The Errant Æsthete

If Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani end up running against each other for president, it will be a contest between a voice of concern and a voice of authority, reports June Kronholz in The Wall Street Journal (11/3/07). The reason could be more physical than ideological, though. Rudy’s vocal pitch is lower, which conveys authority, while Hillary uses more inflections, which conveys caring. Rudy also has a bit of a lisp, while Hillary’s “sudden vocal highs run the danger of making her sound strident. So far, such vocal impediments don’t seem to be hurting either’s chances.

Of course, the other candidates are not without their vocal challenges, either. Mitt Romney speaks in an authoritative baritone, but with so little inflection that he borders on a monotone. That makes him sound less than energetic, apparently. The monotone problem also dogs Fred Thompson, whose “honeyed voice” has been compared to Ronald Reagan’s. But Fred’s voice is higher pitched than was Reagan’s and therefore not as appealing. Barack Obama benefits from a baritone, too. But he has an, uh, “disfluency” problem. When he, um, punctuates his answers with say, um, six uh’s, he sounds, um, unprepared. Hillary has no such problem, blitzing “through a question about nuclear energy at 207 words per minute without a disfluency.”

Unfortunately, “she slowed and uh’ed when asked whether she is a liberal.” But she speaks quickly, which is an advantage. John Daly, a communications professor, says “that people who speak a bit faster than normal are perceived as more competent, persuasive, even likable — if only because they don’t allow listeners time to think about what they’ve just heard.” But it may be a case of too much of a good thing for Dennis Kucinich: At 273 words per minute, he allegedly speaks “at the outer edge of human comprehension.” Bottom line is, psychology professor Albert Mehrabian says vocal quality can be measured, with tone accounting “for 38 percent of our opinion, body language for 55 percent and the actual words for just seven percent.” (source)