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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 23, 2014

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REAL LIFE NEWS: WHAT MAKES A VOICE CHARISMATIC

by Hazed

Scientists have been trying to quantify just what makes someone sound charismatic, and have come to the conclusion that it involves having a wide range of vocal frequencies which you can modulate to achieve a desired effect.

Rosario Signorello, an acoustic scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that having a charismatic voice has two aspects, one biological and the other based on language and culture.

The biological part depends on the length of your vocal cords, so it’s something you are born with (although presumably it can be altered by surgery). This determines whether your voice sounds high or low pitched. The pitch of the voice affects how people perceive you; low-pitched voices make listeners think you are a big person who is dominant and threatening, while high-pitched voices make people think of a small speaker who is more submissive and more benevolent.

Both these types of voice can be considered charismatic, depending on how you perform.

The language and culture part is more flexible because the way we perceive charisma is often learned, so a voice that is perceived to be authoritarian and threatening in some cultures will be seen as very passionate in others.

Signorello ran studies using speeches of politicians from Italy, France and Brazil, in which the words were stripped out leaving just the cadence and tone of the speeches. This meant the participants in the study would not be influenced by what the politicians were actually saying, just by their tone of voice. They were asked to rate the speakers using 67 different adjectives such as vigorous, sexy, wise, attractive and so on.

He altered different parameters of the voices to see if the effect they had on the listeners changed. The results showed that speakers who were perceived as sincere and reassuring tended to have a higher frequency voice and a narrower pitch range, while those seen as dominant and threatening had a low frequency voice with a wide pitch range.

However, which of the two types of voice the listener preferred varied depending their culture. “The Italians seem to need a low-pitched voice, and the French a high-pitched one, because of cultural reasons,” says Signorello. “The Italians seem to want a more dominant leader, and the French a more competent leader.”

Shame he didn’t study British or American politicians.

Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/what-makes-a-politician-sound-charismatic-9836980.html

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