Over the past two posts, I wrote about the various ways in which information is carried via the voice, with a short detour into copyright law.
Now, back again to voice and information, and specifically which part of the voice conveys what information.
“I have a pen.” Common sentence, especially in English as second language text books (some of you may know the song PPAP). There are many ways can you say “I have a pen.” If you are surprised to have found a pen, you can add an exclamation mark. If it’s a question, add a question mark. You can be loud, soft, determined, happy, horrified, everything else and everything in between.
Note that the words stay the same. What changes is the pitch, rhythm, volume. Without having to explain to someone that you are surprised to have found a pen, you can convey all that information with “I have a pen!” Pitch, rhythm and volume carry expression.
Now let’s take a look at the sentence “I have a pen.” You are the sender of the message. The person listening, or the receiver, needs an understanding of basic English as well as the definitions of the words used in order to decode the message. This may not be as obvious as it seems, even for English-speakers. If someone says “I like slimeheads”, depending on how familiar you are with fish names, you may not understand that they are talking about roughies (or you may not understand this entire sentence).
When the message and the expression do not match, the sender can be perceived as “deadpan” “drama queen” “ham”, etc. Think of the voice has having two channels: one which speaks words, and the other which transmits nonverbal information conveying expression.
That robot voice from old sci-fi movies? By removing pitch, rhythm and volume, the voice would lose its nonverbal information channel which transmits expression, thus dehumanizing the voice. Today’s robots are very different, and some would undoubtedly fall into the region of the uncanny valley. By the way, nonverbal expression has been a huge success in the unlikeliest domain of text: the emoji 😀