The Human Voice

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Speaker 10 This is the BBC.

Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Brian Cox and I'm Robin Inks and today's show is about the human voice.

Speaker 12 Now, we did ask Brian Blessed to come back for the show, but he said, I don't need to come back.

Speaker 13 They'll still be able to hear my voice. Because once I've spoken in a theatre, they hear it for eternity.
I'm alive!

Speaker 13 Oh, it's such a workout.

Speaker 1 Do you know what?

Speaker 13 Every morning when I wake up, if I feel a bit glum, I just go, I'm going to be Brian Blessed, but only for a moment.

Speaker 11 Good.

Speaker 12 We all have very different voices.

Speaker 12 I, for example, have a soft, gentle northern voice, according to Robin, perfect for talking about the universe and the nature of time.

Speaker 1 The universe will eventually end in heat death, and the temperature will approach absolute zero, and everything will be dead.

Speaker 12 Whereas Robin has a sort of southern hectic gabbling voice. He thinks if he says enough words fast enough, then chance alone will mean that some of it makes sense.

Speaker 1 That is correct.

Speaker 12 Tonight's show is about the human voice. When did the voice develop into the complex instrument it is today? Do we see anything approaching the complexity of the human voice elsewhere in nature?

Speaker 12 And how do we study the evolution of the voice?

Speaker 1 And we imagine what a world without the voice would be like. No quote unquote, no just a minute.
Unimaginable for the Radio 4 listener.

Speaker 1 So to answer these questions, we're joined by a distinguished panel of linguistic academicians dedicated to investigating and then divulging without the resulting discompobulation that often arises when the opaque linguistic tendencies of the frequent, if loquacious, sesquipidillion are deployed casually and without reference to the clarity the discerning radio for listener demands.

Speaker 16 And they are.

Speaker 18 I'm Trevor Cox, I'm professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford.

Speaker 19 What I find remarkable about my voice is I've been using it for 50 years, and as you can see, I've got wrinkles and ageing is taking effect, but my voice is still working beautifully.

Speaker 10 My name is Sophie Scott, and I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London.

Speaker 10 And what I love most about human voices is that they tell people how we are, they tell people who we are, and they tell people who we'd like to be.

Speaker 24 My name is

Speaker 24 Beardy Man, but my mum calls me Darren. And my favourite thing about the human voice is that it can do stuff like

Speaker 25 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 And we should make it clear that BNIMA, aka Darren, that was just all his voice there creating that.

Speaker 1 There were no other instrumentalists there, because I realized that radio listeners may go, oh, someone's got a band in, but they haven't. That was all.

Speaker 1 I want to ask you, Trevor, before we actually get started, this is that interesting thing about the change of the voice.

Speaker 1 When you just mentioned in the beginning about the aging of the voice, because later on we're going to talk about mimicry, one of my favourite voices has always been John Peel.

Speaker 1 And if you listen to John Peel in 1963, it's kind of, hi, I'm John Ravencraft, and I'm here out in Dallas.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, well, about 1978, he ends up with this very kind of low voice with that timbre.

Speaker 1 So, what is happening when you know that change that we can see from the young person to even just in middle age?

Speaker 27 Yeah, and in general, your voice doesn't change very much during your adult life, which is quite remarkable considering how often it's being used.

Speaker 22 And it's really because it's a muscle you're exercising and therefore you keep it in trim.

Speaker 23 And with blokes, it tends to that you know, the pitch tends to drop a bit as you go older.

Speaker 32 It certainly does with women, but in older, older age, it tends to go back up again for men as your vocal cords, the bit which actually make the sound, kind of fail to sort of meet quite so well and they kind of get lighter and they, you know, the fibres become you know not quite as good as they used to be.

Speaker 10 So for you. There's also there's like a shifting window of how we talk changes all the time, just as a population.
So even the queen no longer speaks the Queen's English.

Speaker 10 She has picked up some of these linguistic changes and that goes on all the time.

Speaker 10 And what tends to happen is you go back and listen to somebody from 30, 35 years ago, and they sound really super posh.

Speaker 10 And it's just like a constant, slightly deposhing of everybody's accents, which gives us all slightly different voices over our lifetimes.

Speaker 12 Is that the technical scientific term? Deposhing?

Speaker 25 Yes, that's exactly what we call it.

Speaker 12 Trevor, how does the human voice work?

Speaker 17 Well, for something simple like a vowel sound, like an EE, what you're doing is you're pushing air out of your lungs, and that air is coming up to your larynx.

Speaker 23 And at that point, you've got these things called the vocal cords or vocal folds, which open and close and break the flow of air up.

Speaker 22 So instead of it being a constant flow of air, you get puffs of air going pssh psh,

Speaker 31 and that puffs of air are actually acoustic waves because acoustic waves are variations in pressure.

