What’s the appeal of deep voices in men? | Hacker News Reader

What’s the appeal of deep voices in men?

sapiens.org

49 pointscoastflow68 comments

There's more to this than the article covers; low pitches in music are appealing even if there aren't vocals. Playing a low note along with the same note an octave up just feels powerful. The lowest note of a chord gets parsed by the brain as a sort of anchor, which is why you can play CEG on a piano, take your thumb off the C, put your little finger on the next higher C, and it sounds different. There's got to be something going on in the lizard-brain that parses high and low notes, similar to how music in general is so attractive, but it's not easily explainable what that is.

I have a deeper voice and in the workplace this appears to be an advantage. Hard to test it scientifically, but it seems my colleagues listen more intently when I speak than they do to others.

This could be due to other factors but I've had multiple female colleagues / contractors comment on my voice and suggest I record audiobooks (I have).

Elizabeth Holmes certainly thought it helped.

This seems believable... it would also suggest that for WFH workers, it would be beneficial to do some artificial voice deepening on the microphone input.

If you switch to a new job, nobody will ever know what your 'real' voice is. Just make sure you never forget to turn on the software before a meeting :)

For an existing job, you might be able to gradually increase the pitch adjustment in small increments over the course of a few months?

I suppose in the future we'll have implants to do this. Cosmetic surgery, but for the voice.

While you’re at it you could also use some deep style transfer to improve your overall looks. Just make sure that no real image can be found anywhere. /s

One nice thing about fully-remote industries is that at least there's no preferential selection for height

Start off a new job as a v-tuber...

There are exercises to increase vocal range and deepen voice. Obviously there's a limit but our voices are not as fixed as most people think.

Interesting, I got driven crazy by having a deep voice that carried at work. If I wasn’t mindful about talking softly and carefully my colleagues would tell me I was talking too loud (they were kind about this, but it was frequent.) It was one of the best things about shifting to WFH a half decade ago- not having to think about disrupting anyone else while talking.

I hadn’t thought as much about the plus side of attention it brought.

That is interesting. My wife occasionally tells me I'm speaking too loudly. I haven't encountered this in the workplace, but perhaps they are intimidated / too kind to say anything.

Low frequencies are better for undirected long distance communication (hunting in a group, especially as a leader), while higher pitch is better for directed short distance talking (gossiping / P2P socializing).

The hunting example seems wrong. As you say, low frequencies carries well but are more undirected.

For driving hunts (? don't know the english term: where a large party fan out to drive the animal before them, towards a smaller killing party) the hunters needs to know exactly where everyone is. For this banging sticks togeather, whistles and clackers have been used since forever.

For stalking hunts, everyone keeps absolutely quiet.

In niether case the male voice is any real advantage.

> "In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent [difference between men and women]."

Is this speaking in raw frequency? If so, I think it is overstated. A 50% reduction in frequency is only one octave, which is 10% of the range of the human ear. And a 50% increase in pitch (from men to women, which is what I think they are saying based on other sources on human voice pitch) is only a 5th, the interval in the Star Wars theme, or 'God Rest, ye merry gentlemen,' which really isn't that much.

> According to Puts, this fits with the immunocompetence handicap hypothesis, which states that since testosterone takes away energy from the immune system, only men in the best of health—whose immune systems are not suffering due to physiological stress—can afford to develop testosterone-dependent traits.

Well I guess my autoimmune disorders explain why I'm a tenor. Oh well, that means I get the best arias.

For most people, I've found that what they call a 'deeper' voice is simply a more resonant voice. There's a video where Tom Scott is trying to sing. He sings a note more resonantly, and he thinks he dropped down the octave. But he actually stayed at the same pitch.[0] So I wonder if that is why 'deeper' voices are perceived as more confident, simply because the people are speaking at roughly the same pitch but are speaking more loudly and more resonantly.

I also question a bit whether deep voices really are more appealing on a society-wide basis, maybe for sexual attraction purposes, though I have some thoughts on that too.[1] But, most male singers that have been prized as stars sing higher. It's a meme now that all male pop singers sing way up in the stratosphere, but it's been true historically too--the tenors got the best arias most of the time. There are certainly lower-voiced outliers (Bing Crosby comes to mind), but the 'stars' so to speak have often been higher-voiced.

