56. The science of voice

Why do men have lower voices than women? Why do we lose our voice when we get sick? Why can’t you sing on the letter s?

In this episode, TikTok Famous Scientist Dr Noc answers all these questions and more. You'll feel so much smarter after listening to this one! Haha

Follow Dr Noc on Instagram, You Tube and TikTok @dr.noc

Transcript

Sally: Why do men have lower voices than women? Why do we lose our voice when we get sick? Why can't you sing on the letter? S these questions do keep me up at night. So I had to get a TikTok famous scientist on the podcast to set the record straight.

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

Now, before we get into today's episode, I realized, I don't really tell you anything about myself in the intro to this podcast, but basically I'm a former TV and radio news reporter, former PR pro, and currently on a mission to help as many people as possible, find their voice and unleash their confidence, because I know you have a hell of a lot of value to share, and I want you to feel good about sharing it through speaking.

And that's why I set up our Members Only online community. I would love you to join us. You'll get an instant fan club, a judgment free-forum, and what I pride myself on most practical, relatable tips to get you speaking your best. And apart from the monthly Masterclasses and the chance to jump in the hot seat with me, you can also take over. Well kind of. You have an instant audience to practice, whatever it is you want. So a workshop, a presentation, a podcast Q and A's even just to test your tech, what an amazing opportunity. So that's in Members Only come and join us. Head to my website, sallyprosser.com.au and I'll direct link in the show notes as well.

Now, today we have Dr. Noc. He's a scientist who helps develop antibody therapeutics to treat respiratory diseases. There's a speech exercise for us antibody therapeutics to treat respiratory diseases. So when the pandemic hit, Dr. Noc was perfectly placed to jump on TikTok and correct a lot of the inaccurate information that was doing the rounds. And this is where I first saw Dr. Noc. He has more than 200,000 followers, and I can't wait to share our fascinating chat about the science of voice.

Dr Noc. Welcome to That Voice Podcast. Could you do your job if you lost your voice?

Dr Noc: Sal pleasure to be here? That is a, that is an interesting question and sort of changed a bit since the beginning of the pandemic. And so I used to make more frequent trips up. First of all, I work as a scientist. I work in the development of antibody therapeutics to treat respiratory disease. And so that has sort of two components. One of which is working in a lab environment some of the time it's alone. And so your voice isn't as necessary in those cases. The other of which though is coordinating research among other people. And so prior to the pandemic, most of that was done in person face-to-face. That would have been extremely difficult without my voice, but now we've shifted, you know, if 40% of my job used to be communicating with people face to face, almost all of that is now emails. So I think that, I think that I could as a whole do my job without my voice, but it would most certainly be harder.

Sally: Yeah. And the reason I got to know you is because you have a fabulous TikTok account. I absolutely love the way that you share such educational content and have such fun with your followers as well. I'm keen to talk more about TikTok a bit later, but first as a scientist, take us through the anatomy of the voice. How does it work?

Dr Noc: Sure. So there's two ways to think about it. There's the neurologic component we can think about which areas of the brain are responsible for forming language or foaming forming coherent language, at least. And so we've known about those for decades, where if you have a lesion in a particular part of the brain you know, you can think about it. If you go from your left ear up a couple of centimeters, back a centimeter. So if you have a lesion in that area of your brain, either because you've had a stroke, which led to loss of blood supply or something, and it doesn't work, you have trouble forming language. And so part of that reason is that that's responsible for translating what you're thinking in your head to some of those movements that are taking place in your voice box. And so one of the misconceptions is when you talk about your vocal cords they're not actually cords. I don't know if you've ever seen, have you ever seen like endoscopy looking into the voice box?

Sally: Yes. If you want to see something kind of disgusting, Google 'vocal cords while singing', it kind of looks like something else.

Dr Noc: You don't have any medical experience or training. And you Google that. You will think that you have ended up on the wrong video, but you haven't look up vocal cord endoscopy. You'll see what we're talking about here. And basically at the fundamental level, your voice is produced though, tonality that rumbling sound, you've got two flaps of what is basically skin and they flap together. If they flapped together faster, it's a higher pitch. If they flap together slower, it's a lower pitch. And so the difference there is if you don't have any flapping at all, that's basically what whispering is. And so when you're whispering, you can still do all of the mouth movements that form, you know, the S's and the T's and the P's and everything, but you don't have that intonation. And so a good example of that difference is trying to see an S which no matter how hard you try, you can't do it with different intonations. That's very different from saying a Z. And so when you're saying that Z you are flapping those vocal cords together, or vocal flaps together, and you're forming that rumbling. And so that's a good example of the s versus the z sort of sound that you produce.

