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A lot of us don't like the sound of our own voices when we hear them played back on a recording.
It just doesn't sound like it sounds in our own head.
But do we ever wonder what makes any voice sound attractive or appealing?
What makes a man or woman's voice sound sexy or seductive?
If we could, it would be nice to work on our voices so we make a better impression on people.
Is there anything science can teach us about this, or is it all subjective?
It turns out that this is something scientists actually study!
I'm going to teach you what cutting-edge science has to say about the relationship between our vocal qualities, like pitch, rate, and volume, and our success at mating. And let's face it, who doesn't want to be more successful at mating?
Human Vocal Behavior Study
So I was browsing Twitter today, as I do too much, to get my news about science and public affairs. I saw this headline about a study that had just been published electronically about the relationship between vocal pitch, rate, & volume and success at mating. I thought, "Oh, I've got to tell people on my YouTube channel about this paper."
I want to just briefly tell you how the study was done and then what they found and what it might mean. This is a paper published in a journal called Evolution and Human Behavior, and the title of the paper was “Human Vocal Behavior Within Competitive and Courtship Contexts and its Relation to Mating Success.”
That's a complex, jargon-filled title, but these are evolutionary psychologists who want to study how things like vocal qualities relate to things like mating success. The idea is that everything about us and every characteristic we have was selected by evolution, in the sense that over billions of years characteristics that allowed us to reproduce were selected. If any trait made us more likely to mate and pass on our genes, it would carry forward into the present because it was a successful trait.
Something about these vocal characteristics that made us more successful in mating makes these characteristics more present today. That's why an article like this ends up in a journal about evolutionary psychology or evolution and human behavior. The authors were Alexandre Suire, Michel Reynaud, and Melissa Barkat-Defradas. The study was done in a university in France at the University of Montpellier in France.
Study Participants
Let me tell you a little bit how they did this study. They wanted to look at the association between people’s vocal qualities, like pitch (how high or low), rate (how fast or slow), and volume (how loudly or how softly), and their success at mating.
I'll tell you how they measured both of those things. They used 68 women and 56 men, all French and heterosexual. The average age was about 23, so these were college students that they used in this study to measure their vocal qualities. They had them play a dating game and recorded their vocal qualities and then used computers to analyze pitch, rate, volume, and so on.
To measure their success at mating, they actually asked them to recall in the past year how many different sexual partners they had had. Those were the simple measures. So what the study is really trying to do is find out what is it about pitch and rate and volume that might predict, or at least be correlated with, the number of sexual partners a person had in the past year.
What Makes Our Voices Sexy
That's the study, and it's pretty straightforward. So what did they find? The headline is that in men, louder voices and faster rate of speech were associated with a larger number of self-reported sexual partners in the previous year.
If we were going to turn this into advice for people looking to be more successful at mating, we’d tell men to speak more loudly and speak faster. Good luck with that and leave me comments below and tell me if that works for you. When you're dating and talking to women that you're attracted to, this is true. We only know from this day for heterosexual French men and women. We'll see if a translates in my English speaking audience.
For women, they found that a breathier voice was associated with a higher number of self-reported sexual partners in the last year. So if women are looking for advice about how to appear more attractive or how to have more success at mating, speak in a breathier voice. Men want to speak more loudly and faster. Apparently this is going to make us seem more attractive.
There was also one more finding for women that the longer they spoke, or the more words they spoke in their particular dating game, the higher the number of sexual partners they reported in the past year. I'm not exactly sure what to make of that.
That's the headline if you're looking for tips about your vocal quality, to allow you to have more success at mating. Men speak louder, speak faster, women speak in a more breathy way.
How These Attributes Make Voices More Attractive
So why is this the case?
The authors offer several explanations and it's not completely clear, but it seems like for men, loudness may communicate something about power, social status, authority, and even physical size that may make you a more attractive mate.
For women breathiness the authors argue also may signal femininity or attractiveness in some other way. There's numerous other studies cited in this paper, which talk about the relationship between vocal qualities and people's perception of you.
I was really fascinated to learn, for example, that lower voice men are seen as generally more attractive and dominant. Higher pitched women and lower pitched men are seen as a higher infidelity risk. So, men if you speak with a low voice and women if you speak with a high voice, you're seen as a higher infidelity risk.
Clearly pitch, rate and volume are signaling something about our attractiveness and our suitability as mates. People of the opposite sex are reading into these vocal qualities about attractiveness and about suitability as sexual partners. This ends up causing this association between these vocal qualities and success at mating, as reported by self-reports of the number of partners in the past year.
Can We Trust the Study?
What are some caveats about this? What should we not necessarily trust about this finding?
Well, this was not a randomized trial. So the classic cautions about “correlation does not mean causation” have to come in here. What this says is that men who spoke more loudly and more faster reported more sexual partners, but it doesn't say which one caused which. Especially if they were reporting sexual partners in the past and their vocal quality was recorded in the present.
Maybe the causality runs in the other direction. Maybe a large number of sexual partners in the past causes men to speak more loudly and more quickly. Maybe it gives them more confidence and confidence is what really causes us to speak loudly and quickly. Similarly, women's previous success at mating might make them speak in a more breathy way. It's just hard to know. We don't know causality.
This wasn't a randomized trial where we randomly put people in groups, taught them to speak in a louder or faster voice or taught women to speak in a breathier voice, and then followed them over time and looked at how many sexual partners they have. If we did that, we would really know whether these vocal qualities caused the success. All we know now is that these vocal qualities are correlated with success at mating.
Summary
Do with that information what you will. I thought it was amusing and entertaining and enlightening. I thank those authors for writing this interesting paper and go ahead and give it a try. For men, speak more loudly, speak more quickly. See if that increases your success at mating. For women, speak in a more breathy voice and see if that increases your success at mating.
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