[0]: https://youtu.be/2QKPQ6JYVhU?t=439

[1]: I remember being inexplicably taken when I watched Mindhunter by the male lead. I took a straw poll of several gay men I knew, and they all said that Jonathan Groff was sexy specifically for his voice, which is indeed quite high, noticeably so even just casually viewing his movies. Obviously, this anecdata doesn't undo the actual research in the article, but I do think it is a bit more complicated than presented here.

Many untrained people have pitch/resonance confusion. Understanding the difference and disentangling them in order to deliberately modulate them forms the basis of transgender vocal training.

In general, any trait associated with a given gender is more attractive the more "saturated" that trait is in a representative of that gender. Men generally have deeper voices, are taller, more muscular than women, so the more of that trait a man has, the more attractive it is. In woman, I'm sure you can fill in some traits. Of course, there is an upper limit on any such trait where at a certain level it becomes grotesque. Women like men who are manly, and vice versa. In general.

Disregarding completely your original argument, but the "saturated form" concept is a strike of genius.

Barry White being a perfect example of “saturated form.”

Yes, yes. Culturally speaking, but I was (am) aiming at the more formal aspect of the concept. Like a fractal side-kick.

It’s also very American, and more broadly related to the English language. French people speak with a more similar voice between men and women; US people, to me, seem to accentuate their deep voice to borderline ridiculousness when their voice saturates “a la Barry White”. The only conclusion I could make was that it gives authority in this culture.

> Men generally have deeper voices, are taller, more muscular than women, so the more of that trait a man has, the more attractive it is.

That's a nice non-explanation. Article states:

> “There is so much attention in evolutionary literature on height, and selective pressures on height, and that’s only an 8 percent difference [between men and women]. In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent. That just doesn’t come about by accident,” Hodges-Simeon says. Instead, she believes, such differences are the result of sexual selection.

Suggesting that deep voices must've been under positive sexual selection pressure for men back when they weren't perceived representative for their gender.

I think his idea is that first there is an initial sex-difference in some trait which could have happened basically randomly. Then sexual selection starts amplifying the difference.

> Suggesting that deep voices must've been under positive sexual selection pressure for men back when they weren't perceived representative for their gender.

I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time parsing this sentence.

are you saying that the deep voices in males has developed due to other sexual selection, and only now shows up as a difference?

I think the point is like this: initially, at some point, males and females of some hominid species had the same voice pitch. Then some individual males were born with a deeper voice by some accident.

Now, the question becomes: why did the very first deep-voice males have any kind of positive selection pressure? At the time, this wasn't a male-specific trait, it was just some mutation that one individual who happened to be male had, so the initial explanation can't be sexual dimorphism. There must have been either some survival advantage, or some coincidence where this mutation happened to match a trait that was already sexually attractive for some deeper reason.

Like, imagine if 10,000,000 years from now, human-descended males have a characteristic tale, while females do not. Today, no humans have a tail, so you have to wonder, why did women start looking for a tail in their men?

We’re already chasing tail

> that one individual who happened to be male had

I don't think it works like that.

I've heard it put like this: evolution is a conservative force, it keeps the genes that work, and remove what doesn't.

I would probably think of it like this: (it's all speculation, we'll never know).

Bigger mammals have bigger lungs and stomachs and deeper voice (because bigger) - thus females are the one who selects that, regardless of if they themselves are big or small (males don't care) - size trend downwards, but still selecting "upwards", so now humans are a bit smaller, male and female, size doesn't change outcome. But voice is still tied to aggression, intimidation, fighting, etc, which males are needed for to protect the females. So we keep the vocal traits while the species trends downwards in size.

The "choose the voice" and "make the voice" strategy has worked for us, so keep doing that.

IE: the mutation happens to both sexes, that we get smaller. It doesn't happen to one sex, "grow a deeper voice". Males would procreate with female deep voice or not.

For us to develop a tail, we'd need to lose our ears (balance) and it would happen to both sexes, unfair for males to have balance and females not.

But human (and probably earlier hominid?) males have a deeper voice not because they are larger, but because the thyroid gland and larynx take on different shapes under the effect of high levels of testosterone. Therefore, deepness of voice is mostly correlated with testosterone levels (assuming no other effects, like smoke inhalation), in both males and females.

It is true though that this may have started out as a coincidence, and then selective pressures could have made it more prominent.

