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What’s the appeal of deep voices in men?
- emodendroket 5y agoHey, I'm short and not in the best shape... but at least I've got my deep voice.
- webwielder2 5y agoIn general, any trait associated with a given gender is more attractive the more "saturated" that trait is in a representative of that gender. Men generally have deeper voices, are taller, more muscular than women, so the more of that trait a man has, the more attractive it is. In woman, I'm sure you can fill in some traits. Of course, there is an upper limit on any such trait where at a certain level it becomes grotesque. Women like men who are manly, and vice versa. In general.
- novosel 5y agoDisregarding completely your original argument, but the "saturated form" concept is a strike of genius.
- andrei_says_ 5y agoBarry White being a perfect example of “saturated form.”
- novosel 5y agoYes, yes. Culturally speaking, but I was (am) aiming at the more formal aspect of the concept. Like a fractal side-kick.
- laurent92 5y agoIt’s also very American, and more broadly related to the English language. French people speak with a more similar voice between men and women; US people, to me, seem to accentuate their deep voice to borderline ridiculousness when their voice saturates “a la Barry White”. The only conclusion I could make was that it gives authority in this culture.
- hh3k0 5y ago> Men generally have deeper voices, are taller, more muscular than women, so the more of that trait a man has, the more attractive it is. That's a nice non-explanation. Article states: > “There is so much attention in evolutionary literature on height, and selective pressures on height, and that’s only an 8 percent difference [between men and women]. In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent. That just doesn’t come about by accident,” Hodges-Simeon says. Instead, she believes, such differences are the result of sexual selection. Suggesting that deep voices must've been under positive sexual selection pressure for men back when they weren't perceived representative for their gender.
- im3w1l 5y agoI think his idea is that first there is an initial sex-difference in some trait which could have happened basically randomly. Then sexual selection starts amplifying the difference.
- drekipus 5y ago> Suggesting that deep voices must've been under positive sexual selection pressure for men back when they weren't perceived representative for their gender. I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time parsing this sentence. are you saying that the deep voices in males has developed due to other sexual selection, and only now shows up as a difference?
- tsimionescu 5y agoI think the point is like this: initially, at some point, males and females of some hominid species had the same voice pitch. Then some individual males were born with a deeper voice by some accident. Now, the question becomes: why did the very first deep-voice males have any kind of positive selection pressure? At the time, this wasn't a male-specific trait, it was just some mutation that one individual who happened to be male had, so the initial explanation can't be sexual dimorphism. There must have been either some survival advantage, or some coincidence where this mutation happened to match a trait that was already sexually attractive for some deeper reason. Like, imagine if 10,000,000 years from now, human-descended males have a characteristic tale, while females do not. Today, no humans have a tail, so you have to wonder, why did women start looking for a tail in their men?
- vikingerik 5y agoI'm not so sure; there are a fair number of counterexamples to that. Men have more body hair, more baldness, larger Adam's apple, but women aren't really attracted to any of those. Women are attracted to the male characteristics that correlate with reproductive fitness. That includes height and muscle, and a deep voice gets in there because it (accurately or not) projects a signal of strength and confidence.
- mise_en_place 5y agoIn my anecdotal experience, low and slow is the name of the game. Take your time with speech and enunciate as much as possible. You will be amazed at how willing people are to follow you and obey without question.
- SamPatt 5y agoI find the same. I suspect having a large frame helps as well. I'm guessing there's some genetic hardwiring from our past that shows deference to outward signs of strength. Seems like a plausible survival mechanism.
- ungamed 5y ago> Men have more body hair, more baldness, larger Adam's apple, but women aren't > really attracted to any of those. Different attributes are attractive to different people. I don't imagine man women would 'actively' say they are attracted to these things due to society pressure but that doesn't mean its fundamentally untrue.
- dehrmann 5y agoI'm far from an expert on what women find attractive, but the burly man is one type I can picture women being attracted to. There are also a lot of bald men who make it work just fine.
- brnt 5y agoI have found that assumptions about what people are attracted to are almost certianly incorrect. Especially some of those stereotypical ones 'everyone knows'. Also, they're not really coupled to reproductive fitness. More fat tissue in breasts has no consequence for mamalian function. Male baldness is correlated with high testosterone, so theoretically positively correlated with fitness. And so on. As with so many human preferences, they're far more personal or cultural than we think.
- chrischen 5y agoSo does that mean women with squeakier voices, shorter, and less muscular are more attractive? I don't think that's true. The height stuff at least has more to do with nutrition/non-stunted growth.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ggm 5y agoThe question also leads to "why vocal fry in young women" and "how strongly do babies preference pitch to mother over father"
- mbg721 5y agoThere's more to this than the article covers; low pitches in music are appealing even if there aren't vocals. Playing a low note along with the same note an octave up just feels powerful. The lowest note of a chord gets parsed by the brain as a sort of anchor, which is why you can play CEG on a piano, take your thumb off the C, put your little finger on the next higher C, and it sounds different. There's got to be something going on in the lizard-brain that parses high and low notes, similar to how music in general is so attractive, but it's not easily explainable what that is.
