October 12, 2016 • 6 mins
Christian explains why male humans' voices generally get lower than female humans' during puberty.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I am Scott and I'm Ben and we're from car Stuff.
We're the podcast that covers everything that floats, flies, swims,
or drives, adventures, thrills, chills literally, planes, trains and automobiles.
That's right. And you can find all of our episodes
on Google Play, Spotify, iTunes, and really anywhere else you
get your podcast. Hey everybody, if you're listening to brain Stuff,
(00:21):
you know that we love new ways to learn, and
that's why we love the Great Courses Plus video learning service.
Not only can you learn about any topic that interests
you there, you can also learn new skills or expand
on your hobbies. They've got courses about how to cook,
to take better photos, speak another language. You can even
learn how to play chess or draw. The Great Courses
(00:44):
Plus gives you unlimited access to over seven thousand engaging
video lectures, and they are presented by top professors, and
you can watch them anywhere, anytime, from any kind of device.
The Great Courses Plus allows you to explore your interests
whenever you want. Maybe you want to learn more about
playing chess, maybe you want to become a master of photography,
(01:06):
or maybe you want to learn how to understand investments.
And now the Great Courses Plus is offering brain Stuff
listeners a special opportunity to stream hundreds of their courses
free for one month when you sign up. Now find
courses that truly interest you and start learning more today.
The way to do it sign up to get your
free trial at the Great Courses Plus by going to
(01:27):
the Great Courses Plus dot com slash brain Stuff. That's
the Great Courses Plus dot com slash brain Stuff. Welcome
to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hello brain Stuff.
I'm Christian Saga, and today we're going to talk about
the human voice. You might have noticed that if you're
(01:49):
talking to a group of five year old boys and girls,
let's say you're asking them for advice about your investment portfolio,
there's not a big difference between the pitch of the
girl's voices and the pitch of the boy's voices. Yet,
if you talk to a group of thirty five year
old men and women, you notice that the men's voices
are on average a good bit deeper than the women's voices.
(02:12):
So why is that and how does it happen? Well,
first off, let's acknowledge that everyone is a special and
unique butterfly. And there's no rule about how men and
women's voices should sound, But on average, adult men's voices
have what's known as a lower fundamental frequency than adult
women's voices. The fundamental frequency is simply the scientific term
(02:37):
for how high or low a person's natural speaking voice sounds.
Sound frequency is measured in hurts, which is a measure
of how many times something happens in a second. So
a sound wave that vibrates a hundred times per second
produces a tone of a hundred hurts. The more cycles
per second, the higher the pitch. According to the National
(02:58):
Center for Voice and Speech, bay bees usually cry at
a frequency of around five hundred hurts. Children have speaking
frequencies in the range of two hundred and fifty to
four hundred hurts. By the time of adulthood. However, men
have an average fundamental frequency of about one hundred and
twenty five hurts and women about two hundred hurts. What
(03:20):
happened here? What why the big difference? Okay, to understand
why men's voices end up lower than women's voices, we
need to look at how the body produces sounds. So
let's take a magical journey to the inside of your neck.
Leading from your lungs to the cavity behind your mouth
and nose is a pipeline called the tray chia. You
use it to breathe. At the top of the tray
(03:41):
chia is a hollow organ called the larynx, or in
common parlance, the voice box. The larynx is amazing. For example,
when you swallow food. It is a part of the
larynx called the epiglottis that closes off your tra chea
and keeps you from getting gummy bears in your lungs.
The larynx is also what allows us to make sound
for talking or singing. To do this, you use your
(04:03):
lungs to push a column of air through the larynx
while using your laryngeal muscles to press together a pair
of membranes called the vocal folds, or more commonly, your
vocal chords. When you close the vocal folds like this,
the air you push out through them makes them vibrate,
and this vibration leads to sound. So the next time
(04:25):
you're just shrieking and shrieking until the cashier finally accepts
your expired coupon, thank your larynx. There are several factors
that can all have some effect on the fundamental frequency
of a person's voice, like the size of the larynx
and the differential development of facial bones and muscles. But
the most important factor to talk about is the length
(04:47):
of the vocal folds. If you pluck a string, the
length of the string affects the frequency of the note
that plays. Think about a guitar. When you press a
string down to a higher fret. On a guitar, you
shorten the length of the part of the string that
vibrates when you pluck it, and this produces a higher note.
The same thing happens inside your larynx. The longer the
(05:08):
vocal fold, the lower the note. During puberty, both boys
and girls experience growth of the vocal folds, leading to
lower voices, but the male hormone testosserone, which is released
by the testicles during puberty, typically causes boys vocal folds
to grow longer and thicker than girls. On average, adult
(05:29):
women have vocal folds somewhere around ten millimeters long, while
adult men have vocal folds in the neighborhood of sixteen millimeters. Consequently,
women are up there on the upper frets soloing into
oblivion like a high school kid who just learned how
to play eruption by Van Halen, and men are letting
the open strings ring like the intro of Nothing Else
(05:51):
Matters by Metallica. Now here's some bonus information for you.
Everyone knows what happens when you inhale some helium from
a party balloon or you know, straight from an industrial
helium transport truck. Your voice pitch gets higher. This is
because helium is less dense than air. But did you
know you can reverse the effect and give yourself a deep,
(06:12):
booming bridge troll voice by breathing a gas with a
higher density than your air, like zenon or sulfur hexafluoride.
But remember, your body needs air to live, and breathing
anything other than air can be dangerous, so don't try
this at home. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube,
(06:35):
and for more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com.
