Anime voice as a sociocultural entity of contemporary Japan

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 17K18485
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Literature, Linguistics, and related fields
• Research Institution: Kagoshima University
• Principal Investigator: Ota Ichiro 鹿児島大学, 法文教育学域法文学系, 教授 (60203783)
• Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha): 宇都木 昭 名古屋大学, 人文学研究科, 准教授 (60548999) ; 太田 純貴 鹿児島大学, 法文教育学域法文学系, 准教授 (90757957)
• Project Period (FY): 2017-06-30 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: 社会言語学 / アニメの声 / メディア論 / 音声学 / 声の文化 / 声優

Outline of Final Research Achievements

From the perspectives of linguistics and media studies, we tried to see how the acoustic quality of the anime voice performed by voice actors is established as a sociocultural entity which is internalized in the contemporary Japanese society. Our main findings are as follows: (1) The anime voice has its own unique characteristics in the spectral slope, which indicates that it contains more harmonic components. (2) To see how the anime voice is being embedded in popular culture, it is necessary to consider voice actor's "performance" designing anime characters, anime fan's "acceptance (consumption)" of characters molded by voice actors, and "emotional engagement" that fans feel for voice actors. (3) Other fields of media studies and linguistics such as auditory culture studies or the theory of sound symbol could provide promising perspectives for discussing the interrelated nature of anime, voice, and voice actor's body.

Free Research Field

社会言語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究の学術的・社会的な意義は，[1] 音響分析や発話実験によってアニメの声質と一般人の声質の音響的な特性に異なりがあるという言語学的知見を得たこと，および[2] 独特の音声的特徴を「声の触覚性」という現代思想の概念を援用して感覚面から捉えるために，ポップカルチャー史，メディア史を背景に声優の系譜を洗い出し，声優研究には映像という視覚的要素が不可欠であることを指摘したことから，[3] 音韻論的体系を越えて新たに生まれてくる言語現象を，歴史的・文化的文脈へ位置づけながら文化として確立する様相に着目するという，言語と文化の関係を捉える研究に新たな転換の可能性を示したことにある。