- scythe 5y agoLike physicality, deep voices have a practical utility. Specifically, human hearing is biased towards the low notes, and it's easier to hear a low-f signal through high-f noise than to hear a high-f signal through low-f noise. This is due to the anatomy of the cochlea, where high pitches only strike the early hairs but low pitches strike all of the hairs -- this is also why you tend to lose high-frequency hearing first. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlea#Hearing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlea#Hearing So, a man with a deeper voice has, quite literally, an easier time being heard. This also means that women, at least usually, have to speak louder than men do in order to be heard in noisy or crowded environments -- a side-effect of otic anatomy that may underlie certain stereotypes.
- mbg721 5y agoThat runs against what I was taught in my high-school choir. In groups of male singers, there's a rule of thumb that you need more basses than tenors because the guys singing the lower notes are harder to hear. It may be that at lower pitches, their vocal cords just aren't making as much noise.
- scythe 5y agoI would agree that the loudest human vocalization is probably much louder and therefore more audible at mid-to-high range pitches (my own voice seems to confirm this). But the loudest human vocalizations are not relevant in the vast majority of conversations, pitch notwithstanding. For example, most people reading this comment would probably attract a significant amount of negative attention if they emitted a sound near their maximum vocal loudness. But at an equal sound power level in watts-per-square-meter, low sounds tend to come through better -- human hearing sensitivity drops off below 100 Hz, but the lowest male voice is around 80 Hz, so that's not usually important.
- thfuran 5y agohttp://web.engr.uky.edu/~donohue/audio/fsear.html http://web.engr.uky.edu/~donohue/audio/fsear.html It's not just dropping below 100 Hz, it's already quite low by then.
- akomtu 5y agoDeep voice = low frequency sound = big resonant cavity (vocal tract) = big and strong animal. So it's wired up in our brains that deep voice means strength.
- WalterBright 5y agoProbably because women find it attractive in men. The same reason men have heavier jaws.
- oh_sigh 5y agoI always guessed the jaw thing was because men would, essentially, punch each other in the face repeatedly until only one man remained.
- LegitShady 5y agoit might be or it might not be. Any trait that would improve sexual selection might proliferate without making an organism more fit. Examples of this include crazy colours on birds, or big tail feathers like peacocks, etc. They aren't survival features - but sexual selection made them proliferate.
- corysama 5y agohttps://www.livescience.com/beards-protect-face-punches.html https://www.livescience.com/beards-protect-face-punches.html
- nikodunk 5y agoWhat an amazingly well-written essay. I love finding things like this on the internet (or print, though I guess I find print on the internet too nowadays). This just improved my day!
- xiphias2 5y agoLow frequencies are better for undirected long distance communication (hunting in a group, especially as a leader), while higher pitch is better for directed short distance talking (gossiping / P2P socializing).
- progre 5y agoThe hunting example seems wrong. As you say, low frequencies carries well but are more undirected. For driving hunts (? don't know the english term: where a large party fan out to drive the animal before them, towards a smaller killing party) the hunters needs to know exactly where everyone is. For this banging sticks togeather, whistles and clackers have been used since forever. For stalking hunts, everyone keeps absolutely quiet. In niether case the male voice is any real advantage.
- jacobmartin 5y ago> "In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent [difference between men and women]." Is this speaking in raw frequency? If so, I think it is overstated. A 50% reduction in frequency is only one octave, which is 10% of the range of the human ear. And a 50% increase in pitch (from men to women, which is what I think they are saying based on other sources on human voice pitch) is only a 5th, the interval in the Star Wars theme, or 'God Rest, ye merry gentlemen,' which really isn't that much. > According to Puts, this fits with the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis, which states that since testosterone takes away energy from the immune system, only men in the best of health—whose immune systems are not suffering due to physiological stress—can afford to develop testosterone-dependent traits. Well I guess my autoimmune disorders explain why I'm a tenor. Oh well, that means I get the best arias. For most people, I've found that what they call a 'deeper' voice is simply a more resonant voice. There's a video where Tom Scott is trying to sing. He sings a note more resonantly, and he thinks he dropped down the octave. But he actually stayed at the same pitch.[0] So I wonder if that is why 'deeper' voices are perceived as more confident, simply because the people are speaking at roughly the same pitch but are speaking more loudly and more resonantly. I also question a bit whether deep voices really are more appealing on a society-wide basis, maybe for sexual attraction purposes, though I have some thoughts on that too.[1] But, most male singers that have been prized as stars sing higher. It's a meme now that all male pop singers sing way up in the stratosphere, but it's been true historically too--the tenors got the best arias most of the time. There are certainly lower-voiced outliers (Bing Crosby comes to mind), but the 'stars' so to speak have often been higher-voiced. [0]: https://youtu.be/2QKPQ6JYVhU?t=439 https://youtu.be/2QKPQ6JYVhU?t=439 [1]: I remember being inexplicably taken when I watched Mindhunter by the male lead. I took a straw poll of several gay men I knew, and they all said that Jonathan Groff was sexy specifically for his voice, which is indeed quite high, noticeably so even just casually viewing his movies. Obviously, this anecdata doesn't undo the actual research in the article, but I do think it is a bit more complicated than presented here.