Sally: Absolutely. It's really cute. So we've got lots of sounds, a little partners. I call them one vibrates and one doesn't. So S doesn't and Z does F doesn't and V does, so they're exactly the same sound. One's just vibrating. One's not very interesting. And so take us through the other side of voice, the side, where as you were talking about earlier, it's not just in the forming of the voice, but the way it's being received or perceived.

Dr Noc: Right. And the psychology of voice, both in production of, you know, in certain circumstances, you may say the same sentence, but you'll say it totally differently, depending on who you're talking to. There's a huge body of research looking at when both men and women are speaking with someone who they find attractive, who they're flirting with, the pitch of their voice goes down. And so whether that's because they're trying to feel more confident or come off as more assertive or whatever it is, it's something that happens broadly across people across the world. So that's the production side. On the flip side, people form very quick snap judgements about people, even from the first word that comes out of their mouth. That even if they don't see the person, they form judgments about the person's trustworthiness about the person's expertise in their field, about what they think the person looks like, all of these things happen. And there's been research studies where they have someone just say the word hello. And they have a different person say hello. And then they ask people to listen to those recordings and try to come up with what they think the people look like to rate how much they trust that person. And it's very consistent across listeners. So the way that you knew how much intonation you have in your voice, the pitch of your voice, it really has a big impact on how people perceive you.

Sally: That's so interesting. Yeah. I wonder what people think about our voice. Although I suppose with social media, more and more people are putting faces to voices, aren't they?

Dr Noc: That's true. Have you ever had an experience where you knew someone by their voice, either from a podcast or something for a year, and then you see a picture of them and it's either very jarring or you're like, I knew it. I knew it all along.

Sally: Absolutely. I remember listening to one woman and I was just sure she was tall with brown hair. Like, I don't even know why I had that picture. And I met her and she was a really petite blonde. And I was like, Oh, it's not what I imagined, but I've got a bit of a funny story. I was just out and about. And I'm there talking to the shop attendant about something. And someone came around the corner and said, Oh, Sally, I recognized your voice around the corner.

Dr Noc: It is incredibly distinctive too. That's a good point is, you know, when you're hearing someone's voice, whether you know them from a podcast or in person, it's incredibly distinctive, it's almost like a fingerprint.

Sally: For sure. So speaking of which, have you had any comments about your voice?

Dr Noc: The one instance I can think of was I was at a grocery store at one point, and I asked someone where I don't remember what the vegetable was. He's like, you should be on radio or something. And I was asking him about zucchini or whatever it was. And so that stands out to me. Cause I think that's the one time that anyone ever has commented on my voice. But for the most part, no.

Sally: Yeah. Cause your voice Dr. Noc is so beautiful and low and your articulation is so clear and I think it really adds extra credibility to the information you share,

Dr Noc: Which can be dangerous because really that's totally unrelated from how much someone actually knows about a topic. And so it can be very dangerous if their voice tricks you into thinking, they sound like they know what they're talking about. Yeah.

Sally: Yeah. There's been a study where they found that a well-delivered lie is more believed than a poorly delivered truth, which is also a little bit concerning,

Dr Noc:

You know, I think we're seeing some of the effects of that today around the world in some cases.

Sally: Yeah. So do you have any interesting facts about voice

Dr Noc: Interesting fact that is kind of related to flu season coming up is, you know, when people's voice gets raspy, when they're sick, do you know why that happens?

Sally: Oh, I thought it was because the muscles get all a bit too inflamed and then the vocal folds can't come together.

Dr Noc: That's exactly it. Yep. No, you have it totally correct. And so when you have those gaps between the vocal folds and some of that air is slipping through, that's what results in some of that raspy sound that we end up hearing. And so this can result from a number of different conditions, but the one that's interesting for me right now is, you know, laryngitis, if you have infection of that epithelium around your vocal folds, that can lead to inflammation in the area, which can cause those muscles to not work like they usually do. And so you end up with some basically leakage, similar to what musicians have. If they're playing a reeded instrument, like a clarinet or a saxophone or whatever it is, if it's not assembled perfectly correctly. And some of that airflow, instead of being used to vibrate that read, which is what produces the sound. If it slips through it messes with their tone. And the same thing happens to us when we get sick.

