The web site’s design is very pleasing
The design of the website is aesthetically pleasing. If you’re familiar with our YouTube channel, you probably recognize a few voices like Sam, Coleman and Joss. Sam is always going to use a map, Coleman will show you a photo, and Joss will drop a bunch of data on you, but make you feel something. If you really think about it, our lives are just line charts.
These are people you don’t always see on camera, but you might recognize them just by their voices. Chip companies moves, we see that the vaccine, this is the first famous photograph. As humans, each of us produces a sound that’s about as unique as a fingerprint. There has never been somebody before, currently or in the future, that will sound like you.
So what is it that makes you sound like you? This is your voice box, it’s called the larynx and it’s located here. The three main functions are to speak, to breathe and to swallow. Sandra Stennett is a laryngologist, which means she treats people who have trouble with any of these. We’re going to focus on speech, obviously.
You have articulatory function, resonance function and then breath support. Let’s start with breath. If we open it up, we can see the larynx is hollow. When you take a breath in, the air comes down this way into your lungs. When you speak or sing, you push air from your lungs up through your trachea and through the vocal folds, which you might know as vocal cords. Laryngologists we like to call them folds because they’re just they’re not chords, they’re folds. The vocal folds are very, very like pristine white bands. They’re made up of mucus covered muscles and cartilage.
As air pushes through it forces them open and then they snap closed and you can maybe imagine like a water balloon. Like if you took two water balloons and slapped them together and they go that vibration creates a sound wave. The faster they vibrate, the higher pitch the sound is. For men it’s about 100 to 200 waves per second, so kind of like a honeymoon bird wings, and then for for women it’s a little bit higher pitched so 200 plus waves per second, so it’s fast.
If you try to raise the pitch of your voice, stretch the vocal cords. If you think of having a rubber band and you sort of pluck and then you stretch the band a little bit and then it gets to be a higher pitch, the vocal folds work like that. When we’re on a low pitch they’re short and then when we go higher they lengthen length and lengthen and there’s a different tension that they have.
Next is where resonance comes in. That sound wave travels through your larynx and up into your oral and nasal cavities where it bounces around. This on its own basically produces the sound of your voice, but to make words we need to shape those sound waves using articulators things like our tongues, lips, teeth and various other features.
As humans, we all essentially create sounds in the same way, but differences in the size and shape of all of these things make our voices sound different. Physiologically, we’re each incredibly unique. No two larynges are the same. There’s I mean that’s it’s like a fingerprint. All of these different shapes and sizes contribute to you having a totally one of a kind instrument.
There are other factors that play too, on top of our physiological features. The brain, which is just like a complicated circuit of nerves that manipulate pitch and emotion and inflection in the voice. So you know when you say “Hi, my name is Sandra” or “Hi, my name is Sandra”, your life’s journey can impact your voice tremendously. Where you’ve lived, what your job is, who your friends are, who your family is, all of these factors change the way that you communicate and the way that you use your voice.
So for all of you absolutely roasting me for this video, respect my journey. I grew up in Jersey and then moved to Long Island. I’m lucky I don’t sound like Margot Robbie and Wolf of Wall Street. Since our voices are so specific to who we are, it can be pretty drying when we go through major changes like in puberty. Testosterone in particular can.