When I was a little girl somewhere around five, six, or seven, my Mother was on me all the time to lower my voice. Screeching was absolutely forbidden! She did not mean lower the volume. She would make me sit at the piano and practice bringing my voice down from Middle C, down, down, down. She would frequently remind me that no one likes to be around a whiny sounding person and that in public speaking a high tonal voice becomes so annoying the content is lost as we tune out. Well, who would have guessed that there is science behind my Mother's admonitions, although in this case the science is limited to men. Hmmmm. The one thing I can say about my Mother is that she was as success driven as any man I've ever known and her success, which I always attributed to her brilliance, may have stemmed as much from her low and dominant (but melodic) speaking voice as it did from her natural ability and incredible intellect. This made especially more so as she was often the lone female competing in a man's world in her career.
Fox is running a "Live Science" story today that seems to prove my Mother's point, at least for men:
A male dog will whine and beg in deference to a stronger dog, but will lower its voice into a guttural growl if it thinks it has a fighting chance.
Men unconsciously do a similar thing, scientists say.
A new study finds that the lower the pitch of a man's voice, the more physically dominant other men think he is. And men lower their voice pitch when addressing a man they believe to be less dominant than themselves, but raise it when speaking to someone they think is more dominant.
The findings, detailed in the July issue of the journal of Evolution and Human Behavior, could help explain why vocal pitch in men and women are so different.
Big and low
Vocal pitch, determined by the main frequencies in a voice, is about half as high in men as in women. This difference has traditionally been explained as a product of sexual selection, in which women favored men with lower-pitched voices. ... Continued
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