Speaker 31 So if you actually did an experiment where you chopped my head off, you and I carried on speaking, you'd hear this kind of buzzing sound, which is actually the source of my vowel sounds.

Speaker 12 I just checked that I could chop your head off and you would carry on speaking.

Speaker 11 It's not, it's a thought experiment rather than a real experiment.

Speaker 33 But then you shape it.

Speaker 21 So you're doing, oh, it's a talk.

Speaker 28 I can just feel all my articulators, the tongue, the lips, every part of my anatomy around my mouth is moving to shape the different words.

Speaker 23 And that part is the top of the throat, the mouth, the nasal passage, is called the vocal tract.

Speaker 20 And that's how we then form the words and turn that buzz into actually the different vowel sounds, for example.

Speaker 12 So is that where the complexity is, Sophie? Because I think you described the human voice as the most complex sound in nature. That's coming from the shaping rather than the emission of the sound.

Speaker 10 It is actually both.

Speaker 10 So we can do something by just actually the air flow that we produce when we blow out make a sound at our larynx, because we walk upright and it's freed up our rib cage from having to support our weight.

Speaker 10 Although the quadrupeds have to engage the rib cage to stay upright, and we can do things like take a breath in and we breathe completely differently when we start talking.

Speaker 10 We're actually now using our rib cage with as much fine control as we do our fingers to produce that flow of air at the larynx.

Speaker 10 If I keep talking without taking another breath, you start to hear that I'll start to run out of puff and I have to work really, really hard to keep the air blowing I don't keep making sort of sad, and in the end, I'll run out altogether.

Speaker 10 Now, one of these days, I'm either going to

Speaker 10 pass out or urinate at the end of that, but no, we're good.

Speaker 10 You're probably thinking that is kind of weird, but we are literally the only animal that can do that.

Speaker 10 And that gives us quite a long chunk of sound to make, and we control pitch and rhythm in our voices with all that.

Speaker 10 And then, again, exactly as you say, as Trevor says, we have these sets of articulators, and no other animals have got this configuration.

Speaker 10 So, for example, the human tongue is more like an octopus tentacle than it is any other mammal's tongue. And we're continuously shaping that sound we're making at the larynx with this.

Speaker 10 It's like a musical instrument where you change the timbre all the time. So you add together this amazing sequence of sounds that we then shape, and there's literally nothing.

Speaker 10 There is no other sound like it in nature. That's a remarkable thing.

Speaker 12 I didn't think of the voice actually as involving your rib cage and

Speaker 12 almost half your body, essentially.

Speaker 10 It's like we're engines for sound.

Speaker 24 That's going to be the title of my next album.

Speaker 25 100%.

Speaker 34 That's really dope.

Speaker 7 You can have it.

Speaker 1 Darren, I mean, you use the voice in so many different ways. And I wonder if you just to give us some.

Speaker 1 Obviously, we had in your introduction some sense of that, but can you just give us an example of the diversity of where you can go when you're performing live?

Speaker 24 Sure, I suppose for me, I suppose I can get about as far as I can. I mean, I don't know.
Let's lay down a little.

Speaker 24 So, trumpets are relatively easy.

Speaker 24 So that sounds like reasonably accurate. I can do like a cello to be like.

Speaker 24 If I try and do a piano, it just sounds rubbish.

Speaker 7 It's just rubbish.

Speaker 14 So yeah, there's limits.

Speaker 24 There are limits.

Speaker 1 So what

Speaker 1 have you been able to work out,

Speaker 1 are you able to think about the structure of certain instruments and then almost immediately think, well, do you know what? That will be something where the human vocal cords do become limited.

Speaker 24 But yeah, I used to be fascinated by turning tape decks at the wrong speed records and stuff, and realizing that the the phoneme changes with the pitch.

Speaker 7 So you can beat

Speaker 24 that kind of thing.

Speaker 24 But yeah, so I suppose, yeah, it fascinates me that the human voice can be used for things it's not supposed to.

Speaker 24 Like I've got kids and I know that I should be discouraging them from making extra phonemic noises, but I don't.

Speaker 7 So my little daughter will be like,

Speaker 7 and I'm like, well done.

Speaker 14 That's brilliant. Keep that up.

Speaker 29 Because if you tune that,

Speaker 7 you know, it can be a career.

Speaker 12 That is a...

Speaker 10 You're right, it is.

Speaker 1 You've had one of those moments that I have quite often as well, where you suddenly go, wow, this is my job. This is, you've just, people have just gone, what a brilliant thing.

Speaker 1 We saw a man make a farty noise, and then he pressed some buttons and he made it into something else. That's what I want to be.

Speaker 13 And that's a beautiful thing.

Speaker 24 Some very angry people listening to this show now.

Speaker 1 Bloody chances with the wastrels.

Speaker 24 Useless.