I am Scott and I'm Ben and we're from car Stuff.
We're the podcast that covers everything that floats, flies, swims,
or drives, adventures, thrills, chills literally, planes, trains and automobiles.
That's right. And you can find all of our episodes
on Google Play, Spotify, iTunes, and really anywhere else you
get your podcast. Hey everybody, if you're listening to brain Stuff,
(00:21):
you know that we love new ways to learn, and
that's why we love the Great Courses Plus video learning service.
Not only can you learn about any topic that interests
you there, you can also learn new skills or expand
on your hobbies. They've got courses about how to cook,
to take better photos, speak another language. You can even
learn how to play chess or draw. The Great Courses
(00:44):
Plus gives you unlimited access to over seven thousand engaging
video lectures, and they are presented by top professors, and
you can watch them anywhere, anytime, from any kind of device.
The Great Courses Plus allows you to explore your interests
whenever you want. Maybe you want to learn more about
playing chess, maybe you want to become a master of photography,
(01:06):
or maybe you want to learn how to understand investments.
And now the Great Courses Plus is offering brain Stuff
listeners a special opportunity to stream hundreds of their courses
free for one month when you sign up. Now find
courses that truly interest you and start learning more today.
The way to do it sign up to get your
free trial at the Great Courses Plus by going to
(01:27):
the Great Courses Plus dot com slash brain Stuff. That's
the Great Courses Plus dot com slash brain Stuff. Welcome
to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hello brain Stuff.
I'm Christian Saga, and today we're going to talk about
the human voice. You might have noticed that if you're
(01:49):
talking to a group of five year old boys and girls,
let's say you're asking them for advice about your investment portfolio,
there's not a big difference between the pitch of the
girl's voices and the pitch of the boy's voices. Yet,
if you talk to a group of thirty five year
old men and women, you notice that the men's voices
are on average a good bit deeper than the women's voices.
(02:12):
So why is that and how does it happen? Well,
first off, let's acknowledge that everyone is a special and
unique butterfly. And there's no rule about how men and
women's voices should sound, But on average, adult men's voices
have what's known as a lower fundamental frequency than adult
women's voices. The fundamental frequency is simply the scientific term
(02:37):
for how high or low a person's natural speaking voice sounds.
Sound frequency is measured in hurts, which is a measure
of how many times something happens in a second. So
a sound wave that vibrates a hundred times per second
produces a tone of a hundred hurts. The more cycles
per second, the higher the pitch. According to the National
(02:58):
Center for Voice and Speech, bay bees usually cry at
a frequency of around five hundred hurts. Children have speaking
frequencies in the range of two hundred and fifty to
four hundred hurts. By the time of adulthood. However, men
have an average fundamental frequency of about one hundred and
twenty five hurts and women about two hundred hurts. What
(03:20):
happened here? What why the big difference? Okay, to understand
why men's voices end up lower than women's voices, we
need to look at how the body produces sounds. So
let's take a magical journey to the inside of your neck.
Leading from your lungs to the cavity behind your mouth
and nose is a pipeline called the tray chia. You
use it to breathe. At the top of the tray
(03:41):
chia is a hollow organ called the larynx, or in
common parlance, the voice box. The larynx is amazing. For example,
when you swallow food. It is a part of the
larynx called the epiglottis that closes off your tra chea
and keeps you from getting gummy bears in your lungs.
The larynx is also what allows us to make sound
for talking or singing. To do this, you use your
(04:03):
lungs to push a column of air through the larynx
while using your laryngeal muscles to press together a pair
of membranes called the vocal folds, or more commonly, your
vocal chords. When you close the vocal folds like this,
the air you push out through them makes them vibrate,
and this vibration leads to sound. So the next time
(04:25):
you're just shrieking and shrieking until the cashier finally accepts
your expired coupon, thank your larynx. There are several factors
that can all have some effect on the fundamental frequency
of a person's voice, like the size of the larynx
and the differential development of facial bones and muscles. But
the most important factor to talk about is the length
(04:47):
of the vocal folds. If you pluck a string, the
length of the string affects the frequency of the note
that plays. Think about a guitar. When you press a
string down to a higher fret. On a guitar, you
shorten the length of the part of the string that
vibrates when you pluck it, and this produces a higher note.
The same thing happens inside your larynx. The longer the
(05:08):
vocal fold, the lower the note. During puberty, both boys
and girls experience growth of the vocal folds, leading to
lower voices, but the male hormone testosserone, which is released
by the testicles during puberty, typically causes boys vocal folds
to grow longer and thicker than girls. On average, adult
(05:29):
women have vocal folds somewhere around ten millimeters long, while
adult men have vocal folds in the neighborhood of sixteen millimeters. Consequently,
women are up there on the upper frets soloing into
oblivion like a high school kid who just learned how
to play eruption by Van Halen, and men are letting
the open strings ring like the intro of Nothing Else
(05:51):
Matters by Metallica. Now here's some bonus information for you.
Everyone knows what happens when you inhale some helium from
a party balloon or you know, straight from an industrial
helium transport truck. Your voice pitch gets higher. This is
because helium is less dense than air. But did you
know you can reverse the effect and give yourself a deep,
(06:12):
booming bridge troll voice by breathing a gas with a
higher density than your air, like zenon or sulfur hexafluoride.
But remember, your body needs air to live, and breathing
anything other than air can be dangerous, so don't try
this at home. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube,
(06:35):
and for more on this and thousands of other topics,
visit how stuff works dot com.
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