7.3.2 Communicating Through Voice
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Communicating Through Voice
Grammy winner T-Pain has collaborated with an enviable who’s who list of rap, hip-hop, and R&B stars: Ludacris, Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, Kanye West, and a host of others. But 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 style is so popular that he even released an iPhone app called “I Am T-Pain,” allowing fans to record and modify their own voices so they could sound like him.
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 rival kinesics in their 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 shape 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.
Tone The most noticeable aspect of T-Pain’s vocals is their unnatural, “computerized” tone. Tone is the most complex of human vocalic characteristics, and involves a combination of richness and breathiness. You can control your vocal tone by allowing your voice to resonate deep in your chest and throat—achieving a full, rich tone that conveys an authoritative quality while giving a formal talk, for example. By contrast, letting your voice resonate through your sinus cavity creates a more whiny and nasal tone—often unpleasant to others. Your use of breath also affects tone. If you expel a great deal of air when speaking, you convey sexiness. If you constrict the airflow when speaking, you create a “thin” and “hard” tone that may communicate nervousness or anxiety.
English-speakers use vocal tone to emphasize and alter the meanings of verbal messages. Regardless of the words you use, your tone can make your statements serious, silly, or even sarcastic, and you can shift tone extremely rapidly to convey different emphases. For example, when talking with your friends, you can suddenly switch from your normal tone to a much more deeply chest-resonant tone to mimic a pompous politician, then nearly instantly constrict your airflow and make your voice sound more like SpongeBob SquarePants. In online communication, we use italics to convey tone change (“I can’t believe you did that”).
Pitch You’re introduced to two new coworkers, Rashad and Paul. Both are tall and muscular. Rashad has a deep, low-pitched voice; Paul, an unusually high-pitched one. How do their voices shape your impressions of them? If you’re like most people, you’ll conclude that Rashad is strong and competent, while Paul is weak (Spender, 1990). Not coincidentally, people believe that women have higher-pitched voices than men and that women’s voices are more “shrill” and “whining” (Spender, 1990). But although women across cultures do use higher pitch than men, most men are capable of using a higher pitch than they normally do but choose to intentionally limit their range to lower pitch levels to convey strength (Brend, 1975).
Question
Loudness Consider the following sentence: “Will John leave the room” (Searle, 1965). Say the sentence aloud, each time emphasizing a different word. Notice that emphasizing one word over another can alter the meaning from statement to question to command, depending on which word is emphasized (“WILL John leave the room” versus “Will JOHN leave the room”).
Loudness affects meaning so powerfully that people mimic it online by USING CAPITAL LETTERS TO EMPHASIZE CERTAIN POINTS. Indeed, people who extensively cap are punished for being “too loud.” For example, a member of a music Web site I routinely visit accidentally left his “cap lock” key on while posting, and all of his messages were capped. Several other members immediately pounced, scolding him, “Stop shouting!”
Speech Rate The final vocal characteristic is the speed at which you speak. Talking at a moderate and steady rate is often considered a critical technique for effective speaking. Public-speaking educators urge students to “slow down,” and people in conversations often reduce their speech rate if they believe that their listeners don’t understand them. But MIT computer science researcher Jean Krause found that speech rate is not the primary determinant of intelligibility (Krause, 2001). Instead, it’s pronunciation and articulation of words. People who speak quickly but enunciate clearly are just as competent communicators as those who speak moderately or slowly.