Sally: Yeah. And that's why we can get a bit of a voice like that. And so for people who have long-term damage and they're always speaking with too much air coming out, no matter how loud you try to speak, you can never get any volume.

Dr Noc: Yeah. It's kind of like a whisper hybrid at that point. Oh volume. So that's an interesting thing. There's two things either when you're talking about recorded sound or speech, you've got the amplitude, which is the size of the sound wave. If you're thinking about like pictures of sound waves, when you see them, and then there's the frequency. So the amplitude is the loudness and then the frequency represents the pitch. The same thing happens with your glottis, which is your vocal folds. And so the, the force with which they're flapping together, basically, how far apart they flap before they come back together, represents the amplitude. And so that's how loud your voice is. And that can be modulated by basically how much air you're forcing up through there. And the frequency is how fast they're coming together. And so that's what modulates your pitch. That's why men typically have lower voices than women. They have longer goddesses, longer vocal folds. And so that just results in this very mechanical difference in the flapping, which changes that frequency.

Sally: It's so interesting, isn't it? And that's what I always talk about when you're thinking about volume. Imagine that you're, I say, breathe into your bottom. Dr Noc - a lot of my methods are not very scientific.

Dr Noc: Sometimes those are the ones that stick the best.

Sally: Yeh, so breathing really low and tape and using that air to create the volume rather than straining from the throat. Yeah. I love that. Fantastic.

Dr Noc: So I've got a question for you. You are full of these tips about voice, about how to be your best self in terms of voice. My question for you is have you totally internalized these or do you still have to sometimes consciously pull from these and assess yourself and update it? Or is it just totally automatic for you at this point?

Sally: As far as using the tips that I teach, I do every day, I'm constantly checking in because our voice isn't the same two days in a row. I read somewhere, this is one of the reasons why recording artists, record in one sitting. They won't do one song across two days because the voice might be a little bit different, either that or the recording studio fees. I don't know I read that it was because of the voice. And so I think one of the most important things is for us to be really forgiving. Every day, we've got different stuff going on with our bodies, different stuff, going on with our moods and our voice will sound different. And believe me, I sound different first thing on a Sunday morning, to what I do when I'm delivering my masterclasses. I have to go through, go through the warmups. And some days you just don't sound as good as you'd like to. I'm constantly trying to channel my swim-up cocktail bar voice. You know, when you're at the beautiful resort, everything's relaxed. Everybody sounds amazing when they're swanning up to order their second espresso martini.

Dr Noc: So that's the ideal, that's the best case scenario for you?

Sally: Yeah. And as far as like learning different tips as I go along, I'm constantly thinking of new metaphors that work. And so often it's my students that give it to me. They say, Oh, Sal, it's kind of like this. One I got the other day was when we're thinking about what to say, I often talk about it being like a lotto ball machine with all the balls flying and that we have to have them settle before we deliver. Otherwise we become like human tennis ball machines that just shoot out our thoughts without speaking. And one of my students said, Oh, well, maybe we could think of it like leaves the leaves have to float down and settle before we deliver.

Dr Noc: I feel the reality of that. That's something that I struggle with is I have to basically write out the full script before I'm going to record a TikTok or an Instagram video or else I'll become so disjointed halfway through that I'll switch thoughts. And then it becomes basically incoherent.

Sally: Yeah. Well, I write my scripts for TikTok as well. And the reason for that is you have to be so succinct. Every word matters every bit of time.

Dr Noc: Yeh, every second matters.

Sally: So I'd love to hear more about TikTok. Why did you join it in the beginning?

Dr Noc: I joined it in the beginning really. It's not an accident that it came with the beginning of the pandemic. So in my actual expertise, which is not related to the science of voice, but it's related to the science of developing therapeutics for viruses, studying immune responses to viruses. And so what I saw on TikTok was vast amounts of misinformation about the pandemic, you know, back in February or March when I joined. And I thought, well, why not try to add some, not misinformation into the mix? And I got started not really knowing what I was doing. I still don't fully know what I'm doing, but I've learned a lot over the time. And a big part of that has been learning how to communicate effectively. I've recently went back to some of my early videos, terrible in terms of delivery in terms of how I was voicing my thoughts, how I was writing my thoughts together. And so I've kind of been stumbling through this process along the months.