- kelseyfrog 5y agoMany untrained people have pitch/resonance confusion. Understanding the difference and disentangling them in order to deliberately modulate them forms the basis of transgender vocal training.
- lehi 5y agoCulture. Operas originally relegated bass and bass-baritones to comedic buffoon roles, with prominent parts reserved for tenors, falsettists, and the extreme of the castrati. Modern performances often transpose these hero parts to much lower ranges for contemporary tastes.
- screenbreakout 5y agoProbably anecdotal but I've noticed my kids when they were babies would noticeably calm down when I rumbled my voice in the deeper tones, maybe the cavemen of old cooing the kids in situations of danger attracted more attention in a matriarcal society?, or maybe the "beat box" quality of the lower tones just helped with music, dancing
- paulryanrogers 5y agoOr a fear reaction
- SamPatt 5y agoI have a deeper voice and in the workplace this appears to be an advantage. Hard to test it scientifically, but it seems my colleagues listen more intently when I speak than they do to others. This could be due to other factors but I've had multiple female colleagues / contractors comment on my voice and suggest I record audiobooks (I have).
- candlemas 5y agoElizabeth Holmes certainly thought it helped.
- the_pwner224 5y agoThis seems believable... it would also suggest that for WFH workers, it would be beneficial to do some artificial voice deepening on the microphone input. If you switch to a new job, nobody will ever know what your 'real' voice is. Just make sure you never forget to turn on the software before a meeting :) For an existing job, you might be able to gradually increase the pitch adjustment in small increments over the course of a few months? I suppose in the future we'll have implants to do this. Cosmetic surgery, but for the voice.
- davnn 5y agoWhile you’re at it you could also use some deep style transfer to improve your overall looks. Just make sure that no real image can be found anywhere. /s
- pcthrowaway 5y agoOne nice thing about fully-remote industries is that at least there's no preferential selection for height
- jterrys 5y agoStart off a new job as a v-tuber...
- SamPatt 5y ago
- 1123581321 5y agoRegarding the limits to the attractiveness of a very low voice, my pet theory is that they start to sound too mellow and like they belong to an inactive person. Someone who can absorb the stress of the day, be alert and active, and still have a deep voice, stands out, and those men are going to be physiologically forced out of the lowest ranges after spending time upright even if they don't tighten in response to stress. Again, just a pet theory, mostly based on past colleagues whose voices almost put me to sleep.
- lmpdev 5y agoI wonder if there has been any research done into pitch modulation of the human voice due to cultural pressure to "get ahead" An extreme example would be of Elizabeth Holmes' faux deep voice in interviews when her actual speaking voice would be an octave or so higher My speaking voice for example is about five or six semitones deeper than my tessitura when singing - and I'm not sure if that was developmental or genetic
- hankman86 5y agoDeep sounds travel further. I wonder if this made better leaders during hunter gatherer times. Like to command your tribesmen by yelling to them and attack that mammoth from behind. Or it’s simply that deep voices mean a larger pharynx, which is a proxy for more testosterone.
- throwaway65432_ 5y agoSo as a man is there any practical way to deepen one's voice?
- 8note 5y agoJoin a choir. Singing involves practice to widen your range
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoProtracted yelling, but the effect is temporary.
- MrYellowP 5y agoInteresting to read the comments, noticing how the word "sex", which identifies a person as male or female and is based on the reality of that person's body, has completely been replaced by the word "gender", which is purely imaginative and made up, with no base in actual reality. Reminds me of how empathy, which is something people are born with and raised out of, has been replaced with morals, which is something taught by "the system" as a replacement.
- jzellis 5y agoSpeaking as a man with a naturally deep speaking and singing voice that's been roughened by decades of smoking, drinking whiskey, etc., it definitely, uh, works, and has worked across cultural boundaries. But it's also true for women, to a point. Personally, I find huskier voices on women - a la Emma Stone - much sexier, all other things being equal. But I also find squeaky voices irritating. Totally subjective, I guess. Whatever the psychoevolutionary rationale, I can tell you that it most definitely works in my favor and has since my voice broke in high school. :-D
- bigodbiel 5y agoAlways apply simple heuristic: Big T! Of course there will be divergences, but it always returns to the baseline.
- macrowhat 5y ago