This week I got a phone call from my friend Michael who lives in Paris. I have know Michael since he was a 19 year old student in my body language course at Florida State. I hadn't heard his voice in about a year and it always goes straight to my heart. His voice is uniquely smokey and rough and after 15 years in Paris he has a French accent and cadence. But the most wonderful thing about his voice is that I can tell from one word that it is Michael and from one word I know I know I can feel safe and loved. That's pretty remarkable in the book, "The Human Voice, the author writes that a study in the US found that , for m just forty seconds of surgeon patient consultations from which the words had en filtered out leaving tone of voice alone, listeners could tell which doctors had been sued from malpractice and which hadn't. the degree of dominance or concern in the surgeons' voice was a giveaway." (Nlini Ambady.et al, "Surguen."
ons' Tone of Voice: a clue to Malpractice History'. surgery, 2002.132.)
I have written about voice before. Today I want to share that that unique voice print is a wondrous thing. The ability to hear one word over the phone and identify it is remarkable.
There is another part of the distinctive tremors and pitches of the voice. That is the ability to hear a single word and know what is going on with the person. How many times have you called someone and known from the first word out of their mouth that something was wrong?