Speaker 1 Sorry, just one more quick question on that, which is just,

Speaker 1 when did you, I mean, because beatboxing, when did that actually come in? In terms of now

Speaker 1 there's more people experimenting with that when did you become aware that like wow this is something that I can take to this level that you are able to I mean huge audiences in in festivals and stuff when you yeah yeah I mean so beatboxing started in

Speaker 24 New York in 1979 ish because

Speaker 24 you know actual beat boxes were hard to come by, they were quite expensive, so people realized that you could be like,

Speaker 24 and it was a very unrefined art form and the noises were very raspberry-esque, that's a scientific term. And yeah, so that's how it started.
But over time,

Speaker 24 there's grown this lexicon of sounds, which, thanks to the internet, has now grown into this vast kind of panoply of different... I just wanted to say panoply.

Speaker 7 Did it sound good?

Speaker 12 I see so you can find tutorials as to how to make the trumpet or the...

Speaker 24 There are eight-year-olds in Tunisia that are way better than I'll ever be.

Speaker 24 It's amazing because

Speaker 24 the skill set's exponentially increasing.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the reason you're on this, is we looked at the cost of flights from Tunisia and you were definitely achieving those eight roles.

Speaker 1 But can I talk one more, Joe?

Speaker 1 Is there a certain noise that you make where, you know, maybe halfway through gig where the audience properly go, oh,

Speaker 1 that one was one that they just cannot believe that a human being can really.

Speaker 24 Yeah, if you give it the whole tooth and float singing thing, it always sounds impressive, but anyone can do it.

Speaker 12 Kind of give it the

Speaker 24 which is weird, but um

Speaker 29 but you could all do it if you wanted to

Speaker 34 Brian you do it

Speaker 7 Sophie

Speaker 12 Sophie you've been working in a scientific sense with beatboxers like Darren so why scientifically

Speaker 10 initially because we just wanted to know what the beatboxers were doing.

Speaker 10 So, my postdocs, Serena Agnew and Carolyn McGetigan, went to the UK beatboxing championships and ran down the front, were shouting, Can we scan your brains?

Speaker 10 Literally, and some people said, All right.

Speaker 10 So, we were, and that was just because we wanted, we'd been looking actually at a vocal impressionist, so we

Speaker 10 just started to think, you know, hang on, people don't only talk with their voices, there is more to this.

Speaker 10 And then I got really struck by the beatboxing. So, I used to start all my talks by saying human speech speech is the most complex sound in nature.

Speaker 10 And then I met beatboxes and I realized we do the bare minimum when we're talking. Talking is hard, but we are scratching the surface.

Speaker 10 Like Darren says, any of us could do, we might not do it as well, but we could do what he's doing.

Speaker 10 And it's like an indication, I think, of a lot of very interesting things about possibly why we have this instrument at all.

Speaker 10 But it's also very interesting as a way of looking at music, as a way of looking at vocal expertise without looking at language.

Speaker 10 And we're even starting a study on the genetics of beatboxing with a group in Nijmegen this summer. So treating it there as an example of a really complex vocal skill.

Speaker 12 Darren, does it feel different? The idea that different areas of your brain are being used when you're beatboxing to when you're speaking, does it feel different to you mentally?

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 24 it's a weird feeling. I sometimes get an out-of-body experience if I'm on a stage and I'll be like,

Speaker 24 and I'm sometimes thinking, what am I doing?

Speaker 7 So, yeah, I know what you mean.

Speaker 12 Good, because I get asked sometimes, people say, well, doing physics on mathematics is very similar to doing music because there's this kind of alleged association between musical ability and physics on mathematics.

Speaker 12 But I don't see the connection at all. They feel completely different to me as activities mentally.
So I just wonder whether you have analysed it.

Speaker 24 Was your time in D-Ream not spent figuring out equations in your head?

Speaker 34 I don't know, actually.

Speaker 1 He's one of the few individuals in the music industry where, on top of the pops, pops, the lead singers turn around and go, you've got to decide, Brian, do I want to be an internationally famous pop star or do you want to be a physicist?

Speaker 34 I don't know.

Speaker 24 Someone actually asked me a question to ask you.

Speaker 24 Does the phrase, things can only get better, fly in the face of the second law of thermodynamics?

Speaker 12 Yes. It's a grotesque misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the science.
It should never have been written. It should say, things inexorably get worse.

Speaker 25 It is a statistical certainty.

Speaker 1 The universe is going to fall to bits

Speaker 12 and die.

Speaker 12 There will be no structure left in the universe at all. The heat death is inevitable

Speaker 12 in an expanding universe. And that's the end of it.
And that's the lyric that I submitted to Pete Cunner. And he said, no, I think things going to get better.
It's more catchy.

Speaker 1 That is great.

Speaker 1 Why did you leave the band? Well, I peer-reviewed our lyrics.

Speaker 34 Sounds like terrible, terrible issues.

