UC Irvine

Many online platforms that offer guided meditations are solely categorized by the genre of the listening experience. Due to the nature of the goals of meditation and being cognizant of meeting the needs of marginalized communities in the United States, there was a spike in the development of meditation guides and apps created for the use of specific racial and ethnic marginalized communities.When humans receive vocal auditory stimulation, the brain begins to categorize sound, and verbal cues, and develop perception. These cues allow for the perception of vocal quality, gender, and ethnic, racial, or cultural background of the voice(s) we hear, i.e., identity markers. Perception allows for bias, and bias can have a negative or positive association. Negative associations, particularly those associated with trauma, can interfere with achieving a meditative state. Therefore, I chose to investigate whether the listener of a meditation guide preferred a voice-over artist whose identity markers aligned with theirs, and or if the listener had identity marker biases. I created an online platform, Affinity Voice (affinityvoice.com), that gives listeners the ability to select a voice-over artist for their meditation guide from a menu categorized by the following identity markers: gender, race or ethnicity, regionality, language inclusion, and sexual orientation. Listeners were provided with a selection of 10 voice-over artists (4 male, 6 female) varying in all the above identity markers. Using the meditation guide text as a control, each voice-over artist read from the same text, and included subtle language shifts, language inclusion other than English, and or vernacular that aligns with their identity markers. There were 26 listeners who participated in the pre- and post-survey allowing for a coagulation of questionnaires that included the listener’s personal identity markers, and if they had the following voice-over guide identity marker preferences: gender, race or culture, and regionality. Of the 26, 12 listeners, 46%, were Black, Indigenous, or a person of color (BIPOC). Listeners showed a prevalent gender preference of female voices at 44.4%. In terms of achieving a state of relaxation, 34% of participants had a cultural or racial preference, and 25% had a regional preference. Of the members who identified within the BIPOC community, 58% had a gender preference, 58% had a cultural or racial preference, and 25% had a regionality preference.