Modulating Your Voice: The Role of Paralinguistic Cues in Improving Podcasters’ Competitiveness

Fierce competition among podcasters is inevitable on audio platforms given the likelihood of overlap in the content of their audio works. Because the number of listeners constitutes a crucial barometer of the success of podcasters, the way content is delivered by podcasters becomes critical for influencing listeners’ willingness to engage with them. Yet, there is a dearth of research that has sought to elucidate the role of paralinguistic elements (i.e., how people say) in engagement. Building on voice persuasion theory, we advance a research model that posits prosodic cues, namely speech rate, speech pause and speech stress, as factors promoting listeners engagement. Furthermore, considering the habitual feature of pitch, we explore how the effects of the three prosodic cues are moderated by pitch. By employing Praat API in python, we will attempt to extract these four variables from audio data obtained from a popular audio platform in our future work