

Man's Voice Reveals His Fighting Ability - liamk
http://news.discovery.com/human/man-voice-strength-fight.html

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losvedir
Offtopic, but from the article:

"'When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and
form a rainbow.' This sentence includes every sound in the English language."

I see immediately it seems to lack the "oo" of food, so I don't think that's
quite right. I would be very interested to see what an actual sentence is that
does have all the sounds.

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mkramlich
Here you go:

"When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and
form a rainbow _of food_."

~~~
mkramlich
upgraded with other reportedly missing sounds:

"When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and
form a rainbow _of good-eatin' food_."

I'm hungry.

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settrans
Can we please keep these fact-free pseudoscience articles off HN? Particularly
those lacking a link to the original source or even the title of the paper.

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billswift
It's not a total loss, I have added another author to my list of sources to
generally avoid. (Did you click on the author's name? - instead of a profile
it leads to a list of articles - and they all look to be this same sort of
silly nonsense.)

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spoonboy
Original source:
[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06/14/rspb.2010.0769.full.pdf)

~~~
Robin_Message
Thanks. It bugs me when people post the probably wrong journalistic summary
when the paper is only 10 pages anyway!

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rmundo
It ought to be fascinating to find out if such vocal characteristics changes
over time with upper body strength in the same person (for instance, putting
them through a six month strength training program). Or if this is somehow set
at puberty, and people's relative strength remained the same over most of
their lives. I would imagine most people don't suddenly acquire an urge to
become stronger after they reach their thirties. Or at least they didn't while
humans were evolving.

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dabent
Mike Tyson may be the exception to this rule.

~~~
zavulon
I've read somewhere that his voice actually was actually one of the reasons
for him becoming a boxer. He was bullied in school for his lisp, and in order
to stand up to them and take up boxing.

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aantix
Yep.

He was made fun of and was afraid to fight at first.

But then, apparently Tyson owned pigeons as a kid. Some guy from his
neighborhood took a pigeon and said to him "You want your pigeon back?", and
then proceeded to pop the pigeon's head off. Tyson then proceeded to beat the
shit out of him (~6 mins into the documentary).

He was also so scared during his first amateur match that he thought about
grabbing a train and leaving (minutes before the fight).

Watch "Tyson" on Netflix (streaming). He tells his life story, first person.
Surprisingly moving and not a sensationalized account like you'd expect.

<http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/Tyson/70100412?trkid=1211018>

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Slightly different version of that story from the Tyson quotes link posted by
_chancho_ in this thread:

 _"One morning I woke up and found my favorite pigeon, Julius, had died I was
devastated and was gonna use his crate as my stickball bat to honor him. I
left the crate on my stoop and went in to get something and I returned to see
the sanitation man put the crate into the crusher. I rushed him and caught him
flush on the temple with a titanic right hand he was out cold, convulsing on
the floor like a infantile retard."_

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blintson
If conveying that information in your voice is useful, it's also very useful
to be able to fake it. I lifted weights in high school, went wakeboarding with
people and (briefly) went to an MMA gym. I've met skinny people with deep
voices and ripped people with high voices and vice versa. I wasn't able to
find a link to the original study, but I think they're completely wrong, and
the correlation is nonexistent or negligible.

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milkshakes
The article implies that there's more to it than pitch:

 _Sell and his colleagues could not precisely pinpoint what qualities in a
man's voice indicate strength._

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MarkBook
Margaret Thatcher had voice training to make her sound more authoritive. Here
are 2 clips the first from 1975 and the second from 1987. They don't sound a
whole lot different to me <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So>
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vIt9lRzuFE&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vIt9lRzuFE&feature=related)

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julius_geezer
Men's voices tend to deepen over time. Almost thirty years later, I remember
the simply awful sound of the Beach Boys (upper 30s? early 40s?) trying to
sing in the keys they used at 20. Could the middle-aged BBs have thrashed the
twenty-something BBs?

(No, I didn't pay for a concert ticket--they were on the radio from the Mall
on 4th of July.)

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GBond
How does the research quantify "Fighting Ability" (hand-eye, violent nature,
inherent strength)? Does muscle development through intense training change
the voice?

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codahale
Awesome. A journal article authored by people who don't know how to fight,
summarized by a person who doesn't know how to fight _or_ do basic science.

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astartup1
If this continues imagine Olympic few years down the line. Just send your
health reports and voice samples. We will do analysis and declare winners.

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samratjp
Ah, if this is really true as it claims, I am sure in the days of remote work,
someone is probably working on a Skype plugin for deeper voice.

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rokhayakebe
Ok, this may explain why women want to talk on the phone before going out with
the guy. Good thing we have SMS.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
It's not just women who do that. I always talked to women I met online before
meeting them in person. You get a lot more from conversation (like: can the
person even hold one!) than you do from email. Sometimes after that talk you
decide you don't want to bother!

Just curious: have you ever done that? Met someone in person without talking
to them first?

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rokhayakebe
Once I did. Met her on Facebook. Message, message, message then asked her out.
Worked.

Other than that I have not. But I never call women I met. It is either email
or SMS. I try to avoid anything real time unless we are in the same place so
you can read my body language.

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haily
This reminds me of a loud chihuahua and quite pitbull.

