720 réponses à ce sujet

[Malthier]

i hope this thread doesn't get locked thanks to this ****

 

I want my better hair options, so if you could take a break from shouting about tumblr that'd be great

[SnakeCode]

Knock it off, will you? This isn't tumblr. 

 

I'm finding it harder and harder to tell he difference these days. BSN is like Tumblr lite. All we need now is a thread demanding that different hairstyles being locked to a certain race to avoid "cultural appropriation" and these boards will have gone full Tumblr.

 

Never go full Tumblr.

[NWN-Ming-Ming]

 

Your use of the word "ignorant" gives me a impression of what I am in for.

Still...different races have significant physical differences in areas that affect how we sound such as the inside of the mouth, the pharynx and the vocal tract. For instance, Africans have the smallest oral cavities, Chinese have the largest and Europeans are inbetween.

So, yeah. Just like different genders within the same race sound different, different ethnic groups sound different from each other. Evidently, the place where these people grow up and yes, the education they receive will affect how they sound which doesn't change the physiological facts mentioned above.

 

I will continue to use the word ignorant to describe your assertion here, because the studies you refer to:

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/17342877

 

...have the following conclusions:

Spoiler

The study used about one hundred and twenty individuals, of white American, African American, and Chinese descent, including both men and women. The researchers studied the dimensions of basically everything, from the lips to the bottom of the throat — working out exactly how much length and volume the different parts of the vocal tract gave different people. What they found were significant differences in some areas, including the inside of the mouth, the pharynx — the little pocket of space behind the flaps that come together when people swallow — and the vocal tract.

Unfortunately, the data was pretty inconclusive. Gender juggles the overall size and dimensions of the inside of the mouth. In males, researchers found an overall size gradient, with African American males having the smallest oral cavities, Chinese men having the largest, and white American males splitting the difference. Chinese women headed the list in terms of oral volume and just barely won out in total vocal tract volume, while white American women had by far the largest pharyngeal volume. African American women came in last in everything except oral volume, where they outdistanced white American women. The sound of a voice, then, doesn't just vary by race and gender, but by gender within race.

The researchers obtained these dimensions via acoustic pharyngometry. This procedure involves a computer that processes sound waves that bounce off the inside of a person's vocal tract. And different dimensions will produce different sounds. Few people, though, use the extreme edge of their vocal physiology in everyday speech. If anything, humans in a society try to sound like each other. But the different acoustics inside your mouth should have some impact, right?

 

The Sound of Speech

The data regarding the sound of different race's speech are even more limited than the last. There is one publicly available study, in which volunteers attempt to identify a person's race by the sound of their voice, but it involves only males, and only white American and African American subjects. A total of one hundred volunteers were asked to record vowel sounds. Those sounds were then put in pairs, and played to more volunteers.

 

The listeners were asked to identify which race each of the speakers on the tape were. Overall, they were successful sixty percent of the time. That's significant — but not too much more accurate than a coin flip. What's more interesting is that the sixty percent guess rate held despite the race, sex, or listening experience of the listener.

What was the difference in these vocal sounds? African American voices had greater frequency perturbation, greater amplitude perturbation, and a lower harmonics-to-noise ratio. This means that, on average, African American male voices varied in tone and loudness more than white American male voices. Is this a built-in measure of a racial difference in voice? Not necessarily. Studies have indicated that greater frequency perturbation is a good indicator of vocal cord health. In other words, it's yet another tangle.

So what have we learned? Possibly, if you cloned a number of people, raised them without any exposure to society, and forced air through their vocal tracts, they might produce different overall sounds, depending on race, and purely as a matter of physiology and acoustics. Right now, however, there's no real evidence of a characteristic physiological voice produced by people of different races. What differences there are, physiologically, are more than overwhelmed by age, health, and the deliberate use of the social voice.

 

Science does not cherry pick data to arrive at a foregone conclusion.  It weighs all available data and uses that data to arrive at the most logical and probable theories that have repeatable conclusions and results.  Your assertion that physiological differences of vocal dimorphism between ethnic phenotypes can and does result in someone 'sounding white' is scientific racism, an obsolete legacy of 19th and 20th century junk-science. 

 

Dispel ignorance, educate yourself.

[Malthier]

I'm finding it harder and harder to tell he difference these days. BSN is like Tumblr lite. All we need now is a thread demanding that different hairstyles being locked to a certain race to avoid "cultural appropriation" and these boards will have gone full Tumblr.

 

Never go full Tumblr.

 

wish I could see some more of this indistinguishability. Tumblr has better porn

[Han Shot First]

How many people would have guessed that Ashley William's VA was not white without looking it up?

 

Sometimes you can guess a person's background by the sound of their voice, but not always. The ethnic background of a voice actor matters much, much less than their acting ability.

