11. Do you sound your age?

Can you pick people's age on the phone? Have you been told you sound older or younger? On my birthday weekend I explore how age affects your voice, and what you can do to slow the vocal ageing process.

Transcript

A friend once told me, we have three ages, one - the age you look, two - the age you feel, and three - the age you are or the age that's written. What about the age you sound? Do you sound older or younger than you are? Can you pick someone's age on the phone and how does age affect your voice?

I'm Sally Prosser and you're listening to That Voice Podcast. No matter who you are or what you do, your voice matters and unless you've sworn a lifetime vow of silence, this is the podcast for you.

Thanks for tuning in. I'll admit I'm not feeling all that sprightly. I've had a bit of a big weekend on Friday, the 4th of October just gone, I celebrated my 34th birthday and you know what? I reckon I'm 34 across the board. I think I look 34 I feel 34 not every day mind you, but most of the time, and I also think I sound 34 although thinking back through my teens and my twenties I think I sounded like I do now. And I'd get a lot of comments about how I sounded older than I was and it was usually in a positive way. I, you know, I definitely believe having a trained voice with loads of resonance helped me be truly heard by employers or colleagues or anyone really. And I had no trouble with people taking me seriously when I spoke, which really helped because when I was younger I was a blonde little thing and I'm sure people looked at me and thought, geez, what a ditz and expected me to come out with ''hi, it's really nice to meet you" rather than, "hi, it's really nice to meet you." Mind you, the morning of my birthday after a lovely combination of champagne, cocktails and Sake on the gold coast, I sounded a little bit more like this. No resonance in sight.

So in this episode we're up to episode 11 of That Voice Podcast. Let's dive into voice and age and I'd love to answer these two questions for you. One, why do our voices change with age and two, what you can do to keep your voice sounding young and strong. First of all, I'm going to play a voice and you have to guess the age. I'll play a voice and you have to guess the age. Okay, let's go.

Recording 1: I remember my mother had given us a can of a little can of kerosene and we pulled the little worms off of the tomatoes and put them in the little can.

So what do you reckon? You might think, Oh, it's definitely an older person, but can you believe this woman, her name is Olive. She was 102 when that was recorded. Pretty good for 102. Okay. What about this one?

Recording 2: I love you Kara, I love you and tell me? See you soon.

That's my gorgeous little niece, Hannah with a little interjection by me there. And she was three when we filmed that one. Okay, one more.

Recording 3: I love you so much. You're a huge inspiration. Thanks for being you.

Oh, thank you. I'm just joking. That was not a message for me. It was actually a birthday message for my little sister by her friend, Josh. Alright, so we know that Josh is older than Hannah and younger than Olive, but narrowing it down a bit more might be a bit tricky. Let's just say he's in his thirties.

So voice does change with age. As we go from kids to adults, it generally gets deeper and stronger and this is basically because our bodies grow. There's much more space for the sound to vibrate. So we get a bigger sound and our voice box is, and you can feel your voice box, if you put your hands just on your throat and you say, ah, you can feel it vibrating there. And it's made up of a bunch of muscles, which get stronger as we move into adult hood and weaker as we move into older age. So in our twenties and thirties our voice is more animated, generally faster, louder, our vocal cords are more agile and stronger, we can natter on for hours. I do that more often than I should. There's a lot of vocal energy there. So the research suggests our muscle coordination starts to slow down by around age 40.

Pretty young, but it's easier for us to hear in our sixties or seventies, and you might hear the voice of elderly people. It's often softer in volume. It's more breathy, it's scratchier. There might be some vocal tremors, you know, that stereotypical grandma voice that we're familiar with. And it's also because our vocal cords dry up a bit with age. They're not as lubricated, so they're not as lubricated and they can't move as fast and they're not as strong. It's interesting actually as women age, the pitch of their voice goes down, but as men age, the pitch of their voice goes up. It's interesting hey?

Now you might remember if you follow this podcast and watch my stuff online, I talk a lot about bringing the vocal cords together, getting them to connect. Now as you get older, the muscles, they shrink. And what that does is it causes a gap between the vocal cords, meaning they don't contact as well and more air escapes as you're speaking and that air escaping is what gives the voice that breathy quality.

And of course it's worth saying a lot of the time you can pick the age of the person because of the words that they're using. Right? Our language is constantly evolving. You know, it'd be pretty weird hearing an older voice talking about bingeing on Netflix and getting the crew together for a selfie. It might sound a bit weird. So it's often the vernacular which gives away age and I am definitely feeling mine because there's some conversations that go on between teenagers and I honestly have no idea what they're talking about. You might be able to relate to that.

So what can you do about it? What can you do to help your voice sound young and strong for longer? Well, you can go and get Botox. I'm being totally serious. You can get Botox injections for your vocal cords to plump them up and give them a stronger sound. And there's also research out of Japan where they're actually taking healthy tissue from elsewhere in the body and they're injecting it into the vocal cords to regenerate the voicebox. It's pretty cool, but if surgery is a bit extreme for you and you'd like to keep your Botox to your smile lines and your forehead, I hear you there, then the best thing you can do is treat your voice like the rest of your body. And so if you exercise, have good technique and you take care of your voice, then your voice will get strong and you'll avoid injury.

And this is why some singers have beautiful speaking voices well into their old age because they've been doing this their whole life. Mind you, many also overuse their voices, which can lead to injury just like professional athletes.

And it's important for me to clarify. Look, I don't have any medical training. So if someone walks into my studio and I can hear that their voice is particularly strained, I always recommend to go and get it checked out by a doctor. And if you notice your voice changing and it's bothering you, honestly go and get it checked out by the professionals. But to avoid getting to a stage where you have issues, then start putting into practice pretty much everything I teach about the good posture, a good breathing method, making sure your vocal cords connect. I talk about the Count Dracula exercise, ah, ah, ah, placing our vibrations down and out for nice resonance. Now I realize I cannot give you the contents of my entire voice training dossier in a sentence, but check out episode three which is Three must do's to take care of your voice. It's also worth checking out my free one minute voice warm-up, which again, sorry, it's been a crazy time and my webpage is still a work in progress, but shoot me a quick message through sallyprosser.com.au, there is a form on my holding page or Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Just shoot me a quick message and I will send you back the warm-up. It's totally free and easy to use. It's just a series of four short videos.

So there you have it. Do you sound your age?

Shoot me some audio and I'll take a guess if you like, but remember, all of this isn't about sounding your age, it's about sounding influential and it's about using your voice to truly get your message heard. Hopefully you learned something today. I'm recording this episode. I'm cutting it fine. It's Sunday afternoon before it drops on the Monday morning. It's that former journo coming out where I do love a deadline, but next week's episode is quite different. It's actually an interview I recorded about five months ago back when I went to Singapore to do some work on my business and at the time of doing this interview, I didn't even know if I was going to go through with the podcast. So, it's funny how it's all worked out and I chat to a broadcaster from Singapore. He's had about 30 years’ experience Joe Augustin and he talks about the importance of really tuning into voices and listening to voices and how by doing so, we can really get some great tips and insight into how we can use our own voice. It's a really fascinating chat and I hope you'll tune in next Monday.

Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast. If you're looking for a speaker for your end of year event, then get in touch - sallyprosser.com.au