March 4, 2014 • 20 mins
The Barry White Effect: What does voice quality tell us about sexual fitness in a potential mate? Do the deep, velvet tones of Barry White have a scientifically-proven effect on our libido? What about Marilyn Monroe's high, breathy voice? All shall be revealed in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Be sure to watch Julie's video on the topic as well.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie. Can't get
a nun? You love Douglas? Yeah? Are you? Are you
a frog? I'm Berry White. Oh okay, I was getting
(00:25):
a little more cartoon frog than Verry White. But man,
this place, I'm telling you how stuff works. You try
to bust out an accent here or any sort of
vocal nuance, and you have a bunch of experts chining in.
But no, it's good to you went for Verry White,
because today we're talking about the very wide effect. We're
talking a little bit about Barry White, a little bit
(00:47):
about Marilyn Monroe, throwing in some koalas here and there.
But but first, let let's just talk very briefly about
Marilyn Monroe and Barry White from sort of a cultural standpoint,
like both of these are icons of sex appeal that
really may not hold up as we were discussing earlier,
to uh to, to modern pop culture standards, and certainly
(01:09):
to any individual out there, you might not think, oh, well,
you know, Verry Wide is the the be all of
male sexuality or you might you might not have Marilyn
Monroe posters all over your dorm room. Um, but they
still have this sort of iconic um power to them. Yeah,
they do. They are just brimming with sexuality. And some
(01:29):
of that is because of the type of music that
very White created. It was very much like I'm gonna
put the player on and we're gonna get down right now.
He wasn't doing historical ballads about you know, about the
battles in in history or anything. He was very much
get down to business. And in terms of Marylyn Row,
I mean she is sort of like a female through
(01:53):
the cultural lens completely, you know, um, characaturist, sort of
the Betty boot living Betty boop. Yeah, and she does
for the roles she played. I don't recall ever having
seen Marilyn Monroe movie where she threw a karate chop
or um, you know, or fought an alien on a
space ship. It was it was very much Marilyn on
her as Marilyn Monroe. Um, you know, copy and paste,
(02:16):
repeat right. That was her purview, right. She wasn't trying
to put forward this idea of a balanced idea of
what a woman could be or should be. So here
we have these big iconic presences and we have a
couple of studies to actually relate to them. And at
the bottom of all this, there's this idea that we
might actually have a voice prejudice. We might hear certain
(02:39):
voices and gravitate toward them. And we're going to explore
this idea. Yeah, and and and that end of itself
when we can all relate to that there are certain
voices that are going to annoy us in our lives,
and we're gonna have certain uh taste that revolve around
other voices. Like it's like some people are gonna be
really annoyed by a high nasal voice or or even
a really deep voice. I could say that as being annoying.
(03:00):
I mean, there's so many like everything that we've discussed
concerning where the human condition meets uh Darwinian evolution. There's
there's what we have evolved to be, and then there's
the complications that have arisen from the ascension of human
consciousness and the layers of culture we put over everything well,
and one of the ways that we try to cut
through all of that and try to figure out whether
(03:21):
or not there's some sort of baseline two voices, and
the way that we react to them is we look
to the animal world, specifically residents, frequencies, and animals. So
we've seen studies of animals and birds that reveal that
listeners can figure out body size and what the intent
of the collar is based our frequency, voice quality, and
(03:43):
format spacing. So this format spacing is really important because
as we're going to go on and talk about these
lower pitches, those are really are at the heart of
what makes something very low pitched. So essentially, lower pitched
vocalizations are less space between something called formats okay, and
(04:04):
these formats uh, These frequencies are emphasized frequencies within vocalizations
and humans, formats are essential to speech and they help
us to distinguish between vowels. So, in effect, an animals
roar or vocal communication of its choice is going to
be a key to its size. The lower, more baritone
(04:26):
sounds are going to say hey, I'm a big animal,
as opposed to the higher ones that would say hey,
I'm a smaller animal. Yeah. I mean, there's this idea
that pure tone like sounds are more likely to suggest
a smaller size, submissiveness and fear that sounds yeah like that. Yeah, yeah.
