Thank you to everyone who has enquired about the effect of fires on our beautiful property here in the Upper Yarra Valley. Yes, we are safe and incredibly lucky. It could have been us.

On the other hand, there is a kind of mass hysteria reigning in Yarra Junction. The Healesville fire can be seen in one direction, the Yea fire in another and the Bunyip fire in another. From our back deck we can hear bulldozers building breaks in the hill and see and hear helicopters flying in all directions. We are all exhausted from raking, carrying, cutting, dragging and staying up all night and … the show ain’t over! People here cry when you meet them on the street and I know that friends in Melbourne are feeling stressed and helpless.

Apparently, all muscles in the body, including the vocal folds, vibrate in the 8 to 12 Hz range. In moments of stress, the body prepares for fight or flight by increasing the readiness of its muscles to spring into action. Their vibration increases from the relaxed 8 to 9 Hz, to the stressful 11 to 12 Hz range. In practice, these increased vibrations, plus the fact that the larynx is restricted by muscle tension, mean that in times of stress, the voice goes higher and higher and stays there.

Trying to make practical sense of this information, researchers at the Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, US, studied voice and stress and discovered that the voices of people who are suicidal are noticeably higher in pitched than those who are not, or even those who are just depressed. This is supposed to be useful for people on ‘help lines’.

The problem is that voice analysts are far from united on this view, as they are on almost areas of vocal perception. Some say that when people decide to kill themselves, they, in fact, “often appear more calm.” In reality, all we can say is that voices will respond to stress in ‘some way’ and it will be different for each person. You need to know the person.

On another tack, Voice Stress Analysis technology (used in lie detection) ascertains that abnormal variations of pitch depict the telling of a lie. Compare Nixon’s resignation speech to his “I am not a crook” speech (although this is cited as an example of the phenomenon, I am more interested in the blockage of air in the second one as opposed to the first).

Combining these thoughts, the issue is: as you become stressed, your voices changes (most likely in an upwards direction) and that uncharacteristic pitch variation can be perceived as deception. Therefore, your stress may be interpreted as a flaw in your trustworthiness… so, just as you may need your friends more and more . . . . they don’t want to know you. Pretty unfair!

as you become stressed, your voices changes and
that uncharacteristic pitch variation can be perceived as deception

If you think that’s tough, spare a thought for John Farnham. In Bernard Zuel’s review notes of Farnham’s album 33 1/3 , he wrote. . . “when he says. ‘when it comes to making love, baby, you’re the best’, what you hear is ‘you make a nice tea, pet’.”

I think the key message yet again is that the gift of voice is not in how we perceive others, but how we get to know ourselves, hearing and feeling the changes in our voices and learning what they mean for US. Right now, I know I am stressed, so I had better get back to the raking.

PS Thank you to Helen Canny for bringing buckets, towels, taking the dogs to Glen Iris and organizing her street for donations and softdrinks for the CFA.