why really old voice audio recordings sound like the person speaking had helium?
In: Engineering
Helium doesn’t make your voice higher, it changes the resonance of your vocal tract so that the low frequencies disappear.
Old recordings couldn’t capture the full frequency range, or obscured some frequencies with noise, and so in the same way as with helium these frequencies are not in the playback leading to them sounding squawky.
This is what hampers analysing the recordings of the only ever recorded castrato singer – the frequency band called the singer’s formant is obscured by noise leaving the recording sounding empty and unimpressive.
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