Why do we have a whisper voice? Why can’t we just talk normally, but quiet?

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When it’s quiet and you need to keep your voice down, you whisper. But a whisper isn’t just a quiet talk, it’s an airy, base-less sound. Why can’t we just talk normally, but quiet?

In: Biology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your talking bits are the same size and vibrate at a certain frequency because of it.

You gotta shrink the machinery to make it softer

I think.

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

You can, we can vary the volume of our voice without changing the tone or pitch much. But there’s a lower limit because it takes a certain amount of airflow to get our vocal chords vibrating at all…less air than that and you don’t get any tone. It’s like blowing really softly into a flute…you don’t just get a really quiet note, you get nothing, there’s a minimum loudness “to make the instrument work”.

If you want to be quieter than that, then you whisper, which is how we can talk without using our vocal chords.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Another aspect is the point of whispering is to limit how far the voice travels. There are 2 ways to limit how far sound travels. First, by decreasing volume. Second, by increasing pitch. Lower notes travel further. By whispering it is both minimizing volume AND increasing pitch.