Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the acoustic quality of voice of anime characters, performed by female college students in a voice actor course as well as by professional voice actresses, and discusses the sociocultural meaning of anime voices as a register in the sociolinguistic context of contemporary Japan.

Paper long abstract:

Anime cartoons are one of the most well-known genres of Japanese popular culture. The voices of anime characters are usually dubbed by professional voice actors (seiyu), who provide some distinctive phonetic qualities recognised as anime-goe (anime voice) or moe-goe (moe or 'adorable' voice). The voice quality produced by voice actors can be regarded as being linguistically embedded or institutionalized in contemporary Japanese language due to its stereotypical auditory image, which is easily recollected by not only anime-otaku (anime fanatics) but also by the masses. Bearing in mind the particularity of the cultural situation surrounding Japanese anime, such as the recent high popularity of anime cartoons or the acceptance of voice actors as pop culture idols, the aim of our project is to give a sociolinguistic account of how anime voices are culturally institutionalized or enregistered in the changing media environment of the early 21st century.

As a part of the project, this paper aims to report some findings obtained by analysing the voice performances of female college students who are being trained in a course for voice actors, and to consider how they manipulate their voices to represent anime characters. In the vocal data collection, the students were asked to perform several roles, such as an ordinary woman, a kawaii or cute girl, a female warrior, a boyish girl, etc., in three different tasks (reading sentences, reading a passage, and dubbing). In addition, the formal interview was also recorded to obtain their normal voices. By analysing these voices, we argue what acoustic parameters contribute to the creation of typical auditory images of anime voices. Furthermore, we compare the results of the students' performance with the findings of Utsugi et al. (2019), where we presented some preliminary results of acoustic analysis of young voice actresses' performance in recent anime. We then consider what acoustic features are deeply involved in creating anime voices, and discuss how the anime voice is linguistically and culturally institutionalized as a register in the contemporary sociolinguistic environment of Japan.