(04:47):
Now one particular study, because because you want specific examples
of this, I'm sure we would looked at a two
thousand and eleven study publishing the Journal of Experimental Biology,
and they looked at koala bears. Now, koala bears, if
you don't know anything about up them, you might think
of them as purely a sexual creatures that live only
on you know, tree limbs or in baby cribs. You know,
they're Steph quala airs. I mean, they're very adorable looking,
(05:09):
but of course, like any animal, they engaged and rather
raucous sexual life all their own. UM. We've we've discussed
in the past lesbian qualas that will push one another
up against plants and and have their way, and so
you know, the kualas are a decent place to look
for examples of of this kind of vocal frequency. UM
(05:30):
is used as a kind of mating signature. And indeed
they found it by um that the that the male
qualas advertise their size by changing the residents of their
calls lower resonance. Again called formats have a more baritone quality,
and that just just telling the lady quala is out
there Hey, I'm big. I'm a big kuala and the
the underlying theme here is that I'm a big koala
(05:52):
that can fight off other koalas. So if you, if
you hear me, guys, know that I am a rather
sizeable opponent, you know, on a mess with me, and ladies,
I am a preferred nate because as a large koala,
I'm more likely to give you large koala offspring who
will in turn have mating success in their lives. So
there's a very you know, hardcore Darwinian message here. Uh,
(06:15):
I mean, it all comes down to the passing of
jeans one generation to the next and trying to gain
the next generation for success. Yeah, and uh this actually
points to the research of a group of twenty male
kualas during the kuala breeding season at Lone Pine Koala
Sanctuary in Australia. And usually these guys, these little cute marsupials,
(06:36):
are pretty quiet this the year, but when it is
mating season they do have that deep, choppy growl. And so,
as you say, the promise here and the research that
was born out here is again there's a larger body
size headsize that's correlated with the lower frequencies and this
idea of hey, I'm going to create more competitive offspring
(06:56):
for you. And in the case of something like a
foul dear, a low frequency growl that's heard off in
the distance might discourage another would be suitors to a
fellow dough, let's say, to retreat from the area. So
it's not just like hey, I'm gonna give you some
really sturdy young n's, but it could also be something
(07:19):
of a play that's kind of like, hey, you better
step off because I'm in the area. All right. So this,
i'll leads to the inevitable question what about humans? Is it?
Is it the same with us? What about Barry White?
And indeed had his very white factor because Barry White,
just to to to remind everyone, was a very big man.
I mean he he struggled with obesity, you know, most
of his adult life, but he's also six four. He
(07:42):
was a big dude, an imposing figure, but also one
that that again became iconic because he had this uh
this kind of soft, uh teddy bear kind of quality
to him as well, like you never doubted that he
could he could stand up for himself and he could
put a new place. But he was a approachable he was.
He had this lovable charm and charisma about him. Well,
(08:05):
there is a study that was published in Plos one
called human vocal attractiveness as Signaled by body size projection,
and this looks at both high frequency and low frequency
and it found, let's look at the males first, that
male listeners preferred female voices with high pitch, breathy voice
in wide format spacing because it correlated with a smaller
(08:27):
body size. Does this sound like anyone you've ever known? President?
I think that was that was pretty spot on. It's
kind of hard to do. Um. Now, a breathy voice
is indicative of the higher pitches that you would see
in younger, thinner vocal cords. So there's this idea that
(08:48):
it is suggesting that it's a youthful person. Um. And
then it is achieved by increasing the amount of air
passing through vocal chords, giving it an aspirated quality. For
female listeners, of course, they they prefer that deep, husky
male voice. But again, not only doesn't need to be
a deep voice, it needs to be that breathy voice.
(09:08):
And again think of Barry White. Uh, the breathiness to it.
It has this kind of calmness too, is saying, yeah,
I'm a big I'm a big guy, but I'm not
a dangerous guy. I'm an approachable guy. I'm a lovable guy. Uh.
For instance, John Goodman's voice we're discussing earlier generally does
not come up as possessing very wide qualities, even though
(09:28):
John Goodman is UH is of course a big man
with a very deep, very deep voice. But in most
of the most like interviews I've seen with him, and
and certainly in any of his film roles, he tends
to have a very abrasive quality and and it's kind
of a fast talker much of the time, and kind
of a grumbling nature to everything he says that. So
(09:48):
it doesn't have that breath equality. It doesn't. He doesn't
have that teddy bear quality that you get with Barry White,
and that, as this study reveals, that's what UH female
listeners are supposedly going for. Yeah, the idea is that
that breathiness kind of mitigates any sort of aggressivity that
might be perceived in the voice. So you go, oh,
what a gentle giant. So you'll see information all throughout
(10:10):
scientific literature that a deep voice is part and parcel
of sexual selection and that men with low frequency short
space formats have more sexual hookups. You'll see this in literature.
