Let Me Visualize Your Words, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are
Consider the following everyday life situation: you’ve bought a defective item, and now you are discussing return policies with a customer service agent over the phone…then maybe you are not discussing return policies at all but you want to place an order over the phone. In any event, I dare you to ask yourself if you’ve ever wondered what the agent on the line might actually look like? I am sure that we’ve all done that at one point or the other, and I am also speculating that 9 out of 10 times our intuition would fail us and the agent on the other line doesn’t look anything like the image we crafted of him or her in our minds. Now, why might this be worth noting? The inference that we can draw is that there are certain cues embedded in the human voice which, when all we have is sound, motivate us to craft an idea of the speaker in our heads. Moreover, not only do we imagine physical attributes, we also equip the voice with certain characteristics that the speaker presumably has. Succinctly put, when we only have the sound of a voice available, we are often tempted to fill in the blanks of the speaker’s personality. And this leads us to the well-grounded assumption that the human voice is shaped by the relative relationship of various parameters such as pitch, tone, timbre, rhythm, inflection, and emphasis among others, which—during the act of listening—leave us with impressions about … Continue reading