Speaker 12 Scientific differences.

Speaker 34 That's what it was.

Speaker 25 Anyway.

Speaker 34 Trevor, what is...

Speaker 1 Going back to what we saw Darren do before, what is going on in terms of the actual vocal cords there? So at that point, that variety of activity compared to...

Speaker 1 I mean, how could you compare it to when just talking and then the variety of noises that he creates there?

Speaker 27 So one of the interesting things that they do that I don't do as an English speaker is he has to make these sounds with an out-breath and an in-breath.

Speaker 23 Because otherwise, he can't keep beatboxing.

Speaker 31 Because, in the middle of his beatboxing, he would have to go

Speaker 32 and he'd ruin the kind of effect.

Speaker 21 So, there are some languages where in-breaths happen, say Iceland, you say ya, and you go,

Speaker 27 you say yes on an in-breath.

Speaker 19 But actually, in English, we don't really do it.

Speaker 20 So, there's all sorts of tricks like that you have to learn.

Speaker 33 And you get things like, I don't know, how do you do your snare, for example?

Speaker 24 There's a bunch of different ways. You can do a kind of a snare with a p which is egressive,

Speaker 24 or you could do a

Speaker 24 which is ingressive, but it doesn't sound like it is.

Speaker 22 So we're used to using kind of a it's a plosive sound.

Speaker 23 So we're used to going p, which is where we sort of build up pressure and hold that pressure with our lips and then let it go to give us a p sound.

Speaker 21 But you're doing the same kind of thing.

Speaker 21 You're holding holding everything closed and then you're dropping your diaphragm to create a vacuum or partial vacuum in your lungs and then opening up and then suddenly you get the ingress and you get that plosive sound, but it's on an in-breath rather than out-breath.

Speaker 21 So So these are skills that I don't have, or most English speakers don't have.

Speaker 28 You have to spend a lot of time learning how to do it.

Speaker 24 And if beatboxing is incredibly sexy, then I suppose in a few generations' time, once it's been selected for, you'll sort of get these incredible sort of beatboxing super people.

Speaker 1 Oh, that is a more horrible vision than the walking dead. Oh, the planet of the beatboxers.

Speaker 34 No, thank you.

Speaker 34 They blew it up. They didn't blow it up.
They just made a noise like it blew up.

Speaker 24 Yeah, the beatbox Championship is a bit like that. It's a really strange place to be.

Speaker 10 But don't you think that's already where we are?

Speaker 10 I mean, I think, I genuinely think that this kind of one of the things that's driven the evolution of the human voice is it as this incredibly diverse musical instrument.

Speaker 10 And that it may well have already happened. It's just we then learnt to talk with it, and we got really judgmental about people who started going

Speaker 10 at each other. So

Speaker 10 we've been very delighted to rediscover it, but I suspect it may have been always there.

Speaker 12 This does lead to the question of what do we know about the evolution of the human voice?

Speaker 10 Well, there is is a very good reason why this was a subject banned by the French Academy of Sciences at the end of the 19th century, because

Speaker 10 voices don't hang around, you know, we can't go and listen to a voice from the past, and a lot of the body parts involved in speaking don't fossilise.

Speaker 10 So you can hypothesise a lot, but what we do know is that everything that was happened to us that has led us to be able to use our voices, it entirely used the structures we already had.

Speaker 10 So we were breathing, we turn that breath into the voice.

Speaker 10 The larynx is a structure that keeps things from falling into the lungs, and that has been very widely adopted by mammals as a way of making sound by breathing out.

Speaker 10 Now, we have a descended larynx, and that larynx means it can no longer do its job of things falling into our lungs, and we can and do choke.

Speaker 10 But what it's given us is a longer pipe to make the sounds of speech, and also arguably makes it more efficient for us to be able to raise the the level of our breath control and get a sound out of it.

Speaker 10 Then we've adapted our tongue. That's normally there for you know manipulating food.
The even the roof of the mouth and the shape of the face is different in humans.

Speaker 10 We've got these flat faces and the domed roof of the mouth, very different from other animals. That means we've got a different space to make these shapes, to make the sounds.
So it's it's all of it

Speaker 10 kind of pushing us in a direction where we are able to make the sounds, but whatever it was that happened, it happened before we could talk with it. So

Speaker 10 something else was driving that evolution.

Speaker 12 So, there's no sense in which we think physiological changes

Speaker 12 are somehow speech has been selected for.

Speaker 12 We think it, or is it now?

Speaker 10 Well, there's such a cost to us being able to choke. It's phenomenally risky.
It's why, you know, if you have a stroke that affects your ability to swallow, the main risk to your life is then choking.

Speaker 10 And people, you have to learn to swallow when you're a baby, you have to learn fast.

Speaker 10 So, whatever it was that was adaptive about that, that there was a positive aspect to, it was powerful because we've literally got a perfect trade-off. It kills us and it gives us voices.