In fact, there's a paper by the name of voice
Pitch Predicts Reprotective Success and Male Hunter Gathers, and it
bears out the fact that the men of the Hodza
(10:33):
people are a Tanzanian hunter gathers assired far more children
than their higher pitched counterparts. That's important to note that
they went to a secluded community like this to conduct
this study, because once you start factoring in things like
birth control, that just kind of excused the whole human
mating platform. Now, one of the things that excuse this
(10:54):
idea of lower pitch voices as part and parcel of
sexual selection. K evolution is a paper published by Lee
Simmons at All in the December twenty eleven issue of
p l O S One, and it says, hey, men
with deeper attractive voices may have lower sperm quality than
then with less attractive voices. And this was determined by
(11:18):
seamen analysis which revealed that men with deeper voices have
lower scores on seven motility parameters. Now we're talking about
fifty four male participants from the University of Western Australia.
They were recruited for this and this is just one study,
but I think it gives you the idea that it's
not quite as cut and dried as some of the
(11:39):
literature in the past would put out there. And researchers
believe that the lower sperm quality reflects a trade off
that comes with having to compete for mats. Okay, because
if you were a say this the squirrelier uh mail
with a higher voice or the sort of annoying voice,
you you may not get that many shots at the prize.
(12:00):
So when you do, it's got to count. But if
you are the very wide of the Kuala world world,
you know you've got numerous opportunities to at the bullside.
Alright'm gonna take a quick break and we're going to
talk about something else that actually maked Trump the Verry
White and Maryland Monroe voice, and it has to do
with our own voices. All Right, we are back and
(12:25):
during the break, um Noel, our producer, myself and Robert
had this quick little discussion of who could actually take
on the mantle of Barry White these days, Who is
the modern Berry White, who can deliver all that sultry fuzziness. Yeah,
and I was thinking, like I was thinking, okay, John Goodman, No,
(12:46):
that didn't work. And I was like running through all
these different names of like sort of big or deep voiced,
you know, male actors or celebrities, and none of them
were really clicking. Like all of them just seemed a
little off. But Noel nailed it. He said, I got it,
And he said Scarlett Johanson. Yeah, because Scarlett Johnson has
this wonderful, like husky female voice that I I ventured
(13:07):
to say a lot of people find attractive. It's great.
And what I love about it is is this little
gender twist, because really it's sort of if you took
all of the best aspects of Marilyn and Rose voice
and Barry Whites and put it together, and man, I
would love to have her voice. That would be great.
It is. It is a really good voice. I've admired
it since uh was it a ghost World back in
(13:28):
the day. Yeah, well admired. Well done, Scarlett. All Right,
So we we may love all the huskiness, the breathiness,
but it turns out that ultimately we just love to
hear ourselves in others. That trumps everything. Else. Yeah. A
new University of British Columbia study finds that we prefer
voices that are similar to our own. And the reason
(13:49):
here is because they convey These voices convey a soothing
sense of community and social belongingness. It's the known quantity
right right, So we automatically be connect and we begin
to empathize with some anounce if they sound like us.
And Molly Babbel great last name, by the way, a
professor in the Department of Linguistics and her colleagues at
the University of California, Santa Cruz asked college age participants
(14:12):
in California to rate the attractiveness of thirty male voices
and thirty female voices reading isolated words. And these sixty
voices represent a geographical areas west of the Mississippi River. Now,
one of the things that stood out is that the
California folks, the participants had a really strong preference for
female voices that pronounced the the oo vowel, the double
(14:34):
o vowel sound from a word like goose further forward
in the mouth, as opposed to the um sound that
someone in Fargo, North Dakota might make when saying gorse.
In that case, the word is originating deeper back in
the mouth. Yeah, this was This was fascinating because on
(14:54):
one hand, you have to sort of realize that at
the end of the day when you're when you're thinking
about what's attracted and what's not attractive and another human being. Uh,
You're you're getting down to are these people I want
to spend time with? Or in the in the case
of potential mate, is this someone I want to to
spend an examinant amount of time with? And uh and
and so you're going to want somebody or you're gonna
(15:16):
want people that you have things in common with, that
you share some sort of sense of community. Uh. And
then this, you know, this goes back through thousands and
thousands of years of human history. You know, you want
people need to belong They need to belong to a
group in order to survive. There's a survival advantage in
being able to to to sync with those around you. Yeah,
(15:37):
and I think that it's it's interesting that that is
more powerful than this sort of veiled idea that breathy voice,
husky voice is going to deliver on on sex um
essentially as what we're thinking, right we're thinking about marily
Monroe or Barry White. Um, and that it really does.
