I first became curious about the power of our voices a few months back when I read about
Margaret Thatcher changing her voice over decades to sound less shrill.
The Queen also has altered her voice over a long period of time
more recently it’s been reported that Elizabeth Holmes potentially lowered the pitch of her
voice.
So, I wondered: Ladies, why are we lowering our voices?
The way you speak is part genetic - like how long your neck is, and part learned - like
the valley girl accent.
So no one sounds quite like you – your voice and all its qualities are as unique as your
face: Your intensity, pitch, tone and nasality.
This is all relatively straightforward.
Though things get weird when we start to make judgements about other people based on their
voice.
One voice expert, Professor Carolyn McGettigan writes that “in vocal communication, we
adopt a variety of selves.”
And after I highlighted this I spoke to her and she said,
“I can adjust my pitch.
I can adjust my intonation.
If I had chosen to, when I moved to mainland UK, I could have started to speak with an
English accent to try and fit in a bit more.”
So depending on what self people want to portray,
“when you hear a voice, you're always hearing that combination of the physiology of that
person and the way they use the instrument of the voice”.
And the way people use the instrument of their voice can have pretty big implications.
The 2012 election for the House of Representatives in the U.S. is particularly noteworthy as
researchers in South Florida analysed the voices of almost 800 candidates running for
almost every seat.
They wanted to know if one feature of candidate’s voices influenced election outcomes: namely,
their pitch.
Now a lot of judgements we make about other people from their voices are based on pitch
– you know, the relative highness or lowness of your voice.
It’s worth nothing that Men speak, on average, an octave lower than women.
So... that experiment I mentioned found that both male and female candidates with lower
voices were more likely to win elected office.
In a separate study, people preferred lower pitched voices of past U.S. presidents AND
rated those speakers as having greater integrity and physical prowess
This seems to suggest pitch affects your popularity.
But does it affect how competent you are?
How good you are at your job?
Can you actually gauge that from a voice?
In animals, vocal sounds signal their size and ability to defend themselves.
Which does indicate competence and strength… if you’re a deer.
Unlike animals, though, low pitch in human voices isn’t directly tied to the size of
the person.
Yet in the human world, we still rate men with low-pitched voices as more attractive
and across gender we’re more likely to elect officials with deeper voices.
So the researchers followed up by collecting samples of the voices of Members of the 109th
U.S. Congress and their power rankings – basically how effective they are at politics.
they analysed voice pitch and mapped it to this power ranking and….
nothing.
Voice pitch doesn’t have any relationship with leadership ability.
Yet researchers in South Australia have found that the average pitch of women’s voices
has dropped by 23 Hz over the past 50 years (like here to here).
And, they speculated, because over time women have adopted a deeper tone to project authority
and dominance in the workplace.
In addition to Australia, women’s voices have grown deeper in Canada the US and Sweden
since the 1950s.
It blows my mind that pitch not only influences who we vote for, but this belief that lower
pitched voices are more competent has led to generations of people lowering their voices.
The next time you’re listening to an interview or
a speech or a presentation – analyse the words.
Because the pitch isn’t always perfect.