How come people have different voices? What makes our voices different from each other?
In: Biology
Sounds are vibrations in the air. The flow of air between the lungs, the nose, and the mouth added with the vibration within the person’s body makes the different timbre of each person’s voice.
Generally a smaller frame person will have slightly higher voice and larger frame means lower voice generally.
Both the vocal quality: the way we produce the sound with the vocal folds (phonation). It can be anything from relaxed phonation, strained, fry, instability etc.
The sound then goes through the vocal tract (the throat, mouth and occasionally nose. The fundamental shape of these structures are the same in everyone, at the same time everyone have minute individual characteristics which make sound resonate slightly differently on its way out of the vocal tract.
Some biological difference in voice production is related to length of vocal folds. Women have roughly 15mm long vocal folds, and men have roughly 20 mm. The effect being men usually have a lower sound frequency then women and vice versa. Men also have roughly 17% larger vocal tracts than women, which affects resonance.
Edit: grammar
This is very interesting actually, it evolved so people could recognise each other, like a password, we have voices that are hard to mimic. I don’t remember the whole story but some evolutionary biologist might be able to answer. The reason might have to do with safety and cooperation but also reproduction, being not average and similar to everybody else, like peacocks instead of zebras.
Latest Answers