The sense of community trumps that promise, that suggestion. And
(15:59):
the only thing that kind of gets in the way
of this idea of community and familiarity is the foreign
language paradox. Yes. And I kept thinking about this myself
when I was reading a lot of this initial stuff,
because I was thinking, Okay, what are the voices that
I would say, I, you know, objectively find uh attractive.
I would say that like a like in male voices,
(16:22):
like a British accent, and in and in among the ladies,
a German accent. Really, yeah, like the German accent. I
don't know, there's something like strong and commanding about a
German accent. Anyway, Well that's the said even real German,
I don't. Yeah, that's rapid, my friend. Well but it did.
I know, you didn't put your heart into it whole
(16:42):
and far. See Okay, but you're that's okay, So that's
not a good example. But um, but still are you
running it for me? But see, so that's what I
would say if someone had asked me. But of course,
in reality, I did not marry anyone with a with
a German accent or a British accent and uh and
and so I end up sort of defaulting to the
(17:03):
argument that you end up mirring someone who are choosing
a partner. It sounds more like you somebody who is
uh in my case, someone who was raised in the
South but has like less of the Southern accent. Uh.
My Michigan people to your right. Now, I wasn't raised
in the South, okay, but I have been here long
enough that I've taken on the twang, that's for sure.
Professor Babbel again, she says that once you're outside of
(17:26):
a certain range of familiarity, novel and exotic sounding voices
might become more attractive. She says, we all have to
keep in mind that we find some accents more preferable
than others because of social stereotypes that are associated with them.
And I thought, you know what, I think she's right.
I'm kind of a sucker for that, because I'm a
sucker for a British accent, because I think that it it,
you know, is endowed with a bunch of different things
(17:48):
for me, like worldliness and wit. Now, of course, both
of us when we're talking about British accents. We're probably
talking about very specific British accents. We're thinking thinking more
about like Ben king Lee and like Tom Hudleston, that
kind of accent, rather than like a strong Birmingham, England.
And I'm not thinking Cockney and I'm not thinking Downton
(18:09):
Abbey either. That the Cockney accent is kind of sexy
in its own right, you know, I suppose it can
be yes, but again, the the idea that of an
exotic voice is a void, and it's a voice that
is uh, that is new, it's novel and maybe a
little dangerous, and that does appeal to the novelty seeking
aspects of an individual. You know, we want new experiences,
(18:30):
we want new ideas, and we've we've podcasted on this before,
so you could definitely see where you would gravitate towards
individuals with those qualities, and you're projecting your fantasies onto that,
right and and it's kind of so we end up
seeing the situation where there's there the voices that sound
like our own, and those are cherished, and then there's
the voices far away that sound nothing like our own,
and those are cherished. It's that gulf in between that
(18:52):
just turns us off, you know, like they're saying they're
they're there, their vowe, their vowels are coming out just
a little weird, and I don't like it. It's the other, right,
it's a and we always have a fear of the other.
So it's interesting to see it played out like that.
All right. So that's pretty much an overview of your
Barry White, your mail women rose out there. Also, I
have a video on this topic, and in it, I'm
(19:14):
going to reveal the real reason why Marilyn Monroe spoke
like a di ide then and revoiced gal. Interesting. Yeah,
I can't reveal it here. You gotta go to uh
YouTube mind stuff show. Check out also stuff to Alow
your mind dot com that of course is the mothership.
You'll find links out to all of our stuff. There.
(19:36):
You'll find links to our Facebook, our Twitter, our tumbler page,
or Google Plus, uh you name it. We probably signed
up for a one point or another, and as well
as all of our our podcast episodes going all the
way back through our history. You'll find all of our
blog posts. Stuff to blow your mind dot com check
it out, throw some traffic. We love it when you
do so If you guys have some thoughts on this,
(19:56):
You see that Marilyn Monroe video and you have some questions,
or you you've got a qualm there about some Marilynon
Row stuff, or you have some ideas about Barry White
and the reasons why we were attracted to certain voices.
