Grammy winner T-Pain has collaborated with an enviable who’s who list of rap, hip-hop, and R&B stars from Ludacris to Kanye West. What makes T-Pain unique, and his songs so instantly recognizable, is his pioneering work with the pitch-correction program Auto-Tune. He was one of the first musicians to realize that Auto-Tune could be used not only to subtly correct singing errors, but to alter one’s voice entirely. Running his vocals through the program, his normally full, rich voice becomes thin and reedy sounding, jumping in pitch precisely from note to note without error. The result is a sound that is at once musical yet robotic.

The popularity of T-Pain’s vocal manipulations illustrates the impact that vocalics—vocal characteristics we use to communicate nonverbal messages—has upon our impressions. Indeed, vocalics rivals kinesics in its communicative power (Burgoon et al., 1996) because our voices communicate our social, ethnic, and individual identities to others. Consider a study that recorded people from diverse backgrounds answering a series of “small talk” questions such as “How are you?” (Harms, 1961). People who listened to these recordings were able to accurately judge participants’ ethnicity, gender, and social class, often within only 10 to 15 seconds, based solely on their voices. Vocalics strongly shapes our perception of others when we first meet them. If we perceive a person’s voice as calm and smooth (not nasal or shrill), we are more likely to view him or her as attractive, form a positive impression, and judge the person as extraverted, open, and conscientious (Zuckerman, Hodgins, & Miyake, 1990).

When we interact with others, we typically experience their voices as a totality—they “talk in certain ways” or “have a particular kind of voice.” But people’s voices are actually complex combinations of four characteristics: tone, pitch, loudness, and speech rate.