This article was originally written in Turkish and has been translated into English with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). The translation may contain errors; the original Turkish version is the authoritative text.
There is hardly a day when we do not use our voice. It is our voice that gives us our personality, our speech and our power to sing. Through it we express our joy and sorrow, our cheerfulness, our happiness, our anger, our love — in short, our emotions. In a sense our voice is like a mirror of our feelings. As I mentioned in earlier articles, we influence the people around us thanks to the different colours and extraordinary abilities of our voice. Our voice is in fact one of the most powerful and versatile instruments in nature — as long as we become aware of these qualities.
Our voice has various characteristics. Its tonal quality (high or low, soft or hard) is one of them. Very often what matters is not what we say but how our tone of voice sounds. Scientists researching the human voice have also shown that people generally pay more attention to tone of voice than to what is actually said. Sometimes, by keeping our tone soft and calm, we defuse an argument and bring it to a pleasant end; at other times, because we cannot control our tone, we hurt the people close to us without meaning to.
Another characteristic of our voice is that it is a mirror of our personality and our soul. So much so that however hard we try to hide it, our voice always gives us away. Someone who does not know us and can only hear our voice can tell, from our voice alone, roughly how old we are, our sex, our level of education and culture, a few clues about our personality, and whether we are cheerful or sad at that moment.
Just as our voice gives clues about our personality, it often reflects our state of mind as well. Because each of us has a different nature, there can naturally be great nuances between our ways of speaking and our voices. Thanks to the extraordinary perceptiveness of our ears and our strong memory, we can easily recognise the voices of people we know. When we hear the voice of someone we know on the telephone, just a few words are enough for us to know who it is.
These distinguishing features consist of a series of speech and voice actions that work both together and separately. These actions are:
- The number of words we say in one breath
- Our speaking speed
- Our speaking rhythm
- Our ease of breathing (diaphragmatic breathing)
- Pitch (which varies from person to person, and by sex and age)
- The strength of the voice
- Whether our voice is dynamic or tired
- Your state of mind
- How intelligibly we pronounce words (how well the lips work)
- The timbre of our voice
When we speak, all these speech and voice actions come together, and the result is a voice that belongs to us alone.