> I've heard it put like this: evolution is a conservative force, it keeps the genes that work, and remove what doesn't.

My understanding is that a new gene is unlikely to become common (or even survive at all) unless it provides some measurable benefit to reproduction (which includes survival, since that is a prerequisite for reproduction, even in old age for social species), either directly or by being associated with another gene that does.

> and that’s only an 8 percent difference

Ah... scientists, just looking at the numbers in a University setting. Look up for a minute, gaze out the window, and try to find a couple where the woman is taller than her boyfriend.

Easy. If you want a real challenge, find me a hetero couple where the woman’s voice is deeper.

Shohreh Aghdashloo and Aydin Aghdashloo. easy.

Sonny and Cher?

There is always a tradeoff, we have sexual fitness but also survival fitness more general. There is a ceiling to each trait - in particular such as physical size there are significant tradeoff such as visbility calory need, skeleton strength and weight, etc. Presumably voice has less negative impact on survival so would be more affected by sexual selection, with the upper ceiling.

So a totally expected difference in difference.

I'm not so sure; there are a fair number of counterexamples to that. Men have more body hair, more baldness, larger Adam's apple, but women aren't really attracted to any of those.

Women are attracted to the male characteristics that correlate with reproductive fitness. That includes height and muscle, and a deep voice gets in there because it (accurately or not) projects a signal of strength and confidence.

In my anecdotal experience, low and slow is the name of the game. Take your time with speech and enunciate as much as possible. You will be amazed at how willing people are to follow you and obey without question.

I find the same. I suspect having a large frame helps as well. I'm guessing there's some genetic hardwiring from our past that shows deference to outward signs of strength. Seems like a plausible survival mechanism.

> Men have more body hair, more baldness, larger Adam's apple, but women aren't > really attracted to any of those.

Different attributes are attractive to different people. I don't imagine man women would 'actively' say they are attracted to these things due to society pressure but that doesn't mean its fundamentally untrue.

I'm far from an expert on what women find attractive, but the burly man is one type I can picture women being attracted to. There are also a lot of bald men who make it work just fine.

I have found that assumptions about what people are attracted to are almost certianly incorrect. Especially some of those stereotypical ones 'everyone knows'.

Also, they're not really coupled to reproductive fitness. More fat tissue in breasts has no consequence for mamalian function. Male baldness is correlated with high testosterone, so theoretically positively correlated with fitness. And so on.

As with so many human preferences, they're far more personal or cultural than we think.

> Also, they're not really coupled to reproductive fitness. More fat tissue in breasts has no consequence for mamalian function.

It is my understanding that it was generally believed that large breasts meant more milk until the 1950s or so. So there may still be an element of truth in assuming that stereotypical male preference for large breast could be selecting for reproduction – just with a cultural bias.

That being said, I generally agree with you. I know that I'm not attracted to the stereotype "everyone knows"/fashion model as a potential partner, far from it.

I’m sure there are women out there who go wild for fat, short, bald men with a squeaky voice. But if we’re looking in the aggregate not so much.

For large populations, the average is not a very informative quantity. Sigma is, and it's far larger than 'common wisdom' implies.

I'm gay, and I'm definitely attracted to some of your counterexamples, apart from the Adam's apple size; I don't care for those.

So does that mean women with squeakier voices, shorter, and less muscular are more attractive? I don't think that's true. The height stuff at least has more to do with nutrition/non-stunted growth.

Deep voice = low frequency sound = big resonant cavity (vocal tract) = big and strong animal. So it's wired up in our brains that deep voice means strength.

Like physicality, deep voices have a practical utility. Specifically, human hearing is biased towards the low notes, and it's easier to hear a low-f signal through high-f noise than to hear a high-f signal through low-f noise. This is due to the anatomy of the cochlea, where high pitches only strike the early hairs but low pitches strike all of the hairs -- this is also why you tend to lose high-frequency hearing first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlea#Hearing

So, a man with a deeper voice has, quite literally, an easier time being heard. This also means that women, at least usually, have to speak louder than men do in order to be heard in noisy or crowded environments -- a side-effect of otic anatomy that may underlie certain stereotypes.

That runs against what I was taught in my high-school choir. In groups of male singers, there's a rule of thumb that you need more basses than tenors because the guys singing the lower notes are harder to hear. It may be that at lower pitches, their vocal cords just aren't making as much noise.

