Trevor Cox: To become Prime Minister, change your voice
Your voice – its pitch, intonation and accent – is a huge part of your personal identity. Trevor Cox is talking to us about the full range of human speech, and how technology’s changing the conversation.
If you’ve ever felt the shock of hearing your own voice played back to you, you’ll realise how important your voice is to your identity. We judge others based on their pitch, intonation and accent, and even use that to decide whether or not to trust them.
Vocal training is an important tool for a lot of people, like politicians trying to become more appealing, and people developing a new voice after a gender change. We chat about how that’s being done, and why it’s so difficult. And finally, with the rise of speaking machines, we talk about why people are saying I love you to Alexa, and whether we’ll ever queue up to see robots perform Shakespeare.
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