Speaker 10 So, it must have been strong.

Speaker 1 Trevor, that is, I mean, that to me is a facet.

Speaker 1 I know this is going to be conjecture, so I'm sorry to put aside this, but is there a point where we are able to, for instance, look at what appears to be structures of a primitive society and, in any way, start to think this may well require a level of communication where at least we can draw a very blurred line of the beginning of a more eloquent sense communication.

Speaker 29 I think the problem with that is this sort of the limited amount of data.

Speaker 21 So, if you'd asked me that question, say, a hundred years ago, I would have probably said Homo sapiens, modern man, was the only people who speak, and this Neanderthal group were a lot of dumb people.

Speaker 18 But now, the oldest art you know, we actually have found is 70,000 years ago, it's Neanderthal art.

Speaker 20 And so, we're having to reconsider other species of man and whether we actually should speak.

Speaker 17 They had all the anatomy that was needed.

Speaker 22 In fact, you could actually argue that chimpanzees have got quite a lot of the anatomy that's needed.

Speaker 19 Certainly, they can do the hearing part.

Speaker 23 Hearing is an incredibly important part of learning to speak.

Speaker 37 And they had, you know, you can teach a chimp to obey commands, so they certainly can take the sounds in and understand them.

Speaker 20 But also, I mean, they couldn't talk that well because their larynx is high, but actually, they probably, if they really wanted to, they could speak.

Speaker 17 But they can't.

Speaker 22 It's interesting that chimpanzees can gesture, you can teach them some language, but they can't vocalise.

Speaker 12 That's interesting,

Speaker 12 but mechanically,

Speaker 12 it is possible. Because I think of other animals, like a parrot, for example, it can

Speaker 12 speak in the sense it can form words that we understand. But of course, it's not talking, it's not having a conversation.

Speaker 12 So, I suppose the chimpanzee, you're suggesting that it could be a little bit different, that they're mentally capable, perhaps, of understanding communication.

Speaker 21 I think most people would say that the issue is about the sort of neurological control, the mental ability, is what's actually preventing chimpanzees from actually being able to vocalise.

Speaker 17 I mean, their anatomy is slightly different, but recent studies have shown that if they had the neurological control, they certainly could form enough to be able to speak, even if it wasn't that clear.

Speaker 10 And I think that is a really important part when you look at evolution. It's not just developing the structural changes in your body, it's being able to control it.

Speaker 10 So it's not enough that our hands are this shape. We can do this with our fingers.
If you go to the zoo and you look at the squirrel monkeys, they can only do that.

Speaker 10 They've got very similar-looking hands, they can simply don't have the neural control.

Speaker 10 So we've got phenomenal neural control over all lots of parts of our articulatory system and our breathing that other animals simply don't have. So the two must have progressed together.

Speaker 12 So what is happening with a parrot or a minor bird?

Speaker 23 Well, they have what's called a syrinx, so they actually have a slightly different vocal anatomy.

Speaker 19 And so they actually have two-way, you know, they have

Speaker 18 their bit of the anatomy which makes the sound instead of our vocal cords, is actually

Speaker 22 in the two branches of their lungs. So they actually can make two sounds at the same time if they want to, and some birds do.

Speaker 20 But they're doing the same thing with those syrinxes.

Speaker 17 They're breaking up the sort of flow of air.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 21 what they're doing there is doing imitation because it's how, for example, they might impress in terms of impressing mates, or how the length of their song or the complexity of their song might be very important for territorial fighting.

Speaker 22 So there's lots of birds that use mimicry and mimic all sorts of things.

Speaker 21 They don't just mimic their own species, they mimic other species, and they'll mimic things like if they're in a forest, they'll mimic the sounds of humans driving their cars past or using chainsaws.

Speaker 21 And it's thought that they get this mimicry ability and then they use that kind of how impressive am I as a mimic as a way of kind of attracting a mate or defending their territory.

Speaker 1 Well, that like my dad had an African grey parrot, and I wanted to know what it was about certain voices or certain sounds that some sounds were heard regularly, but the parrot would never repeat them.

Speaker 1 But things like the microwave going off,

Speaker 1 my dad picking up the phone,

Speaker 1 whistling for the dog, the poor dog. He's so glad the parrot, because a parrot whistling for a dog doesn't have enough process to really quite understand what's going on there.

Speaker 1 And he would pick up certain different voices, but there would also be a lot of family members who probably spoke as much but didn't get pit.

Speaker 1 Is there anything we know about why it might be for whatever reason

Speaker 1 a parrot will decide that's something I'm going to mimic and that is not?

Speaker 23 I think the honest answer is I don't know, but I think one of the interesting things is how we all adapt to different people's voices.

Speaker 21 So my vocal anatomy is different to everyone else on stage, and yet you can hear me, even if you've never heard me before.

