Your voice may reveal more about you than you would like.
Credit: iStockphoto
My voice is too light and gentle, Monique Rissen-Harrisberg tells me. I asked for the truth, and it could have been a lot worse.
"It is not squeaky or anything, you just need more bass," says the CEO and founder of The Voice Clinic in Sydney.
Monique Rissen-Harrisberg has 22 years of experience in speech training. She knows what makes a good voice.
I should train speaking from the stomach, Rissen-Harrisberg continues, because a low-pitched voice conveys more authority. I try to deepen my voice and sound more authoritative for the rest of the interview, and unfortunately, experience little success.
The human voice is that part of human sound production in which the vocal folds are the primary sound source. During human evolutionary history, voice may have been a parameter of mate choice, particularly at night, when vision was compromised.
Scientists from the University of Albany suggested this theory in a 2004 study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior on voice attractiveness and sexual behavior.
"Prior to the invention of artificial illumination, sound was our principle means of communication at night, and this was undoubtly one of the reasons we developed spoken language based on sounds as opposed to sign language based on gestures," says psychologist Gordon Gallup, from University of Albany.
About 150 undergraduate students participated in the study, and they were asked to count from one to 10 into a microphone as their voice was recorded. Afterwards their shoulder to hip and waist to hip ratios were measured and they were asked questions about their sexual behaviour.
The scientists found that men who were rated as having attractive voices also had more accentuated wedge shaped torsos and women with attractive voices had more accentuated hourglass figures. Participants with attractive voices also had more sexual partners and start being sexually active at an earlier age.
"The sound of your voice conveys information about what happened to you during prenatal development. It also says something about your gender, age, body configuration, hormonal statues, sexual behaviour, whether you are on birth control pills and if not, where you are in your menstrual cycle," says Gallup.
There are two aspects of speaking, Rissen-Harrisberg explains, the natural and the habitual way. The habitual speaking is the way we speak on a daily basis, we think it is the natural way of speaking, when in fact it is not.
human vocal pitch
This article seems to imply that the preferred male voice is more in the baritone range than the tenor, but insofar as singing is rated, other studies have shown that the tenor voices of say, the modern three tenors,are found to be more attractive to women than baritones,though the bass baritones such as Brynn Terfel, certainly have a following.
Perhaps it is dependent on the resonances in the voice. I have a singing voice which spans over three octaves, equally above and below middle C. Yet when singing in my preferred upper register, my voice can sound much lower that someone else singing in the same pitch because all the resononces or overtones and undertones, are down in my chest, whereas another singer may have the resonances in their head and produce a higher sounding voice, even though it is the same note.
I feel this should be taken into account when dealing with such matters, that is: where does the voice resonate, in the head or the chest, because the effect can be quite different while operating at the same pitch.
The vocal apparatus is also more complicated than the simplistic version given here, as the lungs are pressurised by torso muscles which affects the power and depth of the voice, and the tension or relaxation of throat muscles can seriously modify what sound the larynx produces.
I think that the resonance or harmonics of vocal production can play a large part in the effect of a voice, and a relatively high pitched voice which resonates in the chest and produces low harmonics can be as authorotative and impressive as a lower one which has few harmonics or little resonance.\
STUART