The voice of love

The early stages of being in love with someone are an interesting time. They are interesting for the individual doing the loving and also for the friends of that person. For the friends they find that a companions who was previously up for a good time anytime, now suddenly has other more important things to do. There are other bizarre changes in behaviour that accompany this disappearance from the social milieu, and those changes will vary from individual to individual but there is one universal thing that will happen; for at least two weeks the smitten individual will invariably deny that they are in love, most vehemently to the object of their affection. The good news is that despite what words someone might utter, new research has shown that you can tell if they are in love by the tone of their voice.

For the study people who were newly in love were recruited and asked to make phone calls. The phone calls were either to the object of their affection or to a same sex friend. In each phone call they were asked to engage in conversation specifically asking “How are you?” and “What are you doing?”.

The researchers then played the conversations to independent listeners who were asked to rate the voices for sexiness, pleasantness, and degree of romantic interest. The raters only heard the subject’s end of the conversation, and not the reply of the other person.

The raters were able to correctly identify whether the subjects were speaking to a loved one or a friend. This suggests that people unconsciously alter their voices to communicate their relationship status.

Analysis of the voices used by people showed that women and men tend to mimic the voice pitch of their partner when they are in love. So women lower their voice and men raise their voice when they are in love. So ladies, if he has suddenly become a soprano then he is so into you and guys, if she becomes a baritone when talking to you, you are onto a good thing. It may make duets at karaoke nights problematic but at least you’ll have love to get you through.