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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

This is a good place to start - https://omny.fm/shows/revisionist-history/from-inside-voice-...

Lake Bell asks the person to speak in their highest note and then their lowest note and then yodel for a couple of times. Then to asks her to just speak, and the voice that comes out much closer to what we associate with a 'normal' woman's voice.

I guess having to manually change tone to such extremes resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.

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> resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.

What is one's "own voice?"

Nearly all speech patterns, dialects, accents, patterns and phrasing is learned from one's social circle. Speech itself is "learnt behavior." It makes sense that those engaged in a subculture or online community may take up the way people talk in that sphere of social influence. Before hand, speech patterns evolved apart from one another due to geographic distance. In the modern era, it doesn't seem unreasonable that one would have greater influence from an online community than a local one.

I don't see any reason to privilege a specific, arbitrary way of speaking to be "normal" and one's "own voice" and others to be learnt behavior one "recovers" from.

Perhaps that is a difference of definition.

Your 'own voice' refers to the unaugmented tone from your vocal cords. It is distinct to you because that is your physiology.

To find the tone you can take a deep breath and sigh. You can hear your tone. You have to sigh like you mean it though and relax, let it out.

Uuuuuuuuhhhhh

Other than the resonance of you oronasal cavity, all other aspects are some type of learned behaviors/impediments

Well... In my country there is a well known sociolect among well educated females. It also involves speaking in a low register. Doctors have found that this causes vocal chord scarring for some people. Not all learned behavior is favoured by the body, shall we say.

The "normal" voice would probably be associated with clear diction, produced with the least physical effort based on the speakers physiology.

Think sighing loudly but neutrally, producing white noise. Then sigh loudly again, tightening the vocal cords just enough to add sound, with the least effort. Try talking like that or near that where it feels comfortable.

Wasted physical effort (in the sense of not adding clarity) in speaking is almost certainly culturally learned or due to the aesthetic/self-image of how one wants to hear oneself, attract and maintain listeners attention, differentiate oneself, etc.

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