What is actually happening in your body when you breathe in helium that changes your voice?
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Sound waves travel faster through helium than the composition of gases we call air, which means the pitch becomes higher. This is certainly a Googleable question.
Helium is less dense than air, which is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen mostly, and is the reason helium balloons rise. Voice sounds are made by a gas, in most cases air, passing through the vocal folds (voice box) and causing vibrations that resonate the gas within the mouth. The mouth changes the sounds produced and speech is made.
When the density of the gas decreases, the resonance of the vibrations is increased to create a higher sounding pitch. Sulfur hexaflouride is a gas that is more dense than air and a balloon filled with it would sink to the ground quickly. Inhaling sulfur hexaflouride and speaking causes the resonant vibrations to be lower and the voice is thus lower.
There’s a good bit in Impractical Jokers where they make Murr give a speech and alternate inhaling the two gasses and his voice is changing with each breath.
The sound of your voice comes from air moving past these things called your vocal chords. When the air moves fast, your voice goes high. When the air moves slowly, your voice goes low. Helium is much lighter than regular ol’ air. Picture letting go of a balloon that has helium in it, and then imagine the speed of that balloon. The speed that it flies away from you is the same speed that the helium that you inhale is moving past your vocal chords as you exhale. It’s much faster than the air you normally breathe, so your voice is much higher. There are also gasses that are more dense than air, that can make your voice lower, but since that gas is heavier than what your body is used to exhaling, it can be hard to get it out again. So be very careful.
What happens is the density and thus the speed of sound change within your breathing tubing. Since the length stays the same, your voice will have a different frequency.
Well for one, you being to suffocate but that doesn’t have anything to do with your voice. Helium carries sound different than air so any sound made in helium comes off as higher pitch.
Helium is also incredibly inert so while it won’t kill you or even hurt you it can’t sustain your life.
Fun fact, sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is like an anti-helium. It is denser than air, and inhaling it will cause your voice to get super deep.
There’s a clip of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, where they bring on a science guy to demonstrate it. Josh Duhamel was the guest that night. Both Jay and Josh got a big whiff of it and were messing around sounding pretty monstrous.
Thing is, this gas is completely inert, colorless, odorless. Except if you pass voltage through it. Earlier in the set before people were breathing it in, the science guy extinguished a stun gun in it – in most of industry, this is exactly what this gas is used for, as a dielectric material. But, it’s used pressurized to raise its properties.
If you manage to get an arc to pass through SF6, it creates all sorts of hazardous gasses, like mustard gas and airborne acids. In a vat, unpressurized, this could have happened as the stun gun was dipped into and out of the vat (and it was thinned in the swirl of air + SF6 above the tank).
It’s also a greenhouse gas and heavier than air, which means if there’s a leak of a large quantity of it, it can settle in a valley or someone’s basement, and you suffocate in it. It also doesn’t clear itself from your lungs like helium (because it’s heavier, not lighter, than air). You have to take superbreaths in order to flush it out.
I don’t know if the science guy ever appeared on the show after that. He was a sometimes guest for a few shows.
Consider [this wind up fish toy](https://i.etsystatic.com/6336119/r/il/2096dd/1921616348/il_794xN.1921616348_gpwh.jpg). If you wind it up and drop it into a bowl of water, it’ll paddle it’s little fin around at a certain speed.
Now imagine instead of water you drop the same wind up fish into a bowl of something more viscus, like syrup. The fin paddles at a slower speed than in water because it’s harder to push the syrup back and forth. That’s kind of like how vocal cords act [when people take a breath of sulfur hexafluoride](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG7gstXCt1A). It causes the vocal cords to vibrate slower. slower vibration = lower pitch.
Helium is like the opposite of that. It’s like when you take the fish out of the water bowl and let it’s fin paddle in the air. Because air is easier to move around than water the fin paddles faster. Helium is less dense than regular air. Vibrating vocal cords move back and forth faster through it due to the lower resistance, creating a higher pitch.
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