I found some research on talking; seems appropriate as my piece is on talking. Read the article, it’s about a study into how cold callers presuade someone or are successful because of their voice. The principle could be used to see how you make friends, get a partner and so on based on your voice. If we think about great actors the audence love their voice and that’s what draws people. Stephen Fry, Jeremy Irons and Judi Dench have a wonderful pitch and a good pace that make people want to listen.
“Really fast talkers were relatively unsuccessful, I guess because they were experienced as fast talkers. Also unsuccessful were really slow talkers, maybe because they were seen as stupid or stilted. So, the middle path – in terms of speech rate – is indicated if one wishes to be persuasive.
Males with a lower pitched voice were more persuasive than those with a higher pitched voice. Perhaps pitch signals age or maturity. Pitch made no difference for females making the initial telephone calls. Interestingly, variation in pitch – which might make a person sound more animated – had little effect on the persuasiveness of speech by males or females. At least for me, a monotone is probably fine, at least if it is not high-pitched.
What about fluency, gauged by pauses in what one says? These findings made me, um, smile. It turns out that pausing – whether empty or filled – is more persuasive than not pausing, apparently because normal (that is, spontaneous) speech entails four or five pauses per minute, and the person who never pauses sounds phony. Fluency is over-rated, which I did not know.
This research makes me think of phone calls I am now receiving, with annoying regularity, after I innocently participated some months ago in a brief telephone survey about my “investment” beliefs and attitudes. Apparently, my phone number and whatever information I provided were sold to dozens of investment companies, representatives of which now call me day and night. I doubt I would ever commit thousands of dollars to a stranger over the phone, but I certainly won’t do it with any of the folks who have been calling me. They talk too fast. They are too animated and too ready to laugh at my jokes, including the ones I am not making. They are too glib and too rehearsed. And they won’t take no for an answer. I actually hung up on someone last week, which I have never before done in my entire life, some years of which have been spent on the telephone.”
(Christopher Peterson, 2011)
Now, my piece isn’t on talking but it is interesting to think that the conversations you have and whether people engage with them are affect by your voice.