The Human Voice Pitch

What an amazing tool is the Human voice. We use it to identify people we know, communicate verbally, express different emotions that we experience, make wonderful music through singing. It is also amazing that every person has a distinctive voice that is different from the other.

The human voice is made up of multitude of different components, each playing a part in making each voice sound different than the other. The different components are the pitch, the tone and the rate.

What is Pitch? “The rate of vibration of the vocal folds" is how pitch is defined. The sound of the voice changes with the rate of vibrations. As the number of vibration increases so does the pitch. Which means faster rates form higher voices whiles lower rates elicit deeper voices or low pitched voices? How does the vibration differ? The vibration differs depending on the length and thickness of the vocal chords. Added to that is the tightening of the muscles surrounding the vocal cord. However, not the physical structure, emotions also has a great role to play on the pitch.

Women have shorter vocal chords in comparison to men and hence women generally have higher voice pitch.

In a recent study was aimed at seeing how and which brain areas were impacted depending on the pitch. This could be only done by studying people in real time as they speak.

Using a detection method used for epileptic persons known as Electrocorticography, the brain activity was closely monitored and it was found that neurons in the dorsal laryngeal motor cortex got activated when the pitch was altered.

By: Madhuchanda Saxena

Content: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322359.php