{
  "abstract": "When people imagine the voice they want, they often name a singer. Using gendered singing voice as a model system, I asked whether that choice externalizes an idealized self. Participants (N = 2,536) described masculine and feminine singing voices, placed their current and ideal voices on a feminine–masculine dimension, and named the singer they would ideally sound like. Cisgender and gender-diverse participants drew on statistically equivalent concepts of vocal gender. The perceived gender of the named singer tracked participants’ ideal voice more closely than their current voice, ideal-self proximity predicted the choice beyond popularity and gender homophily, a result that replicated in a held-out test set, and the ideal-over-current advantage held when singers were re-rated by five language models or scored from their recorded acoustics, and in an independent text corpus. The correspondence operated at the level of gender category: within category, the chosen singer’s acoustic femininity did not track the ideal voice. It was also largely independent of distress: singing-related gender incongruence was associated with the chosen singer only weakly, and not detectably once gender identity was controlled. Chosen singers are better understood as representations of a desired self than as indices of distress.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Logan Barrett"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/f29b7s8a9qtfg.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.31234/osf.io/p49ba_v1",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "f29b7s8a9qtfg",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p49ba_v1/",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "bepress",
      "Clinical Psychology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Cognitive Psychology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Gender Dysphoria"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Music"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Social and Behavioral Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "3207|LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7221320509",
  "pdf_url": "https://osf.io/p49ba/download",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-10-10",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/f29b7s8a9qtfg.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:21:18Z",
      "native_id": "p49ba",
      "source": "osf",
      "url": "https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p49ba_v1/"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "medicine",
      "origin": "bepress:Clinical Psychology",
      "subfield": "psychiatry"
    }
  ],
  "title": "The Voice You Want, Not the Voice You Have: Chosen Singers as Externalized Idealized Selves",
  "title_text": "The Voice You Want, Not the Voice You Have: Chosen Singers as Externalized Idealized Selves",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:21:18Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/f29b7s8a9qtfg",
  "venue": "PsyArXiv",
  "versions": []
}