You can email us at blow the Mind at Discovery
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
(20:18):
topics because it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie. Can't get
a nun? You love Douglas? Yeah? Are you? Are you
a frog? I'm Berry White. Oh okay, I was getting
(00:25):
a little more cartoon frog than Verry White. But man,
this place, I'm telling you how stuff works. You try
to bust out an accent here or any sort of
vocal nuance, and you have a bunch of experts chining in.
But no, it's good to you went for Verry White,
because today we're talking about the very wide effect. We're
talking a little bit about Barry White, a little bit
(00:47):
about Marilyn Monroe, throwing in some koalas here and there.
But but first, let let's just talk very briefly about
Marilyn Monroe and Barry White from sort of a cultural standpoint,
like both of these are icons of sex appeal that
really may not hold up as we were discussing earlier,
to uh to, to modern pop culture standards, and certainly
(01:09):
to any individual out there, you might not think, oh, well,
you know, Verry Wide is the the be all of
male sexuality or you might you might not have Marilyn
Monroe posters all over your dorm room. Um, but they
still have this sort of iconic um power to them. Yeah,
they do. They are just brimming with sexuality. And some
(01:29):
of that is because of the type of music that
very White created. It was very much like I'm gonna
put the player on and we're gonna get down right now.
He wasn't doing historical ballads about you know, about the
battles in in history or anything. He was very much
get down to business. And in terms of Marylyn Row,
I mean she is sort of like a female through
(01:53):
the cultural lens completely, you know, um, characaturist, sort of
the Betty boot living Betty boop. Yeah, and she does
for the roles she played. I don't recall ever having
seen Marilyn Monroe movie where she threw a karate chop
or um, you know, or fought an alien on a
space ship. It was it was very much Marilyn on
her as Marilyn Monroe. Um, you know, copy and paste,
(02:16):
repeat right. That was her purview, right. She wasn't trying
to put forward this idea of a balanced idea of
what a woman could be or should be. So here
we have these big iconic presences and we have a
couple of studies to actually relate to them. And at
the bottom of all this, there's this idea that we
might actually have a voice prejudice. We might hear certain
(02:39):
voices and gravitate toward them. And we're going to explore
this idea. Yeah, and and and that end of itself
when we can all relate to that there are certain
voices that are going to annoy us in our lives,
and we're gonna have certain uh taste that revolve around
other voices. Like it's like some people are gonna be
really annoyed by a high nasal voice or or even
a really deep voice. I could say that as being annoying.
(03:00):
I mean, there's so many like everything that we've discussed
concerning where the human condition meets uh Darwinian evolution. There's
there's what we have evolved to be, and then there's
the complications that have arisen from the ascension of human
consciousness and the layers of culture we put over everything well,
and one of the ways that we try to cut
through all of that and try to figure out whether
(03:21):
or not there's some sort of baseline two voices, and
the way that we react to them is we look
to the animal world, specifically residents, frequencies, and animals. So
we've seen studies of animals and birds that reveal that
listeners can figure out body size and what the intent
of the collar is based our frequency, voice quality, and
(03:43):
format spacing. So this format spacing is really important because
as we're going to go on and talk about these
lower pitches, those are really are at the heart of
what makes something very low pitched. So essentially, lower pitched
vocalizations are less space between something called formats okay, and
(04:04):
these formats uh, These frequencies are emphasized frequencies within vocalizations
and humans, formats are essential to speech and they help
us to distinguish between vowels. So, in effect, an animals
roar or vocal communication of its choice is going to
be a key to its size. The lower, more baritone
(04:26):
sounds are going to say hey, I'm a big animal,
as opposed to the higher ones that would say hey,
I'm a smaller animal. Yeah. I mean, there's this idea
that pure tone like sounds are more likely to suggest
a smaller size, submissiveness and fear that sounds yeah like that. Yeah, yeah.