[aoibhealfae]

.... when people have no points when others are critical about them.. always turns to blame something else.. 

 

okay, no sarcasm again. I'm 100% Asian. English is my second language. You said I have big oral cavity that I sound "not-white" when I talk because I have these anatomical defect because of my race. Sure... let's all suddenly blame Social Media Justice when someone took offense for that... 

 

How does this make sense? 

[Steelcan]

.... when people have no points when others are critical about them.. always turns to blame something else.. 

 

okay, no sarcasm again. I'm 100% Asian. English is my second language. You said I have big oral cavity that I sound "not-white" when I talk because I have these anatomical defect because of my race. Sure... let's all suddenly blame Social Media Justice when someone took offense for that... 

 

How does this make sense? 

I don't think he ever said it was a defect

[Sylvius the Mad]

when its phrased in such a way as to imply that there is an inherent problem with male protagonists then it does become at the least provocative

I find that I'm much happier since I recognized that implication isn't real.

[Lady Artifice]

I find that I'm much happier since I recognized that implication isn't real.

What? You don't believe that something can be implied?

The concept of subtext is pretty established...I mean, not just in storytelling, but in regular conversation.

[Evamitchelle]

 

It's directly related because of the exclusivity. But if you don't understand that then you don't understand it.

 

Asking for more non-white people doesn't mean hating or being sick of white people. Even taking the exclusivity into account, asking for a non-white protagonist instead of a white one doesn't mean you're sick of white people. It means you want to see a POC protagonist. If you don't get that we're indeed not going to understand each other.

[Sylvius the Mad]

What? You don't believe that something can be implied?

The concept of subtext is pretty established...I mean, not just in storytelling, but in regular conversation.

I think it's always the listener making inferences.  The implication isn't really there.

 

Since most people think in a relevantly similar way, they all make the same inferences, and they think they detected something in the text.  But I think they're wrong about that.  The existence of a small minority of relevantly dissimilar people falsifies the existence of implication.

[Jorji Costava]

I think it's always the listener making inferences.  The implication isn't really there.

 

Since most people think in a relevantly similar way, they all make the same inferences, and they think they detected something in the text.  But I think they're wrong about that.  The existence of a small minority of relevantly dissimilar people falsifies the existence of implication.

 

Can't say I follow the argument here; from the fact that the existence of X is inferred, it doesn't follow that X isn't real. The question is whether or not that inference is reasonable given the evidence.

 

Nor would it follow from the fact that X can be denied by a minority of people. The existence of a small minority of US citizens who decide to treat US dollars as nothing other than green paper rectangles would not invalidate the dollar as a form of currency; the existence of a minority of people who decide to treat Shakespeare's Henry V as nothing more than squiggle marks on paper would not make his play meaningless.

[In Exile]

I think it's always the listener making inferences.  The implication isn't really there.

 

Since most people think in a relevantly similar way, they all make the same inferences, and they think they detected something in the text.  But I think they're wrong about that.  The existence of a small minority of relevantly dissimilar people falsifies the existence of implication.

That doesn't follow.You assume that for inferences to be available there has to be some necessary connection the conclusion and inputs. But that's just impossible when it comes to the real world. Logic is borderline worthless as inferential tool. It's all IBE. That's the best we get. 

[Lady Artifice]

What they said.

[pdusen]

I find that I'm much happier since I recognized that implication isn't real.

What a bizarre belief. Implication is demonstrably real; we know this because of the way human languages work. Language is only as precise as it needs to be, and the rest of the intended meaning is inferred from context.

If implication weren't real, we would be completely unable to communicate complex ideas, because no human language has the precision needed to do so.

[Natureguy85]

Do you have sources that say that non-white people are physically incapable to speak English fluently because of their racial physical characteristics?

 

Who said anything about being able to speak the language or not. We're talking about vocal tones. In fact, I think that the closer a person is to my own dialect, the easier it is to detect a difference in tone.

 

okay, sarcasm aside- when some of you said it very quaintly that anyone who is not white americans (because you said it yourself europeans are 'different' and some 'whites' are descendant from the British isles but not all of them) are genetically incapable to be proficient enough, it does mean you think are inferior than others because you think people are physically different because they're of a different race.

 

Well, racial differences aren't genetics, in fact we only have 0.5-0.1% nucleotide differences on average between people. Racial classifications is cultural. Physical differences like skin tone, eye color and hair color and predisposition to certain diseases are product of evolution and statistically depends on genetic drifts of a population and geographical variations. And for most part of the world, every population are linguistically diverse. Just because you hear them sounded different because they're different people than yours, doesn't mean they're incapable to sound like you in time especially when they're talking in the same language as yours.

 

Nobody said anything about proficiency or deficiency.

 

How many people would have guessed that Ashley William's VA was not white without looking it up?

