Women's
voices
Georgia: On My Mind
Georgia Green Stamper
My husband and I are closing in on
forty years of marriage, a milestone our children and many of
our contemporaries find amazing.
“What’s your secret?” they ask as though we
were one hundred years old and had happened upon a patent-worthy
tonic.
I wish I had something wise to pass on to them, but the truth
of the matter is so mundane it’s downright embarrassing.
My husband hasn’t heard a word I’ve said in the
past thirty-five years! About the time the honeymoon glow began
to fade, his hearing went south, and the rest, as they say,
is history. It’s hard to argue with a person who can’t
hear you.
When I go on a nagging jag, he sits there and smiles fondly
at me as though I’m discussing, say the weather, or the
remarkable qualities of our grandchildren. When I pause in my
rant, he asks sweetly, “Would you like another cup of
coffee?” and passes the front section of the morning paper
to me. Lately, I’ve taken to making my “here’s
how you could improve” and “honey-do” speeches
via email, but I can’t muster the same energy electronically
as I do face to face.
For the longest time, he’s insisted it’s only my
voice he can’t hear, and I admit I do speak in soft tones.
Allergies, vocal nodules, and what-you-may have taken a toll
on my volume control. And I have to admit, too, that he does
seem to hear his friends pretty well. Still, this seemed like
a cop-out to me.
Lo and behold, he now has science on his side. With a triumphant
look, he waved a newspaper article under my face the other day,
and said, “See, I told you.” It seems that a university
study conducted in Great Britain confirms that men do not hear
women’s voices in the same way, or even in the same area
of the brain, as they do male voices. In fact, when a woman
first begins speaking they don’t hear speech at all but
instead (are you ready for this?) they hear music.
But since it’s not music, the poor male brain gets confused.
He has to convert to a whole different computer software package
in his head to figure out that his wife is not Patsy Cline singing
the blues in her terry cloth bathrobe. Instead, she’s
lip-syncing a ditty that sounds vaguely like “Don’t
forget to pick the kids up after soccer practice, o-o-o, because
I’m taking your mother to the doctor-o and can’t
do-wapity-do-it.”
According to this study, men were not biologically hard-wired
to hear women’s voices. (So much for Adam blaming Eve
for talking him into eating that apple in the Garden of Eden.)
Men process other male voices quite easily in a large (the study
also uses the word “simple”) section of the brain
near the back of the head. In fact, since that “simple”
section of the brain recognizes the other man’s voice
as being like his own, the man first thinks he’s hearing
his own voice when another man speaks. Maybe this explains how
men can sit for hours watching football games grunting the same
phrases back and forth at each other without having a real conversation.
It’s hard to talk to yourself.
Women’s voices, however, must be processed in the section
of the male brain that decodes music. This is not because of
the softer pitch of the female voice, but because of her “more
complex range of sound frequencies.” The number of sound
waves and the vibration of the female voice are much more intricate
than a man’s due to the gender differences in the size
and shape of the larynx and vocal cords.
“So see, honey,” my husband said, “your voice
really is music to my ears.” I wonder if I’m too
old to get a gig on American Idol?
