Straight outta Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, which you should read if you haven’t.

“Speech pitch has little to do with the social environment. Chronic stress is highly overrated as a cause of many things, including speech variability, despite DNW’s assertion.”

Fair enough.

“Chronic stress” was probably a poor choice of words since, as a general concept, it is usually taken as applying to a specific individual under pressure, and it doesn’t necessarily convey the sense of generalized social tension, anxiety, and insecurity – leading to the kind of chronic woe-is-me whine – that I had in mind.

And obviously, someone with a naturally and profoundly deep voice will not sound like someone with a pleading nasal whine just because his financial situation deteriorates..

But I think that the psychology of the speaker and the level of tension or anxious insecurity they feel, or are encouraged to feel, do contribute to some of the peculiar de-masculinization of speech patterns noticed in so many in males today.

Hollywood employed voice coaches for years; and not just for elocution and accent correction, if the many available articles about it are any indication.

Of course maybe it’s down to insecticides and all the birth control pill hormones in the water … LOL

Based on what you say about speech patterns vis-a-vis society, I’m immediately led to reflect on how so many people in my current country of residence don’t engage in gentle Scandinavian-style upspeak, but tend to just always sound somewhat aggressively incredulous. At least in my areas of China, the pattern is like: “eh? What? What you want? That! Yeah? Yeah? Thank you!” (No it’s not just them not liking me; they speak that way to each other).

There’s basically two modes of speech in China: cocksure assertions of sage advice from the tradition (you should do this; “as we say,…”; etc.) and the aforementioned aggressive incredulity.

Just spitballing here, but that tracks with my apprehension of the current Sino-cultural temper. Sacred comfort in the certainties of the magical Chinese tradition (literary and bureaucratic), and a more or less hostile uncertainty or indifference in every other area where bromides can’t be applied.

When the calls would overflow to me, I’d answer the phones in the same way. I must have been very consistent because people would take a few seconds to realize that I was a real person, not the recording.

So I was used to hearing my voice when I called in to the company as well.

I’m VERY sensitive to voices and will judge people by their voices, so I don’t like talking on the phone to people before I meet them.

Consider for example the vocal cords, tiny little muscular strands which, when tight, appose themselves. Hoarseness occurs when they are swollen (laryngitis) or floppy (if paralysed). The larynx is quite a marvelous little muscular box. Like piano wires, the thicker male cords yield lower pitch, the thin female one yield higher pitch. The cords vibrate by the act of exhaling air through the tight appositional gap while speaking; no piano hammer needed! The tension on the cords, and the gap between, are minutely controlled. Thus the marvel of the human voice in song.
There are very very few male sopranos! And a female basso is similarly rare. That’s what i mean by physics and anatomy.
One might wish to discuss all of this with a speech pathologist for great erudition.

Speech pitch has little to do with the social environment. Chronic stress is highly overrated as a cause of many things, including speech variability, despite DNW’s assertion.
Speech patterns, however, do relate to sex and society. The pitch uplift at the end of a sentence makes it sound more like a question than a statement. Swedes are notable for this. Watch ‘Fargo’, the Coen brothers’ movie, for an excellent example in a North Dakota lady cop.

And of course I think you’re on the right track. It’s not a disparity – if there is a disparity – between baritones and altos; it’s a deeper mixture of confidence breathed into words as their life, tone, and a “no nonsense” mood.

Even my grandfather, a lifelong damn-near religious Democrat who can barely fathom that Republicans exist, is positively one of the most rugged, do-it-yourself, personally sane and sensible men I know. I still hear his favorite exclamations calling me away from stupidity, like Socrates’ daemon: “Boy, what exactly are you trying to accomplish?” (said with a thick Texas accent); “Ah, nonsense, boy.”

The absence of that quizzical mode – like the increasingly prevalent trend of “upspeak” – is practically an essential definition of what we yutes call “old speak,” ie, the way men in particular spoke in 40’s and 50’s newsreels, films, and TV shows.

“I was goin’ here see, doin this see, then over there a man came around see…”. – it’s pretty much the opposite of upspeak.

I hate upspeak so much that it is the only thing I actively suppress when it pops up in my speech. If I catch myself doing it, it’s the hair shirt for a week.

Kolnai, said this remarkably perceptive thing that stands out among the many perceptive things he said in this thread: “It’s a fairly haunting feeling when you feel your mere speech patterns to be constant attempts to evade the secret bursting out that there is no there there – there, right where *I* should be. ”

And as for you Neo, you sound nothing like the woman in the interview, and much more like an educated Mae West than you are likely to find comfortable. Ha.

As for the pitch of modern men’s voices, I think it is in significant part the result of things, which are not specifically the effects testosterone level and vocal cord thickness, or even sinus resonance.

The first is chronic emotional stress. Everyone has noticed their voices on waking are more profoundly bass than hours later. As a matter of fact, taking 5 deep breaths and telling yourself all is well-in-hand will probably drop your voice an octave.

I also noticed that the older I’ve gotten, the more my voice surprises me … when, say, I am talking to younger people who are seeking information on some topic they know nothing about, and about which I do know a great deal. In those situations I find myself making simple, declarative, unqualified statements as if they are deliverances stamped with the label “To a moral certainty”.

The same goes for discussions with relatives or neighbors, and I am not sure how it happened. I guess that being in business long enough has led me to actually talk like the man behind the desk; i.e, the guy who rises when he decides the conversation is over, and says, “Thank you for coming in”.

I didn’t intend it to happen it just developed the same way my signature did from signing untold thousands of checks …

The second is probably closely related to that issue of stress, in that it is I think the result of social reinforcement. Many men seem to develop that quizzical way of phrasing statements as a means of trying not to be overbearing.

As declarative statements are seen by some as offensive, and nested parenthetical qualifications are verbally unwieldy, they seem to intentionally speak tentatively as though they are seeking social permission or at least validation for every observation.

These possible causes noted, I will also observe that old recordings of speech, and old news reels, give little evidence that the majority of men randomly selected for recording, had deep, confident, and resonant voices. Cops and bystanders talking before news cameras about gangsters in the early 30’s, didn’t sound like the actor Robert Taylor did in the 1950s.

What I considered “normal” as a 60’s child, was then an impression gained from listening to my father or his brother, or other uncles and neighborhood men talk, or from watching old movies on TV. For the locals, it was probably, a factor of their psychology, as well as their genetics.

Having been in and through the war, and then currently engaging in the project of raising families, was an experience that left them with little doubt about who they were, and what they wanted, and how slight was their ongoing moral obligation to put up with, or cater to, the bullshit and neuroses of others, and to endlessly “feel their pain” as the price of merely being alive.

They scratched “putting up with chickenshit” and “feeling guilty for living”, right off the list for starters.

I’m sure their voices reflected that, on top of whatever other factors were in play.