Individual differences in human voice pitch are preserved from speech to screams, roars and pain cries.

Fundamental frequency (0, perceived as voice pitch) predicts sex and age, hormonal status, mating success and a range of social traits, and thus functions as an important biosocial marker in modal speech. Yet, the role of 0 in human nonverbal vocalizations remains unclear, and given considerable variability in 0 across call types, it is not known whether 0 cues to vocalizer attributes are shared across speech and nonverbal vocalizations. Here, using a corpus of vocal sounds from 51 men and women, we examined whether individual differences in 0 are retained across neutral speech, valenced speech and nonverbal vocalizations (screams, roars and pain cries). Acoustic analyses revealed substantial variability in 0 across vocal types, with mean 0 increasing as much as 10-fold in screams compared to speech in the same individual. Despite these extreme pitch differences, sexual dimorphism was preserved within call types and, critically, inter-individual differences in 0 correlated across vocal types ( = 0.36-0.80) with stronger relationships between vocal types of the same valence (e.g. 38% of the variance in roar 0 was predicted by aggressive speech 0). Our results indicate that biologically and socially relevant indexical cues in the human voice are preserved in simulated valenced speech and vocalizations, including vocalizations characterized by extreme 0 modulation, suggesting that voice pitch may function as a reliable individual and biosocial marker across disparate communication contexts.