Secrets Revealed For Great Radio Voice

The distinctive voices of radio broadcasters may be a result of their vocal cords being more elastic, say Australian researchers.

Gary Owens

According to discovery.com, the suggestion follows a new study that found the vocal cords of such radio performers close faster than others.

The researchers filmed the vocal cords of 16 male radio announcers, broadcasters, newsreaders and voice-over artists using a high-speed video camera. They hoped to find out what made them sound different to non-broadcasters.

"There is an element of a radio voice that is incredibly distinctive but it's incredibly difficult to isolate and measure," said speech pathologist Dr Cate Madill, from the University of Sydney.

This quality is described in different ways in various studies, as warm, resonant, powerful, emotive, and authoritative.

Air from the lungs vibrates the vocal cords, which causes sound. This then travels through the vocal tract and out through the mouth, and to a lesser extent the nose.

The vocal tract has a particular shape and characteristics that interact with the sound to create 'resonance'. It's the resonance that gives the voice what we think of as depth, or warmth, or a 'ringing' quality.

The researchers placed the camera, which takes pictures at 4,000 frames per second, into the mouth to film the vocal cords as they vibrated.

Ted Williams

The camera revealed that the closing phase of every broadcaster's vocal cords was faster than the opening phase, Madill and colleagues report in the journal PLOS ONE.

When they analyzed the video taken of 16 men who were not radio presenters, they found that the time that it took for their vocal cords to open and close was about equal.

Madill inferred from the research that the vocal cords of radio presenters may have a little bit more elasticity, or that there was some manipulation of the tension in the vocal cords so that their recoil was maximized.

A second study looked at the acoustic differences between radio broadcasters who worked for either public or commercial radio stations. It found that public broadcasters and non-broadcasters had voices that were slightly warmer and deeper than commercial broadcasters, who had a slightly brighter and possibly harsher resonant tone.