Sally: Absolutely. The same for me, my beginning TikTok's were terrible. Like I did not know what I was doing at all. And so I guess your advice would be similar to mine in that respect, which is if you're thinking of getting on there, like you will be bad in the beginning, but don't worry about it. Just start. You'll get better.

Dr Noc: Yeah. There's no doubt. In fact, I was speaking with a medical school yesterday and there's a famous quote it's attributed to Voltaire. I don't know who it's originally from, but it's something along the lines of the perfect is the enemy of the good or the best is the enemy of good or something with the idea of being don't wait until you're 100% confident in making whatever piece of content in this extends beyond content in life. Just go for pretty good, because you're going to learn a lot from whatever it is and your next iteration is going to be better. That's something that has certainly been true for me. Sounds like true for you as well and TikTok making.

Sally: I had somebody call me up last week and say, Sal, I want to start a podcast, but I want to get my voice right first. So let's do the lessons. And I said, no, start the podcast and come back then because otherwise I'm just a diversion tactic.

Dr Noc: The quickest way to learn is to jump into the fire or jump into the lake and figure out how to swim.

Sally: Absolutely. I love the educational content you're sharing on TikTok, again, we're similar where the hashtag learn on TikTok kind of area. And isn't it wonderful to be reaching a group of people who may or who probably of course, would not be reading medical journals or trolling the internet for the right information. How does it feel to be reaching all of these people and getting the response that you have got?

Dr Noc: It's been fascinating. And so a year ago, prior to the pandemic, how many people honestly would have been wanting to follow an immunologist or a scientist on what is largely an entertaining platform? It's almost no one. And so it's been an interesting way to get a look at what people think about the scientific process. Things that I had assumed, you know, are the status quo because most of the people that I talked to in my daily work life are within the science bubble. It's been a really good way to get a feel for what people outside of that bubble think of science, which has changed a lot of the way that I communicate about science in which I communicate with my peers about how to communicate science. You don't really get that perspective until you talk to people and I never would have reached this scope of people, for sure, without doing this type of outreach,

Sally: And can you think of any questions that you've got that you'd just never thought of in a million years, but it's come up and you've gone. Wow. That's a really good question.

Dr Noc: Yeah. So one good one is why don't bacteria or viruses develop resistance to hand-washing or develop resistance to using hand sanitizer, but they do develop resistance to antiviral drugs or antibacterial drugs.

Sally: Good question!

Dr Noc: Would you like to know? So the answer, if using hand sanitizer, assuming it's an ethanol based alcohol based hand sanitizer, it's basically, it's like a nuclear weapon. It's destroying all of the proteins on the outside of that virus or bacteria, it's dissolving the actual membrane. And so there's no way it's going to survive to develop resistance. That's very different from an antiviral drug or an antibacterial drug, which typically targets one thing on the virus or bacteria. So if it mutates and that one thing changes, you can get resistance. It doesn't happen that way for hand-washing you're physically removing them from your hands. And so if you have that layer of, you know, scientific insight to this is how it's working, it's sort of a natural that, you know, you can't develop resistance if you're totally nuking it. But if you don't have that layer of scientific understanding, it's a very natural question of why doesn't this happen?

Sally: And this is why you have to follow Dr. Noc. Absolutely fascinating. And so what's the future hold for you? What are the plans? Is it to keep TokToking, keep Instagramming, keep doing your day job?

Dr Noc: Keep doing my day job. Certainly. Yeah. So post pandemic, I've been trying to shift already a little bit away from every video I make being about some element of COVID this COVID that A because people are getting tired of it B because I don't think it's healthy to think about COVID all of the time and C, because eventually people aren't going to be interested in it and I'm going to have to talk about other topics in health and medicine. And so I do plan to keep making content, we'll see where that goes, but it's going to be somewhere in the realm of science and medicine.

Sally: Yeah. I love that. And how can people contact you if they want to find out more?

Dr Noc: Sure. So my @ is @dr.noc both on TikTok and on Instagram and on YouTube. And so that's the best way.

Sally: Fantastic. Dr. Noc, thank you so much for coming on That Voice Podcast.

Dr Noc: It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Sally: Thanks for listening to That Voice Podcast for episode details straight to your inbox, leave your email wwwdotthatvoicepodcast.com.