How does helium change a person’s voice when inhaled
In: Biology
It’s a common misconception that helium makes your voice higher. Helium does change your voice, but it does not change the pitch of your voice. What we perceive as a “higher” voice is actually an auditory illusion. How helium changes your voice is much more subtle.
So, what’s actually going on?
The pitch of your voice is determined by how fast your vocal cords open and close. The gas that’s moving through your vocal cords does not affect them very much. So, if your vocal cords open and close 500 times a second under normal conditions, they will do the same thing when inhaling helium.
Now, if you were to put a microphone down your throat and record the raw sound your vocal cords make, you would hear a buzz, similar to the sound when you stick out your tongue and blow. If that’s so, then why do people’s voices sound so nice in comparison? This is due to the resonance of the vocal tract. But what does that mean?
Your “vocal tract” is all the air inside your head above your vocal cords. That’s your throat, nose and mouth. Before the gross buzzing sound from your vocal cords leaves your mouth, it has to pass through your vocal tract. When it passes through your vocal tract, it bounces around a bunch. It bounces off the walls of the vocal tract and runs back into itself a bunch. By bouncing around and running into itself, the sound changes. The term we use to describe how the sound changes when it does this is called “resonance”. So, resonance in the vocal tract changes the sound, and turns it into the nice sounds.
So, where does helium come in? Well, because helium is lighter than air, that means that sound travels faster in helium than it does in air. So, if your vocal tract is full of helium, the faster speed of sound is going to change how the sound bounces around, and that’s going to change how it sounds when it finally comes out of your mouth. It ends up making you sound like a chipmunk.
Latest Answers