(04:47):
Now one particular study, because because you want specific examples
of this, I'm sure we would looked at a two
thousand and eleven study publishing the Journal of Experimental Biology,
and they looked at koala bears. Now, koala bears, if
you don't know anything about up them, you might think
of them as purely a sexual creatures that live only
on you know, tree limbs or in baby cribs. You know,
they're Steph quala airs. I mean, they're very adorable looking,
(05:09):
but of course, like any animal, they engaged and rather
raucous sexual life all their own. UM. We've we've discussed
in the past lesbian qualas that will push one another
up against plants and and have their way, and so
you know, the kualas are a decent place to look
for examples of of this kind of vocal frequency. UM
(05:30):
is used as a kind of mating signature. And indeed
they found it by um that the that the male
qualas advertise their size by changing the residents of their
calls lower resonance. Again called formats have a more baritone quality,
and that just just telling the lady quala is out
there Hey, I'm big. I'm a big kuala and the
the underlying theme here is that I'm a big koala
(05:52):
that can fight off other koalas. So if you, if
you hear me, guys, know that I am a rather
sizeable opponent, you know, on a mess with me, and ladies,
I am a preferred nate because as a large koala,
I'm more likely to give you large koala offspring who
will in turn have mating success in their lives. So
there's a very you know, hardcore Darwinian message here. Uh,
(06:15):
I mean, it all comes down to the passing of
jeans one generation to the next and trying to gain
the next generation for success. Yeah, and uh this actually
points to the research of a group of twenty male
kualas during the kuala breeding season at Lone Pine Koala
Sanctuary in Australia. And usually these guys, these little cute marsupials,
(06:36):
are pretty quiet this the year, but when it is
mating season they do have that deep, choppy growl. And so,
as you say, the promise here and the research that
was born out here is again there's a larger body
size headsize that's correlated with the lower frequencies and this
idea of hey, I'm going to create more competitive offspring
(06:56):
for you. And in the case of something like a
foul dear, a low frequency growl that's heard off in
the distance might discourage another would be suitors to a
fellow dough, let's say, to retreat from the area. So
it's not just like hey, I'm gonna give you some
really sturdy young n's, but it could also be something
(07:19):
of a play that's kind of like, hey, you better
step off because I'm in the area. All right. So this,
i'll leads to the inevitable question what about humans? Is it?
Is it the same with us? What about Barry White?
And indeed had his very white factor because Barry White,
just to to to remind everyone, was a very big man.
I mean he he struggled with obesity, you know, most
of his adult life, but he's also six four. He
(07:42):
was a big dude, an imposing figure, but also one
that that again became iconic because he had this uh
this kind of soft, uh teddy bear kind of quality
to him as well, like you never doubted that he
could he could stand up for himself and he could
put a new place. But he was a approachable he was.
He had this lovable charm and charisma about him. Well,
(08:05):
there is a study that was published in Plos one
called human vocal attractiveness as Signaled by body size projection,
and this looks at both high frequency and low frequency
and it found, let's look at the males first, that
male listeners preferred female voices with high pitch, breathy voice
in wide format spacing because it correlated with a smaller
(08:27):
body size. Does this sound like anyone you've ever known? President?
I think that was that was pretty spot on. It's
kind of hard to do. Um. Now, a breathy voice
is indicative of the higher pitches that you would see
in younger, thinner vocal cords. So there's this idea that
(08:48):
it is suggesting that it's a youthful person. Um. And
then it is achieved by increasing the amount of air
passing through vocal chords, giving it an aspirated quality. For
female listeners, of course, they they prefer that deep, husky
male voice. But again, not only doesn't need to be
a deep voice, it needs to be that breathy voice.
(09:08):
And again think of Barry White. Uh, the breathiness to it.
It has this kind of calmness too, is saying, yeah,
I'm a big I'm a big guy, but I'm not
a dangerous guy. I'm an approachable guy. I'm a lovable guy. Uh.
For instance, John Goodman's voice we're discussing earlier generally does
not come up as possessing very wide qualities, even though
(09:28):
John Goodman is UH is of course a big man
with a very deep, very deep voice. But in most
of the most like interviews I've seen with him, and
and certainly in any of his film roles, he tends
to have a very abrasive quality and and it's kind
of a fast talker much of the time, and kind
of a grumbling nature to everything he says that. So
(09:48):
it doesn't have that breath equality. It doesn't. He doesn't
have that teddy bear quality that you get with Barry White,
and that, as this study reveals, that's what UH female
listeners are supposedly going for. Yeah, the idea is that
that breathiness kind of mitigates any sort of aggressivity that
might be perceived in the voice. So you go, oh,
what a gentle giant. So you'll see information all throughout
(10:10):
scientific literature that a deep voice is part and parcel
of sexual selection and that men with low frequency short
space formats have more sexual hookups. You'll see this in literature.