 

Sometimes you can guess a person's background by the sound of their voice, but not always. The ethnic background of a voice actor matters much, much less than their acting ability.

 

Me, though it's easier if I think of or listen to the voice without looking at the white character on screen.

 

.... when people have no points when others are critical about them.. always turns to blame something else.. 

 

okay, no sarcasm again. I'm 100% Asian. English is my second language. You said I have big oral cavity that I sound "not-white" when I talk because I have these anatomical defect because of my race. Sure... let's all suddenly blame Social Media Justice when someone took offense for that... 

 

How does this make sense? 

 

Nobody said anything about defects. Stop trying to play the victim.

 

 

Asking for more non-white people doesn't mean hating or being sick of white people. Even taking the exclusivity into account, asking for a non-white protagonist instead of a white one doesn't mean you're sick of white people. It means you want to see a POC protagonist. If you don't get that we're indeed not going to understand each other.

 

 

Then the title should be "PoC protagonist" not "not white protagonist", though I still would ask "who cares?"

[Malthier]

I still would ask "who cares?"

 

Me

[aoibhealfae]

In English, a different pitch for a spoken word can convey different emotions but there are other languages that use complex tonality. Namely Mandarin, Thai, Vietnamese where a word spoken in different pitch and tone can have several dozens or several hundred different meanings. And for these population, they do actively learn and adapt by their speech and listening comprehension since their fluency are heavily depended on these. Human sound systems and language was influenced by climate and geography. But it only mean that individual population can adapt physiologically to a language. If you're raised in an environment that encourage your fluency in a certain language, you're going to have developed perception of language that was different than others to that language, regardless of the race. People do sound differently from one another especially different gender and different background but that does not mean that its different because of their specific racial classification. There are no significance difference that prove that and all of these vocal tract dimensions and variation studies was merely studies done to identify differences for speech therapists in clinical settings, not a study on sociallinguistic or ethnolinguistic. 

 

Which means, a person who was is born and raised as an American would still sound like an American regardless of their race. If that person suddenly move to another continent and raised their family in an environment that require them to adopt a specific linguistic norms or language, in several decades that family would assimilate and their descendants wouldn't be discernible from a native to that region, even more so in mixed family. I've met with Chinese who can't speak Chinese, Indian who can't speak Indian, my eurasian British cousins barely speak in their own mother's language and so on. Do you still insist that they sound different merely because of their preset ethnicity?

[Sylvius the Mad]

That doesn't follow.You assume that for inferences to be available there has to be some necessary connection the conclusion and inputs.

Yes.

But that's just impossible when it comes to the real world.

I fail to see the relevance of the impossibility.

Logic is borderline worthless as inferential tool. It's all IBE. That's the best we get.

Yes, it is. That's the point. We're just making everything up.

[Sylvius the Mad]

What a bizarre belief. Implication is demonstrably real; we know this because of the way human languages work. Language is only as precise as it needs to be, and the rest of the intended meaning is inferred from context.

Your reasoning there is circular.

Inference is real. The only way to conclude that implication exists is to presuppose that it does.

If implication weren't real, we would be completely unable to communicate complex ideas, because no human language has the precision needed to do so.

We are. Communication isn't even a thing.

We express ideas, and we interpret speech. Those are separate events that have little to do with one another.

[Evamitchelle]

Then the title should be "PoC protagonist" not "not white protagonist", though I still would ask "who cares?"

Removing words from the title to make it better suit your interpretation isn't the way to go.

And 'who cares', really ? You just have to look at the number of likes the OP got to see that a lot of people do care about it. And why shouldn't they ? If the character creator isn't letting people easily make their character look like they want them too it's not doing its job very well. This particular topic focuses on a lack of options when it comes to making non-white characters, especially black and East Asians ones. There have been many threads about the lack of other options (for example long hair and tattoos.) So far the CC in ME has made it very hard to make black and East Asians characters because pretty much none of the presets include 'non-white' facial features, and there aren't any options for natural hair beyond going bald.

[Lady Artifice]

We are. Communication isn't even a thing.

We express ideas, and we interpret speech. Those are separate events that have little to do with one another.

 

You're kind of redefining words here, just on the fly. Communication is the general term for expressing and interpreting ideas. 

[Sylvius the Mad]

You're kind of redefining words here, just on the fly. Communication is the general term for expressing and interpreting ideas.

But it doesn't have characteristics beyond thise two things. And since no one person can do both for a single idea inside a multi-person exchange, then it's never possible for one person to communicate anything.

Communication requires two people, and neither one is actually communicating at any point.

[Lady Artifice]

But it doesn't have characteristics beyond thise two things. And since no one person can do both for a single idea inside a multi-person exchange, then it's never possible for one person to communicate anything.

Communication requires two people, and neither one is actually communicating at any point.

 

Okay, agree to disagree.