9 Reasons to Get a Deeper Voice

Vocular

8 years ago

The world is full of people trying to look as good as they can, but when it comes to sounding good people become strangely bashful. They describe their voices with contempt and avoid recordings of themselves for years like some strange creature, afraid of its own reflection.

This seems to be driven by an idea that your voice is ‘all in your head’: if you don’t care about how you sound then no one else will. Well, I wanted to write a series of posts to show you how this simply isn’t true. Even something as basic as your spoken pitch can have a profound impact on the way you influence others. And by ignoring this fact, you’re really missing out…

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1. Women are more attracted to men with deep voices – and this attraction is strongest among prettier, more feminine women. In fact, women prefer a masculine voice more strongly and more unanimously to a masculine face. This might lead you to think you should be the next Barry White, but a recent study found that the most attractive male voices were the ones around 96Hz (that’s deeper than average, but not incredibly so.) Once this average pitch fell into the 80s, women preferred a higher voice.

Barack Obama, Alec Baldwin, Jason Momoa, Patrick Stewart, Morgan Freeman and Gerard Butler all speak with a median pitch of ~96 Hz

2. Deep-voiced men are rated as being significantly more dominant, both physically and socially, to men with higher voices – and men who believe themselves to be more dominant subconsciously lower their tone when faced with competition.

This is probably why powerful characters such as Darth Vader or Smaug are traditionally given very deep voices. They’re supposed to intimidate on a very primal level, and a low pitch and low variance is the best recipe for that.

3. In fact, owners of a deep voice get better ratings for all kinds of qualities. A 2012 study on electoral success found they were considered more intelligent, more trustworthy, more confident, more likable, healthier, and of a higher social status than high-pitched men.

4. People prefer voting for politicians with deep voices, especially during wartime. Most famously, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher underwent vocal coaching to lower her voice by a whopping 46Hz, more than half the difference between male and female voices.

5. CEOs with deeper voices tend to run larger companies, make more money and keep their jobs for longer. From a sample of 792 CEOs, a 1% decrease in voice pitch was found to be worth $19,000 in CEO pay and $30 million in the size of company managed. And the CEOs at ‘the deep end’ earned $187,000 more on average and ran companies that were $440 million bigger.

Tesla’s Elon Musk has a median pitch of ~90 Hz, about 30 Hz lower than the average man.

6. Men with deeper voices report more sexual partners and start having sex at a younger age. A study in Tanzania even found that the deeper-voiced tribesmen fathered more children, despite the fact that a naturally lower voice has been linked with a lower sperm count.

The Hadza tribe of hunter-gatherers

7. Lowering the pitch of your voice makes you feel more powerful. Much in the same way that certain ‘power poses’ boost confidence and reduce anxiety, researchers found that “participants who lowered their voice pitch perceived themselves as possessing more powerful traits”. They also found that they gained, in their own words, “a higher level of abstract thinking”, which is associated with people in high power positions.

8. Lowering your pitch also makes you more persuasive and influential. This finding came from an experiment in which groups of people were asked to discuss which objects would be most useful after a crash landing on the Moon. Speakers whose voices deepened during the discussion were more likely to convince others to support their ideas and more likely to be rated as of a high social status. And this was independent of their average voice pitch – even guys with high voices had the same benefit.

9. Women retain information better when listening to a man with a deep voice. Unfortunately, this study was not done with male listeners, so we can’t really tell whether this is because of the attractiveness or the authority of deep voices.

It’s not all good news for the low-toned though. A deep voice also carries connotations of promiscuity and selfishness within relationships. So, while they’re seen as generally more trustworthy, this gets reversed in a romantic context.

It’s also worth saying that, for male voices, the most attractive feature was not depth. A recent study found that the greatest predictor of vocal attractiveness by a long, long way was a thing called H1-A2 (which roughly corresponds to how ‘breathy’ a voice is). And this was so important that a high-pitched, breathy voice was found to be more attractive than a deep, non-breathy one. We’re currently working on adding this to Vocular.

Finally, I have to add that it’s not worth getting bogged down in this. Yes, every point here comes from peer-reviewed academic studies, but it’s clearly not the only thing that matters. Bill Clinton and David Cameron both have high-pitched voices, but this never stopped them from being elected as leaders of their countries. If nobody believes a single thing you say, maybe it’s not your voice that’s the problem. Maybe you’re just talking crap.

But, if you want to take advantage of these facts, here’s a post I wrote on how to get a deeper voice