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What is voice psychology?
We try to respond with an example taken from real life.
The phone rings.
I raise the handset and what you can hear is just a voice.
"Alone"?
A word pronounced with that voice is enough to allow you to recognize that on the other side of the wire there is a woman and she is an adult; From the stamp you notice that it must be cooled; From the accent you understand that it is originally from northern Italy.
From the prosody and the stamp you can see that it is a formal phone call, perhaps of work or perhaps a promotional offer ...
It seems to you a decisive, confident person but polite. You don't know why but you are the high, dry and light -skinned images. Wait, there is more ... Listen to a moment again ... someone reminds you ... but yes! He is a old classmate of yours that you were very friendly and who has not felt for years! He interrupts her, to verify that it is really her, and she lets you speak. Then he takes a long pause, you understand that he is reflecting ... add something and she finally recognizes you: understand from the tone that is at the same time surprised and happy to hear you! Formal tones change and are decidedly more friendly. What lucky coincidence!
"Only" from listening to this item you have therefore been able to infer a series of information relating to the identity of your interlocutor and the most contingent social role that he intended to assume compared to you in this call (first professional then friendly). In a few seconds you even made you an idea of his character and as he was physically, without having seen it!
Still, you understood the thin variations of his emotions and, thanks to pauses and overlaps on duty, you both have automatically understood how to manage the conversation (request/refusal on duty).
You were able to create a more than detailed picture of your interlocutor in a handful of seconds. For this Belin et al (2011) speak of the voice as an auditory face : it is unique for each of us, for the uniqueness of the physical characteristics of our vocal apparatus but also for the way we learn to use it, which leads trace of the our geographical origin, about the way of talking about our parents, our personal history. It is a digital imprint.
Voice psychology is a vast universe that studies phenomena relevant to all these areas: how through listening to the item we make inferences compared to the identity of our interlocutor and how we use it to convey information about us; How we use the voice to express different emotions; How the voice is intertwined with the word to create particular communication phenomena (such as irony, lies, empathy ...); Still, how the voice appropriates another code, the musical one, to express itself through singing and how you change the way we sing according to our emotions, our psycho-physical state, our interlocutor (an audience or my son newborn)
In this column we will fly to the bird's flight themes related to these various areas, thus tracing a map of the way through which psychology has interfaced with the complex and varied world of voice.
Bibliography:
Belin P., Bestelmeyer Peg, Latinus M., Watson R., 2011 "Undersanding Voice Perception" in Bourish Journal of Psychology 102 (4): 711-25
Read also the article: the origins: my first vocal expression