Speaker 29 You can quickly calibrate to what the size of my vocal anatomy is and what it can do.

Speaker 23 And that might be one of the reasons the parrot would struggle to imitate different voices is because they're probably not trying to normalise and understand the difference between humans, so they're latching onto a familiar voice.

Speaker 29 But I'm afraid that's a bit conjecture, really.

Speaker 10 It's also quite interesting that mammalian hearing is very similar. That

Speaker 10 your ear and a dog's ear, and a cat's ear, and a bat's ear, they're pretty much the same. They just scale up or down, and they're completely different from reptile and bird's ears.

Speaker 10 All reptile hearing and bird hearing cuts off at about 10,000 kilohertz, and we can hear much more than that. Many mammals can.
So we can hear birds, we can't hear bats.

Speaker 10 And so the parrot may also simply be hearing a different

Speaker 10 auditory world.

Speaker 12 So really, you're saying, I suppose, that our speech and our the ability to speak is a large part of being human that differentiates us from other animals.

Speaker 10 Well, I think our voices definitely are.

Speaker 10 There's so many, there's, as I say, the cost of having our voices is profound in the terms that we can and do choke, and it's taking up a lot of real estate in the brain, and our brains are big, and our brains are expensive.

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 10 it's something that we are, it is our primary, for most people, it's your dominant social tool, how you interact with other people, is by talking to them.

Speaker 10 Even in a world where you can be communicating in all sorts of different ways,

Speaker 10 to see a friend, you want to sit down and talk to them. You want the voices to be there.
And that doesn't seem to be showing any signs of going away.

Speaker 10 For example, one of the other main differences between human adult men and women is voices. We have sexual dimorphism in our voices.

Speaker 10 We don't know why, but it clearly matters enough that it exists as a thing. And there are actually not that many other differences.
So it's quite,

Speaker 10 it does seem to have a very, very important role to us. And because we see people talking, we think it's always about the language.

Speaker 10 But when you're speaking, you are communicating a lot about yourself, your emotional state.

Speaker 10 As Travis says, when you're talking to someone, you will change your voice to adapt to them. You will change your voice depending on who you're talking to.
And that has an important social role.

Speaker 10 Your emotional state will influence it.

Speaker 10 It's an absolutely extraordinarily complex thing that exists in our lives, and which huge amount of the sort of emotional and social work that we do in our day-to-day interactions hangs off that.

Speaker 1 Trevor, you were going to uh well, I was going to say

Speaker 21 Sophie was talking about how important the voice is for identity, and one of those kind of sort of stark reminders of that is if you if you ever meet someone who has foreign accent syndrome or hear about these cases, so these are people who often had well have had head injuries or they've had stroke, and they suddenly start talking in what appears to be a different accent.

Speaker 21 So, the most famous case is probably the first case, which was an unfortunate Norwegian woman who, during World War II, was hit during a raid and then started talking what the locals assumed was a German accent.

Speaker 22 And therefore, the shopkeepers stopped serving her because they thought she was a conspirator.

Speaker 21 And so, this is completely changing your identity, your vocal identity.

Speaker 29 And if you read the cases of what that does to people,

Speaker 29 it often, when they, you know, they've got brain injuries, they've got lots of problems, but often it centers around the voice, is what they kind of the major issue they're struggling with.

Speaker 1 That is, sorry, yes, I just want to know more because that is. I saw the one where there was a Texan woman who again she had some form of knockwork, and then she became a very posh English woman.

Speaker 1 And I mean, these are how much of this is do we know is actual physical damage, and how much of it has some connection, something I suppose, more outwardly psychological?

Speaker 10 I have worked quite a lot with people with foreign accent syndrome. What it tends to be associated with, as Trevor said, it's brain damage, but it's a small amount of brain damage.

Speaker 10 Because if it was a bigger amount of brain damage, you would have a very frank problem of speaking. So people can still talk, and it's basically a form of what's called dysarthria.

Speaker 10 A lot of different strokes and head injuries can give you dysarthria, a problem of speaking. There happens to be a problem of speaking that to our ears sounds like a foreign accent.

Speaker 10 There'll be enough cues there. So the first woman I

Speaker 10 worked with, she

Speaker 10 put sounds at the end of

Speaker 10 lots of words, and that starts to give a rhythm that to UK people's ears sounded well Italian-ish, maybe. Um and of course it's not.
And if you played her speech to somebody who was Italian, they go,

Speaker 10 that sounds like somebody speaking with difficulty and with effort. Then it's awful, like Trevor says, it's it's really disruptive.
You suddenly sound like you're not a fellow countryman.

Speaker 10 I worked with one woman who lives in the middle of going to be general, in the middle of the UK in a kind of rural area, and she ended up carrying a piece of paper that says, I come from round here, because she'd go to catch the the bus, and everyone would start explaining to her how the money works because they thought she was Latvian or something.

