In movies, why are giants portrayed as having deep, slow voices, while “dwarves” are portrayed as having small, squeaky voices? Is it accurate that voice changes depending on your size?

Question

Put tag as biology since it has to do with organisms

In: 0

Answer 1

In musical instruments, you can often find situations where a larger thing – eg: drums – produces a lower pitch than a smaller one. This is because, in general, a bigger thing needs more time for a full vibration cycle to happen. Making a big thing vibrate fast requires more energy and may be more stress on the larger thing as the vibration moves through its larger body.

How would it work for a giant though? If you did just take a human body, put it into a photocopier and hit ‘scale up 200%’, you’ll get larger vocal chords. Same idea to musical instruments apply – you’d expect a tone shift downwards. Again, shrinking should have the reverse effect. So, this is how it’s portrayed.

While “big” humans and people with dwarfism exist, they’re not literally taking a person and scaling them directly. Humans with dwarfism still have heads about the same size as normal people, and so their vocal chords are probably not too different either. And actual humans that are dozens of feet tall don’t exist…