The Reason A High-Pitched Voice Is Considered More Attractive

There's a variety of reasons that can spark an attraction to someone. Maybe it's the ability to have a deep conversation with them, maybe it's how much you laugh when you're together or maybe it's something as simple as someone having a great smile. But I'm not sure many of us have considered someone's soulmate potential could be based on just the tone of their voice. Apparently, who we're attracted to can be based on purely primal factors. According to research published in the journal PLOS One, researchers used pre-recorded statements from men and women and asked participants which voices they found the most attractive (via Healthline). 

They found men preferred females with higher pitch, breathy voices with wide formant spacing, which indicated a smaller body size. Women on the other hand, preferred deeper voices that reflected a larger body size. "Despite the development of complex language, human vocal interactions still employ certain animal instincts," the authors concluded.

Huffington Post points out that while research has suggested a high voice can indicate more estrogen and a lower voice can mean more testosterone, there are other factors for why we might swoon over someone's voice. "The voice is an amazingly flexible tool that we use to construct our identity," Dr. Molly Babel, a linguistics professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Huffington Post. "Very few things in our voices are immutable, so we felt that our preferences had to be about more than a person's shape and size."

Babel helped lead a study that asked participants to rate the attractiveness of 60 different voices that had different dialects and tones. They found that men and women preferred voices that were similar to their own. So it looks like whether our voice is high-pitch or similar to someone else's, it plays a more critical role in attraction than we may have originally thought.