Speaker 10 And she's like, No, I know how it works. I live down the road.

Speaker 16 I've been here all my life, Pauline, you know.

Speaker 10 And it was really, really, really hard for her. In fact, she carried around with her a tape recording of herself where she called into local radio and taking part in a competition.

Speaker 10 And she would make you listen to that before you had any further conversation with her. And she'd go, That was me.
Now that's what you should be hearing. And it's terrible.

Speaker 10 We don't think about this until it's gone. It's appalling.
People make

Speaker 10 assumptions about people all the time based on what they sound like. And frequently, of course, we're wildly wrong, but it doesn't stop us doing it.

Speaker 10 And those people on the bus they were trying to be helpful, but she felt like she was being isolated and pushed out.

Speaker 10 And in fact, I've heard several people say they feel more comfortable when they come to London to see their neurologists because they're surrounded by a thousand different accents.

Speaker 12 Accents

Speaker 12 must demonstrate to us how complex and subtle vocalization is. Because you know, we are tuned.

Speaker 12 You know, I'm from Oldham, and around there, you can tell, I can tell where people were brought up or grew up within a couple of miles because I'm used to that particular area.

Speaker 22 It also shows you how flexible the voice is, and because accents are changing, and gradually accents are tending to smooth out across the country.

Speaker 18 But there are some factors staying on, and one of the interesting ones is the pronunciation of last or last.

Speaker 21 That north-south divide is still being maintained.

Speaker 19 And accents is about group identity.

Speaker 22 And of course, are you northern northern or are you southern?

Speaker 33 It's a really important group identity in Britain.

Speaker 18 And therefore, I come from the south, so I say Bath.

Speaker 22 But my children who are born in Manchester say Bath.

Speaker 21 And that's you know, that differentiation is still maintained.

Speaker 12 I couldn't say it.

Speaker 12 Bath, I can't do it. It's Bath.
I cannot.

Speaker 16 It's Bath.

Speaker 25 I came from Bath.

Speaker 12 It is such a strange, alien thing for me to say. And I can adapt to the words, and I have done.
You know, you sort of lose your accent to some extent.

Speaker 1 I've never felt more like Rex Harrison than I do now.

Speaker 34 The rain in Spain falls many on the plane, Brian.

Speaker 12 Historically, I don't want to think of you as my Rex Harrison.

Speaker 25 Just think about that.

Speaker 14 Think about that film.

Speaker 10 Historically,

Speaker 10 it was the southerners starting to say bath that was the aberrant and unusual thing. Just to make it clear, the northerners are right.
Okay, you've got that.

Speaker 14 I mean, it's spelt bath, isn't it?

Speaker 10 Well, it's, it, it, I mean, it, but it just changes all the time.

Speaker 10 And you can see that when you go back to old poetry or jokes that were puns in Shakespeare that aren't puns anymore because we don't say those words that way anymore. It just changes all the time.

Speaker 10 But I think the other thing that's really interesting about accents, as you say, it's something, it's speaking to the fact that we learn a language and we're learning it from the people around us.

Speaker 10 And you do find tremendous variation. So I grew up in Blackburn, where we do the same, you know, we consider people from Accrington to speak hilariously because they say buzz and not boss.

Speaker 10 But my parents were from the south of England and they used to go ballistic if I said bus. You know, so I spoke two accents growing up and I still do.

Speaker 10 I'll change quite happily depending on where I am. If I take my son to Blackpool on the holiday, he starts going, Mum, why are you talking like that within two minutes of me getting off the train?

Speaker 10 But it's it's a it's as much to do, and I'm delighted when that happens.

Speaker 10 I love it because it's not just a physical thing that I've learnt to do, it's part of, you know, it reminds me of an aspect of who I am that I love and I'm really fond of and I'm proud of.

Speaker 10 So it's somebody once said to me, oh, you're from Blackburn, you must have really lost your accent when you came to London and became a professor. And I was like, no, I definitely did.

Speaker 10 No, I did do that. I absolutely did do that.
You know, I would not talk that way at work.

Speaker 12 We're getting towards the end, actually, but we wanted to...

Speaker 12 Well, that was actually the final question we had, wasn't it, Matt?

Speaker 25 But we wanted to.

Speaker 34 Nope, that's it.

Speaker 1 But it is, it's a very... I mean, there's lots of things.

Speaker 1 I wanted to talk about Coco the gorilla who recently died and, you know, the inability to,

Speaker 1 you know, how far we can go with other animals being able to learn language, but there's no time for that.

Speaker 25 Robin always does this, he always.

Speaker 34 How can I cocoa story, please?

Speaker 1 But we shouldn't talk about it.

Speaker 10 How come my cocoa story?

Speaker 13 Of course, she can tell her cocoa.