In fact, there's a paper by the name of voice
Pitch Predicts Reprotective Success and Male Hunter Gathers, and it
bears out the fact that the men of the Hodza
(10:33):
people are a Tanzanian hunter gathers assired far more children
than their higher pitched counterparts. That's important to note that
they went to a secluded community like this to conduct
this study, because once you start factoring in things like
birth control, that just kind of excused the whole human
mating platform. Now, one of the things that excuse this
(10:54):
idea of lower pitch voices as part and parcel of
sexual selection. K evolution is a paper published by Lee
Simmons at All in the December twenty eleven issue of
p l O S One, and it says, hey, men
with deeper attractive voices may have lower sperm quality than
then with less attractive voices. And this was determined by
(11:18):
seamen analysis which revealed that men with deeper voices have
lower scores on seven motility parameters. Now we're talking about
fifty four male participants from the University of Western Australia.
They were recruited for this and this is just one study,
but I think it gives you the idea that it's
not quite as cut and dried as some of the
(11:39):
literature in the past would put out there. And researchers
believe that the lower sperm quality reflects a trade off
that comes with having to compete for mats. Okay, because
if you were a say this the squirrelier uh mail
with a higher voice or the sort of annoying voice,
you you may not get that many shots at the prize.
(12:00):
So when you do, it's got to count. But if
you are the very wide of the Kuala world world,
you know you've got numerous opportunities to at the bullside.
Alright'm gonna take a quick break and we're going to
talk about something else that actually maked Trump the Verry
White and Maryland Monroe voice, and it has to do
with our own voices. All Right, we are back and
(12:25):
during the break, um Noel, our producer, myself and Robert
had this quick little discussion of who could actually take
on the mantle of Barry White these days, Who is
the modern Berry White, who can deliver all that sultry fuzziness. Yeah,
and I was thinking, like I was thinking, okay, John Goodman, No,
(12:46):
that didn't work. And I was like running through all
these different names of like sort of big or deep voiced,
you know, male actors or celebrities, and none of them
were really clicking. Like all of them just seemed a
little off. But Noel nailed it. He said, I got it,
And he said Scarlett Johanson. Yeah, because Scarlett Johnson has
this wonderful, like husky female voice that I I ventured
(13:07):
to say a lot of people find attractive. It's great.
And what I love about it is is this little
gender twist, because really it's sort of if you took
all of the best aspects of Marilyn and Rose voice
and Barry Whites and put it together, and man, I
would love to have her voice. That would be great.
It is. It is a really good voice. I've admired
it since uh was it a ghost World back in
(13:28):
the day. Yeah, well admired. Well done, Scarlett. All Right,
So we we may love all the huskiness, the breathiness,
but it turns out that ultimately we just love to
hear ourselves in others. That trumps everything. Else. Yeah. A
new University of British Columbia study finds that we prefer
voices that are similar to our own. And the reason
(13:49):
here is because they convey These voices convey a soothing
sense of community and social belongingness. It's the known quantity
right right, So we automatically be connect and we begin
to empathize with some anounce if they sound like us.
And Molly Babbel great last name, by the way, a
professor in the Department of Linguistics and her colleagues at
the University of California, Santa Cruz asked college age participants
(14:12):
in California to rate the attractiveness of thirty male voices
and thirty female voices reading isolated words. And these sixty
voices represent a geographical areas west of the Mississippi River. Now,
one of the things that stood out is that the
California folks, the participants had a really strong preference for
female voices that pronounced the the oo vowel, the double
(14:34):
o vowel sound from a word like goose further forward
in the mouth, as opposed to the um sound that
someone in Fargo, North Dakota might make when saying gorse.
In that case, the word is originating deeper back in
the mouth. Yeah, this was This was fascinating because on
(14:54):
one hand, you have to sort of realize that at
the end of the day when you're when you're thinking
about what's attracted and what's not attractive and another human being. Uh,
You're you're getting down to are these people I want
to spend time with? Or in the in the case
of potential mate, is this someone I want to to
spend an examinant amount of time with? And uh and
and so you're going to want somebody or you're gonna
(15:16):
want people that you have things in common with, that
you share some sort of sense of community. Uh. And
then this, you know, this goes back through thousands and
thousands of years of human history. You know, you want
people need to belong They need to belong to a
group in order to survive. There's a survival advantage in
being able to to to sync with those around you. Yeah,
(15:37):
and I think that it's it's interesting that that is
more powerful than this sort of veiled idea that breathy voice,
husky voice is going to deliver on on sex um
essentially as what we're thinking, right we're thinking about marily
Monroe or Barry White. Um, and that it really does.
