How to Age-Proof Your Voice

We can glance at a stranger and make an age assessment within seconds. Our intrinsic Sherlock Holmes kicks in as we subconsciously notice skin tone, discoloration, hair color, lip fullness, then tally wrinkles and stamp an age to an individual. Americans spend more than <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/281357/total-us-expenditure-on-surgical-and-nonsurgical-cosmetic-procedures/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">$14 billion</a> a year trying to influence that birthdate verdict to be a decade or two younger. A similar age calculation happens over the phone. Just like sagging skin, the quality of your voice can reveal your age. “We’re good at estimating a speaker’s age because of physiological changes that happen to all of us,” says Ksenia Gnevsheva, PhD, a language researcher at Australian National University. When researchers asked people to guess a person’s age by looking at their photo vs. listening to their voice, the estimates were only four years apart. “People talk to someone over the phone and build up an image of what they look like,” said Harriet Smith, an independent research fellow and one of the lead investigators in <a href="https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26739/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">the study</a>. “We wanted to investigate how accurate this image is likely to be.”