I would agree that the loudest human vocalization is probably much louder and therefore more audible at mid-to-high range pitches (my own voice seems to confirm this). But the loudest human vocalizations are not relevant in the vast majority of conversations, pitch notwithstanding. For example, most people reading this comment would probably attract a significant amount of negative attention if they emitted a sound near their maximum vocal loudness.

But at an equal sound power level in watts-per-square-meter, low sounds tend to come through better -- human hearing sensitivity drops off below 100 Hz, but the lowest male voice is around 80 Hz, so that's not usually important.

http://web.engr.uky.edu/~donohue/audio/fsear.html

It's not just dropping below 100 Hz, it's already quite low by then.

My wife tells me that she really appreciates my deep voice at parties because she can always find me in a crowded room when I'm talking. Probably too situational to make a good evolutionary 'just so' story, but it's a nice minor advantage.

Speaking as a man with a naturally deep speaking and singing voice that's been roughened by decades of smoking, drinking whiskey, etc., it definitely, uh, works, and has worked across cultural boundaries.

But it's also true for women, to a point. Personally, I find huskier voices on women - a la Emma Stone - much sexier, all other things being equal. But I also find squeaky voices irritating.

Totally subjective, I guess. Whatever the psychoevolutionary rationale, I can tell you that it most definitely works in my favor and has since my voice broke in high school. :-D

Probably anecdotal but I've noticed my kids when they were babies would noticeably calm down when I rumbled my voice in the deeper tones, maybe the cavemen of old cooing the kids in situations of danger attracted more attention in a matriarcal society?, or maybe the "beat box" quality of the lower tones just helped with music, dancing

Or a fear reaction

Culture. Operas originally relegated bass and bass-baritones to comedic buffoon roles, with prominent parts reserved for tenors, falsettists, and the extreme of the castrati. Modern performances often transpose these hero parts to much lower ranges for contemporary tastes.

Regarding the limits to the attractiveness of a very low voice, my pet theory is that they start to sound too mellow and like they belong to an inactive person. Someone who can absorb the stress of the day, be alert and active, and still have a deep voice, stands out, and those men are going to be physiologically forced out of the lowest ranges after spending time upright even if they don't tighten in response to stress. Again, just a pet theory, mostly based on past colleagues whose voices almost put me to sleep.

What an amazingly well-written essay. I love finding things like this on the internet (or print, though I guess I find print on the internet too nowadays). This just improved my day!

I wonder if there has been any research done into pitch modulation of the human voice due to cultural pressure to "get ahead"

An extreme example would be of Elizabeth Holmes' faux deep voice in interviews when her actual speaking voice would be an octave or so higher

My speaking voice for example is about five or six semitones deeper than my tessitura when singing - and I'm not sure if that was developmental or genetic

The question also leads to "why vocal fry in young women" and "how strongly do babies preference pitch to mother over father"

Deep sounds travel further. I wonder if this made better leaders during hunter gatherer times. Like to command your tribesmen by yelling to them and attack that mammoth from behind.

Or it’s simply that deep voices mean a larger pharynx, which is a proxy for more testosterone.

Interesting to read the comments, noticing how the word "sex", which identifies a person as male or female and is based on the reality of that person's body, has completely been replaced by the word "gender", which is purely imaginative and made up, with no base in actual reality.

Reminds me of how empathy, which is something people are born with and raised out of, has been replaced with morals, which is something taught by "the system" as a replacement.

Always apply simple heuristic: Big T! Of course there will be divergences, but it always returns to the baseline.

Hey, I'm short and not in the best shape... but at least I've got my deep voice.

If you're rich you won't need any of those things!

So as a man is there any practical way to deepen one's voice?

Protracted yelling, but the effect is temporary.

Join a choir. Singing involves practice to widen your range

Probably because women find it attractive in men. The same reason men have heavier jaws.

I always guessed the jaw thing was because men would, essentially, punch each other in the face repeatedly until only one man remained.

it might be or it might not be. Any trait that would improve sexual selection might proliferate without making an organism more fit. Examples of this include crazy colours on birds, or big tail feathers like peacocks, etc. They aren't survival features - but sexual selection made them proliferate.

https://www.livescience.com/beards-protect-face-punches.html

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