Scientists discover "the perfect voice"

The scientists are now claiming to have discovered "the perfect voice".

Linguist Andrew Linn from Sheffield University and sound engineer Shannon Harris examined 50 voice examples to find the best balance of tone, intonation, speed, frequency and words per minute.

Sky News picked up the story and invited Gillyanne on as voice expert to comment on the idea of a perfect voice. (Check out the Vocal Process website for more info).

And if that really is the recipe for the perfect voice, great. It's really easy to analyse and the setup is easy to teach.

Now as far as I'm concerned, "the perfect voice" doesn't exist. Even the concept of the perfect voice is flawed.

And that's for a specific reason.

Voices 'move'. Voices need to be flexible, because they are called on to do so many different things.
Ordinary people talk, yell, cry, moan, laugh, and make all sorts of expressive sounds. Professional voice users have to do all of that, and usually have to do a bigger range of sounds, or do it for a lot longer at a higher level of competence.

The online examples of male and female "perfect voice" sound warm and fluent, with fairly wide intonation leaps and sentences that end with downward pitch direction. Technically, they both have slight glottal chink (a breathy sound that is not completely clear), and some thyroid tilt to sound warm and gentle (unthreatening). Interestingly, they both speak at approximately the same pitch centre, albeit an octave apart. And the pitch is low (around low Ab) although the resonance is bright.

All of which is lovely...but the snag is that they won't be heard more than a couple of feet away. So no use for teachers, sports trainers, sergeant majors, opera singers, public speakers, or in the pubs and clubs.
However, it IS really useful for anyone using microphones or talking one-to-one. So television presenters, radio DJ.s, telephone sales assistants, therapists and vicars.

In other words, it works really well at close quarters when you want to sound confident, trustworthy and warm.

Would you buy a car from this man?


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86 things you never hear a singer say (free ebook)
The new Voicebox Videos DVD website tells you all about the Looking At A Voice endoscopy videos

The Vocal Process website has a series of free articles on vocal technique and style, memorising and different musical genres.