OK I know this is a ridiculous question but I noticed in the past 7 years I sometimes get YouTube videos of Japanese people doing anime reviews. I sometimes click on them just for fun even though I can't understand much of it at all. And while some of them sound distinct there is about 3 male voices and 10 female voices that seem to make up almost every channel. Taken at face value, I'd get the impression that more than 90% of Japanese speakers have about the same voice and there are only 13 variations.
This is way too ridiculous to actually be true. For one thing, there are more than 13 voices in anime. And you have voice actors like Kei Tomiyama, Megumi Hayashibara, Sanae Kobayashi and others so even the same VA can have multiple voices. I went to Japan last year as a tourist and although I couldn't understand most of those around me, there were multiple voice "types" just like native English speakers have multiple voices. So it's pretty obvious 13 voices don't represent most of Japanese speakers.
The obvious explanation I could think of is maybe 13 people all around Tokyo (since they seem to share the same accent) made hundreds of channels and sound like 13 people since… they are 13. Or maybe since those voices are generally about anime reviews, maybe people who share the same hobby get their speaking habits from similar places so there are hundreds of uploaders who sound similar. I noticed sometimes those using the 13 "common" voices had a few things in common. None of them had a face reveal, all of them said European words weird, and all of them sometimes had a change in inflection between sentences. Some of the unique voice uploaders like this farmer I watched unclogging a culvert had a face on camera and all of them had natural sentence transitions. I thought of Stephen Hawking's Text to Speech device and how Hatsune Miku can generate audio from Japanese inputs. Perhaps there is a commercially available non-singing voicebank that is just weirdly popular among uploaders? I just find it weird how most of these uploaders sound the same but common sense would tell me that there are more than 13 voices and when I went to Japan there were multiple voices just like any other language.
by ShadowGuyinRealLife