The Semen Quality of Deep-Voiced Men [study]

NOTE: We suggest you invite a deep-voiced man to real this aloud to you, in a public place.

“Low Pitched Voices Are Perceived as Masculine and Attractive but Do They Predict Semen Quality in Men?” Leigh W. Simmons [pictured here], Marianne Peters [shown here, below, evaluating a male], Gillian Rhodes, PLoS ONE 6(12): e29271. The authors, at the University of Western Australia in Crawley, begin with a nice summary of the project:

we examined women’s preferences for men’s voice pitch, and its relationship with men’s semen quality. Consistent with previous voice research, women judged lower pitched voices as more masculine and more attractive. However men with lower pitched voices did not have better semen quality….

Here are some of their notes about how the experiment was prepared and conducted:

This work was approved by the UWA Human Research Ethics Committee (Project number: 1074). All participants were provided with an information sheet outlining their role in the study, and were required to provide written consent….

Fifty-four male participants (age range 18–32) were recruited by advertisement from the campus of the University of Western Australia….

Voice recordings were made of the participants saying the vowels a, e, i, o, and u….

They were asked to abstain from sexual activity for a minimum of 48 h and a maximum of 6 days prior to providing the sample. [Then were] provided with the same set of 4 sexually explicit images, and asked to view these images immediately before collecting their semen sample. Semen was collected at home, by masturbation into a sterile vial. Vials were wrapped in insulating foil to maintain temperature, and delivered to the laboratory within 1 h of collection.

Participants were provided with explicit pictorial instructions on how to measure the length and width of both left and right testes, from which volume could be estimated using the formula for an ovoid [4/3 X pi X (length/2) X (width/2)squared].