Sometimes a strangers voice sounds like ours, our voice remotely matches our parents, so how is that when we get hereditary many things from our parents, why not the voice?

1.14K views

Sometimes a strangers voice sounds like ours, our voice remotely matches our parents, so how is that when we get hereditary many things from our parents, why not the voice?

In: Other

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I sound exactly like my sisters and mother. How much of that is the structure of our larynx/vocal chords vs environment… who knows.

All I know is I speny my childhood being mistaken for someone else when I answred the phone.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s impossible to give a definitive answer to this, but I think it’s both a matter of how the voice is created and how people’s perceptions differ, when they’re seeing something as opposed to hearing something.

First of all, the characteristics of a voice are dependent on a huge number of factors. The shape and size of the vocal folds, as well as the shape of the person’s skull and mouth and even chest cavity (all of which causes the voice to resonate differently).

The shape of all this anatomy is dictated by a mix of your parents’ genes. Put it together in its final shape, and you get a specific voice out of it. Even if your larynx is an exact carbon copy of your father’s larynx, your face is going to be a different enough shape that it’ll sound different.

In actual fact, your larynx won’t be exactly the same size and shape as your dad’s. Even if it’s 98 percent the same, a couple of percentage points can have a profound affect on the final result, all on its own. Just because the generation of sound is so complex.

And also, paradoxically, the *perception* of that sound is simple, when compared to a visual inspection of a person.

If you hear a voice, there’s only one way to hear it. It can remind you of someone else’s voice, but you’ll hear the differences immediately, and they’ll be impossible to ignore. That’s because it’s a much more limited stream of information than looking at someone’s face.

If you look at someone’s face, you can (consciously or unconsciously) choose to see the parts of that shape that remind you of the person’s father or mother (or grandfather, uncle, etc).

You can light the face from different angles, and you’ll suddenly see different things that make it seem more or less like those relatives.

Again: the voice isn’t like that. The stream of audio information is complex in its generation, but it’s linear. You have to hear it as it comes. It’s vastly more difficult to choose what aspects to focus on.

Combine all this stuff and you’ll just never get the same kind of “oh, that’s a family resemblance” factor that you will with faces.

At the same time, I’ve had people tell me I sound just like my father. So it’s never a hard-and-fast rule.