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If you’ve ever watched even a few minutes of porn, you know that being performatively noisy in bed — moaning, gasping, screaming, etcetera — is one of the most common features of performing sex, especially the heterosexual kind. A researcher in Sweden analyzed thousands of crowdsourced recordings from an orgasm sound library, and found that getting loud when you’re close is less about performance or urging one’s partner along, and more about involuntary expressions of enjoyment.
Andrey Anikin, a cognitive science researcher at Lund University in Sweden, wrote that this is the “first [study] to perform detailed acoustic analyses of authentic sexual episodes,” and that it “paints a more complex picture” of vocalization during sex than we might commonly believe. The paper was published in the March issue of the peer-reviewed journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
Anikin downloaded 3,528 audio recordings from the Orgasm Sound Library project’s website, where users can upload their own recordings of their orgasms. The project focuses on the “diversity of female pleasure,” but Anikin wrote that the audio isn’t limited to female vocalizations. He then filtered the audio to reduce background noise, and manually(!) went through each recording to eliminate duplicates, too short or long (less than 10 seconds or longer than 10 minutes) recordings, computer-generated or exaggerated moaning, music, multiple voices, and fragments that were just breathing.