Speaker 10 So she's an amazing gorilla, learned to sign. You know what she mostly signed?

Speaker 10 Nipples. And what's what she wanted to see? It wasn't random.
She'd be like, no.

Speaker 10 And then, you know, any bit of film of Coco, this great big gorillay hand starts. I'm not going to do it to you, Trevor.
But she starts.

Speaker 10 And there's a fabulous bit of film I show of her with Robin Williams because he makes her laugh by tickling her.

Speaker 10 But then she also just keeps taking his shirt off and going what have you got going on underneath here and she genuinely was very very interested so it was a good example she was taught a sign and she was like thank you I have been waiting to ask to see these nipples I want to see nipples

Speaker 1 you were the same weren't you Brian

Speaker 1 what is it that you can a certain level of language is possible and and you know even the variety the different that we were thinking before we start recording we were talking this afternoon about you know a blue whale, how much variety, how much expression, you know, we think we can express ourselves in many ways, but now we're beginning to learn the nuances, the very, very subtle tonal nuances, maybe some that we can't even pick up.

Speaker 1 You know, what do we have in terms of

Speaker 1 the animal world, the non-human animal world,

Speaker 1 what are the nearest we have for actually seeing an incredible, you know, variety of possible expression?

Speaker 10 Well, you know, sea mammals like whales and dolphins, they do seem to be probably the best contenders for having very, very complex vocal behavior.

Speaker 10 We have literally no idea how they're making the sounds because they can't make it on a breath of air out because that doesn't work under the water.

Speaker 10 They're sort of shunting air around inside their heads. Dolphins have at least two larynxes.

Speaker 10 They make two sounds at once. One is probably echolocation, one is almost certainly communication.

Speaker 10 So I may have to revisit everything I've ever said about beatboxes and human speech when we know a little bit more about dolphins.

Speaker 24 I mean, I could give it a go.

Speaker 24 I mean, I don't know how they do it, but I mean, I was doing it with my laptop.

Speaker 3 Anyway.

Speaker 21 Right. That brings us to the end of the shipping forecast.

Speaker 12 That's something about nipples, I think.

Speaker 35 You speak dolphin too.

Speaker 1 So, thank you very much. We asked the audience a question as well, as usual.
We said, if you could have somebody else's voice, whose would it be and why? Andrew, I'm not allowed to say Brian Cox.

Speaker 12 Well, I've got one here which looks like a list of your impressions. It's John Peel,

Speaker 12 Alan Bennett, and Stuart Lee. Do you do Stuart Lee?

Speaker 1 No, I don't do Stuart.

Speaker 3 It's like...

Speaker 4 No, ah, you know, some of the audience, oh yeah, is that Stuart Lee?

Speaker 1 And then some of the others are like, oh, I don't listen to Stuart Lee, I don't know.

Speaker 25 And

Speaker 1 my favourite is always to do Carl Sigan, Carl Sigan, which is the universe, everything there is, everything there was, and everything there ever will be.

Speaker 35 We were talking about this.

Speaker 1 Why? I can, and I think you're the same, Darren. You can only do impressions of people you like.

Speaker 24 Yeah, it's kind of doing Donald Trump, but every time I try, I just like, ah, get out of my brain.

Speaker 3 I don't want him in there.

Speaker 1 I've found my ability to impersonate Morris has become less and less week by week.

Speaker 25 What is it down to now?

Speaker 1 No, thank you.

Speaker 34 So

Speaker 12 this one is quite sad, actually. It's my primary school teacher, so I could give myself the approval I never got as a child.

Speaker 25 Patrick.

Speaker 1 God. I think this says God, doesn't it? Does that say God?

Speaker 16 God. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Because even though people still wouldn't listen to me, at least some would pretend to.

Speaker 1 Oh, this one, it would have to be Patrick Stewart, just so I could say, engage and make it so.

Speaker 16 You know, yeah, I tried to learn German.

Speaker 12 I did my PhD in Germany, and I tried to learn it by watching German television. And Star Trek the Next Generation was on.

Speaker 12 So those are the two of the things I learned how to say, a Mackenzie Das, which is Make It So, and a See Hab and De Brucken number Eins, which is you have the bridge number one.

Speaker 25 And that didn't have no use at all

Speaker 21 in shops, it turns out.

Speaker 1 I love that. I love the fact that that's what you've got.
I can speak Star Trek in any country in the world.

Speaker 38 That's brilliant.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you very much to our panel, Trevor Cox, Sophie Scott, and Darren aka Beardyman.

Speaker 1 And we thought we would leave, rather than the final word to Brian, we're going to leave the final noise to you.

Speaker 4 Oh, finished.

Speaker 4 That's in the monkey case. Thank you, Mitch.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

Speaker 4 In the infinite pony cage.

Speaker 25 Without you troubling in the infinite pony cage.

Speaker 1 Till now, nice again.

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