Dr. Eddie Chang

in your ear are picking that up and translating that into electrical activity.

It's such a complex feat.

Some people would say it's the most complex motor thing that we do as a species is speaking, not the extreme feats of acrobatics or athleticism, but speaking.

Okay, sure.

I'll talk primarily about the larynx here for a second, which is that if you think about when we're speaking, really what we're doing is we're shaping the breath.

So even before you get to the larynx, you got to start with the expiration.

We fill up our lungs.

And then we push the air out.

That's a normal part of breathing.

What is really amazing about speech and language is that we evolved to take advantage of that normal physiologic thing at a larynx.

And what the larynx does is that when you're exhaling, it brings the vocal folds together.

Some people call them vocal cords.

They're not really cords.

They're really vocal folds.

They're two pieces of tissue that come together and a muscle brings them together.

And then what happens is when the air comes through the vocal folds, when they're together, they vibrate at really high frequencies, like 100 to 200 hertz.

And the reason why men and women generally have different voice qualities is it has to do with the size of the larynx and the shape of it.

Okay, so in general, men have a larger voice box or larynx.

And the vibrating frequency, the resonance frequency of the vocal folds when the air comes through them is about 100 hertz for men and about 200 for women.

So you take a breath in.