大象传媒

Maybe you have a deep, booming voice. Or perhaps it鈥檚 light and mellifluous. Some people鈥檚 voices are honey-smooth while others are as rough as gravel. But why does your voice sound the way it does?

CrowdScience listener Hannah in Berlin is training as a teacher. She tells presenter Marnie Chesterton that she鈥檚 going to be using her voice a lot in the classroom in future and she鈥檇 like to understand more about it. How can she improve the quality of her voice and protect it? And what factors - physical, genetic and environmental - determine the sound of your voice in the first place?

That leads on to a question from a listener in the Kingdom of Eswatini. He鈥檚 wondering why people there seem to speak more loudly than in other countries. Could it be connected in some way to Eswatini鈥檚 mountainous landscape? Has centuries of calling to neighbours across the valley left people with naturally louder voices?

And listener Jonathan has an unusual question for Marnie. Sometimes he gets her voice mixed up with that of fellow CrowdScience presenter Caroline Steel. He says he can鈥檛 always tell them apart. And that got him wondering whether it鈥檚 common for two people to sound very similar. So Marnie gives Caroline a call and together they set out to discover whether your voice really is unique to you.