Woman's higher pitch voice means she is fertile

London, October 9: A woman’s voice rises and falls in tune with her fertility, a new study has found. The woman raises her voice at the point in her monthly cycle when she is at her most fertile, suggested the novel study published on Wednesday in the British journal Biology Letters.

Scientists at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) said the female voice pitch goes up a day or two before ovulationdefine when women are most likely to become pregnant.

To reach their findings, Lead researcher Dr Greg Bryant and his colleague Martie Haselton recruited 69 women and asked them to make voice recordings when they were at high and low fertility points in their menstrual cycle.

After an analysis of voice recordings of volunteers during two phases of their menstrual cycle - once when their fertility was low and once near their optimum time for conceiving- the investigators found that study women’s pitch was significantly higher during the high-fertility phase of their menstrual cycle, compared with the low-fertility period.

They found that the women voices took on more feminine qualities as they reached nearer to ovulation, the time when an egg is released.

“Our study shows women change their voice in relation to fertility. The closer they get to ovulation the greater the increase in their pitch,” Bryant said, “what we’re saying is by raising pitch women enhance fertility. They’re turning up everything that makes them attractive.”

The investigators gave study subjects simple sentences to speak and make pure vowel sounds at low and high points in their fertile cycle, which were identified using hormone tests.

The analysis of recordings showed that the voice pitch increased only when volunteers spoke a meaningful, introductory sentence like "Hi, I'm a student at UCLA", and not when they simply made the sounds of different vowels, meaning the effect only increased when women were using communicative language.

“It’s feasible these changes in vocal femininity occur primarily or exclusively during social communicative tasks -- raising the intriguing possibility cues of ovulation appear more during social interactions,” Bryant said.

Previous researches have found that women's behavior changes in subtle ways throughout the monthly cycle, and that the earnings of lap dancers increase dramatically when they are most fertile.

There is increasing evidence that men find women most attractive around the time of ovulation.