The sense of community trumps that promise, that suggestion. And
(15:59):
the only thing that kind of gets in the way
of this idea of community and familiarity is the foreign
language paradox. Yes. And I kept thinking about this myself
when I was reading a lot of this initial stuff,
because I was thinking, Okay, what are the voices that
I would say, I, you know, objectively find uh attractive.
I would say that like a like in male voices,
(16:22):
like a British accent, and in and in among the ladies,
a German accent. Really, yeah, like the German accent. I
don't know, there's something like strong and commanding about a
German accent. Anyway, Well that's the said even real German,
I don't. Yeah, that's rapid, my friend. Well but it did.
I know, you didn't put your heart into it whole
(16:42):
and far. See Okay, but you're that's okay, So that's
not a good example. But um, but still are you
running it for me? But see, so that's what I
would say if someone had asked me. But of course,
in reality, I did not marry anyone with a with
a German accent or a British accent and uh and
and so I end up sort of defaulting to the
(17:03):
argument that you end up mirring someone who are choosing
a partner. It sounds more like you somebody who is
uh in my case, someone who was raised in the
South but has like less of the Southern accent. Uh.
My Michigan people to your right. Now, I wasn't raised
in the South, okay, but I have been here long
enough that I've taken on the twang, that's for sure.
Professor Babbel again, she says that once you're outside of
(17:26):
a certain range of familiarity, novel and exotic sounding voices
might become more attractive. She says, we all have to
keep in mind that we find some accents more preferable
than others because of social stereotypes that are associated with them.
And I thought, you know what, I think she's right.
I'm kind of a sucker for that, because I'm a
sucker for a British accent, because I think that it it,
you know, is endowed with a bunch of different things
(17:48):
for me, like worldliness and wit. Now, of course, both
of us when we're talking about British accents. We're probably
talking about very specific British accents. We're thinking thinking more
about like Ben king Lee and like Tom Hudleston, that
kind of accent, rather than like a strong Birmingham, England.
And I'm not thinking Cockney and I'm not thinking Downton
(18:09):
Abbey either. That the Cockney accent is kind of sexy
in its own right, you know, I suppose it can
be yes, but again, the the idea that of an
exotic voice is a void, and it's a voice that
is uh, that is new, it's novel and maybe a
little dangerous, and that does appeal to the novelty seeking
aspects of an individual. You know, we want new experiences,
(18:30):
we want new ideas, and we've we've podcasted on this before,
so you could definitely see where you would gravitate towards
individuals with those qualities, and you're projecting your fantasies onto that,
right and and it's kind of so we end up
seeing the situation where there's there the voices that sound
like our own, and those are cherished, and then there's
the voices far away that sound nothing like our own,
and those are cherished. It's that gulf in between that
(18:52):
just turns us off, you know, like they're saying they're
they're there, their vowe, their vowels are coming out just
a little weird, and I don't like it. It's the other, right,
it's a and we always have a fear of the other.
So it's interesting to see it played out like that.
All right. So that's pretty much an overview of your
Barry White, your mail women rose out there. Also, I
have a video on this topic, and in it, I'm
(19:14):
going to reveal the real reason why Marilyn Monroe spoke
like a di ide then and revoiced gal. Interesting. Yeah,
I can't reveal it here. You gotta go to uh
YouTube mind stuff show. Check out also stuff to Alow
your mind dot com that of course is the mothership.
You'll find links out to all of our stuff. There.
(19:36):
You'll find links to our Facebook, our Twitter, our tumbler page,
or Google Plus, uh you name it. We probably signed
up for a one point or another, and as well
as all of our our podcast episodes going all the
way back through our history. You'll find all of our
blog posts. Stuff to blow your mind dot com check
it out, throw some traffic. We love it when you
do so If you guys have some thoughts on this,
(19:56):
You see that Marilyn Monroe video and you have some questions,
or you you've got a qualm there about some Marilynon
Row stuff, or you have some ideas about Barry White
and the reasons why we were attracted to certain voices.
You can email us at blow the Mind at Discovery
dot com for more on this and thousands of other
(20:18):
topics because it how stuff works dot com
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