Quality/Timbre

The quality (or timbre) of a voice is by definition everything that allows a listener to distinguish two voices that are the same in pitch and loudness. By definition, then, quality is multivariate and multidimensional. The acoustic correlates of perceived voice quality have not been identified (possibly because of the difficulty of the multivariate problem quality poses), in contrast to the well-understood relationships between frequency and pitch, and amplitude and loudness.

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