The Voice You Want, Not the Voice You Have: Chosen Singers as Externalized Idealized Selves
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.
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BibTeX
@misc{barrett2026voice,
title = {{The Voice You Want, Not the Voice You Have: Chosen Singers as Externalized Idealized Selves}},
author = {Logan Barrett},
howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.31234/osf.io/p49ba_v1},
url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p49ba_v1/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Voice You Want, Not the Voice You Have: Chosen Singers as Externalized Idealized Selves
AU - Logan Barrett
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/10
PB - PsyArXiv
DO - 10.31234/osf.io/p49ba_v1
UR - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p49ba_v1/
AB - 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.
ER -