted vocal space and lower perceived clarity are associated with a number of motor speech disorders, suggesting that lack of clarity may also have indicated the presence of disease in the our ancestors “.
In previous studies, volunteers who were asked to transcribe recorded sentences made fewer mistakes when women spoke.
According to scientists, the variability of “acoustic parameters” related to speech clarity makes it a “fertile” area for vocal appeal research.
The findings have been published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.