Average Voice Pitch: Men and Women

The average voice Hz for adult men is about 115 Hz, and for adult women about 199 Hz, according to the Sydney Voice Lab's 2025 normative reference sheet. Those are averages of conversational speech. Most adults sit within 20 to 30 Hz of them, and the published figures shift from study to study, especially for women.

The number in question is your fundamental frequency, often written F0: how many times per second your vocal folds vibrate while you talk. Pitch is how high or low that sounds to a listener. In everyday use the two words mean the same thing.

Average voice Hz for men and women: the norms

Several studies have measured speaking pitch in large groups of adults. They agree on the broad picture and differ on the details.

SD is the standard deviation, a measure of spread. On a bell curve, about two thirds of people fall within one SD of the average.

The figures for men are close across studies. The figures for women vary more. The German study's authors noted that their female average was six to seven semitones lower than earlier published values. Age, language, the speaking task and how pitch was measured all differ between studies, so no single number is "the" average. We use the Sydney figures in our voice Hz test because they are recent, published as a reference sheet, and come with a spread for each group.

Average male voice frequency

Using the Sydney norms and assuming a bell curve, adult men's speaking pitch spreads out like this:

About 24% of adult men speak above 130 Hz, the line the voicecel meme made famous. If your reading is there, you are in a large and ordinary group. Our voicecel test shows where your result falls on that meme scale.

Average female voice Hz

The same approach for adult women, again on the Sydney norms:

If you are a woman over 40 and your reading is lower than this table suggests, the German study may describe you better: its women aged 40 to 79 averaged about 169 Hz. Because the meme scale was drawn for men, women should use the voicecel test for women, which compares you with adult women.

Why men's and women's voices differ

The difference comes from the larynx. During male puberty, rising testosterone makes the vocal folds longer and thicker, and male pitch usually drops as a result. By adulthood, men's vocal folds are about 60% longer than women's, and a review of the research reports that men's pitch is about five standard deviations lower than women's.

The gap between the two Sydney averages, 115 and 199 Hz, is about nine and a half semitones, a little under an octave.

What changes your pitch

Your speaking pitch is mostly set by anatomy, but several things move it.

Age

The largest change is puberty, covered above. Teens whose voices are still dropping often read higher than adult norms, which is expected. Later in life, the German study found that men's speaking pitch rose with age between 40 and 79, while women's did not change significantly.

Puberty and hormones

Testosterone drives the growth of the larynx at puberty. In adult men, a Penn State study found lower pitch associated with higher testosterone and lower cortisol, with no such link in women. A 2024 study of 30 men found testosterone associated with average pitch but not with formants, the resonances that make a voice sound big or small.

Smoking

In the German study, current smokers had significantly lower speaking pitch than people who had never smoked or had quit, and former smokers looked like non-smokers. That is a finding about health, not a tip: smoking is not a way to deepen your voice.

Volume and emotion

Speaking louder raises pitch, by a lot. In the German study, men averaged about 112 Hz in conversation, 130 Hz in a raised "classroom" voice and 176 Hz when shouting. Women went from about 169 Hz to 198 Hz to 246 Hz. If excitement, nerves or an argument makes you louder, expect a higher reading.

Time of day

We could not find a figure for time-of-day effects in the norms we use, so we make no claim about it. If you track your voice over weeks, test at a similar time each day so that one variable stays fixed.

Microphone and room

The creators of the original voicecel test warned that background noise and the microphone affect results. A quiet room, a steady distance from the mic and your normal volume give the most comparable readings. Our guide to whether the voicecel test is accurate covers this in more detail.

Speaking pitch vs singing range

The averages above describe speaking pitch: where your voice sits in ordinary conversation. That is a narrow slice of what your voice can do. Your singing range runs from the lowest to the highest note you can produce, and finding it takes a different kind of test, one that sweeps up and down through notes. The shouting figures above show how far even a speaking voice can climb.

So a low speaking pitch does not mean you can only sing low notes, and a high one does not mean you are a tenor or soprano. Pitch tests built for speech, including ours, report your median speaking pitch, not your range.

Hz, notes and semitones

Pitch doubles with every octave, and each octave holds 12 semitones. The A that orchestras tune to is 440 Hz. Two octaves below it is 110 Hz, so the average male speaking pitch of 115 Hz sits just above that A. One octave below 440 is 220 Hz, and the average female pitch of 199 Hz sits close to the G at 196 Hz.

Check your own pitch

• The voice test gives your median pitch, comfortable range, intonation and an approximate clarity score, compared with these norms.
• The deep voice test turns your pitch into a 0 to 100 score: the share of adults in your group who speak higher than you.
• If you want a lower speaking voice, read how to make your voice deeper before you try anything.

Whatever your number, it is a description, not a grade. A psychologist interviewed about voice tests said the link between lower male voices and attractiveness is real but small.