The trouble with our voices

In Inside Out, Disney writers successfully portrayed emotions as personalities in our heads. This is so whether at puberty, middle or old age. So whenever we are dominated by any one emotion, and we want to express it by saying something, does that emotion stay constant all throughout the time we are trying to express our feelings in words? In short, do we always say what we mean?

Scientists have been debating this. Some think that when we intend to express a certain emotion by speaking, then our emotional voice will match that intention. But some also say that emotions are very primal and because they are, they sometimes bypass the more “rigorous” check of of our controlling brain and so we could lose control. From my own experience with my own emotionalvoice, we do not always match note for note. Tuning in to others, I can say the same. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US tried to settle this so elegantly.

They had participants first answer a questionnaire to gauge whether they were happy, fearful or sad. This was coupled with a skin conductance test which recorded changes in their sweat levels – a proven indicator of emotional arousal. Then they made them read a material aloud. Without the participants’ knowledge, the researchers recorded their voices for a few minutes. Then the researchers used their recording to manipulate the voice of the reader so that after the first few minutes, the reader is hearing not her real voice reading the succeeding material but the manipulated voice. Then they asked the participants again how they felt and did the sweat test again.

This is where it really gets surprising. First, the readers did not even detect that their voices were being manipulated and second, they even went along with the emotion that the manipulated voice carried and not with the original emotion that they started reading with.

I particularly liked the thought of exploiting the properties of sound. The human voice is a sound – which would have its own signature in the air in terms of pitch (which is an overall term that will consist of vibrato, inflection etc.)  Happiness, sadness and fear would carry their own signatures. When we say something, that sound, for a fragment of time, is in the air and could be captured. This is how recording works. And this is why I thought that this study was truly elegant in its idea and execution. They captured the emotional signature of a voice and changed it without changing the signature of the voice itself. This is why the participants still recognized it was their voices even if the emotional signatures have changed.

I thought the results were quite inspiring. It means that we have good reason and evidence to explore how we can use this kind of “manipulation” to alter our own moods that are not promoting our well-being.  It revealed that the “Inside out” personality that is carried by our voice could change. It means that we could still correct our own communication mishaps as they happen!

This is where I think we can learn so much from actors who have mastery of language delivery and all the nuances each pause, accent, inflection could mean. I think their craft is hinged on sculpting their entire performance, including verbal delivery, to be consistent with the targeted emotion. That requires a lot of control which to most, would seem counterintuitive since they belong to the arts.

The scientists think that emotions are so primal that they are not easily subdued by our “bossy” yet Johnny come lately cortex. Our cortex can check it but it has to be prompted by an “intervention”, which in this case was a “emotion substitution.”

I think the lesson from the findings of this study could be a powerful one in terms of understanding how we understand our own voice. At any single time, emotions of all configurations ride through our voices like various birds on telephone wires. Even when we have said our piece, the emotions linger, in us and to those who have heard it. We also don’t know how long or deep it will last. It is comforting to know that there is a way to check ourselves.

I like what Richard Strauss said about the human voice as being the most beautiful, yet being the hardest to play of all the instruments. I guess as in most things that you were born with, the key is how you tune them in to provide the scoring to the life you want. – Rappler.com