What Did Neanderthals Sound Like IFLScience
It's a bit underwhelming to say the least.
The demonstration they give may or may not be accurate, but the basic gist of it seems to be that a male Neanderthal would probably sound something like a cross between Mickey Mouse and a less metallic Dalek from Dr. Who.
Sgt_Gath
It's interesting, and thank you for posting this, but what decides tessitura (range) is the actual length of the vocal folds with neither the crycothyroids or the crycoarytenoids unduly tensing, or to put it another way, with both sets of opposing muscles balance. The longer the folds, the deeper the general tessitura. The shorter the folds, the higher the tessitura.
As to the subject of nasal or not nasal, that is absolutely impossible to ascertain with 100% certainty, since a large nasal cavity does not necessarily mean a nasal sound at all. When a person breathes to speak and of course, to sing, the soft palate is lifted in the back of the mouth. For perfect singing, if the soft palate is perfectly raised, then it will completely hermetically seal-off the port to the nasal cavity, and therefore no nasality would ensue at all. For speaking, some people tend to be somewhat nasal, others not at all. Nature or nurture? Who knows for sure....
With that background information, without having an actual neanderthal soft-palate to look at and examine, this issue can never be really correctly assessed.
More likely is that overall, neanderthals had a SLIGHTLY higher speaking tessitura than Homo Sapiens of today, and whether or not a neanderthal back then spoke nasally would be an individual issue.
I am also amazed that that woman in the video would pick out a student who would speak so terribly "off the breath" in order to make her point. Kind of silly.
It should be noted that just 170 years ago, the voice of authority, at least in the Western World, was the high voice, and the voice of the "Dummkopf" was the low voice.
With the advent of radio, TV and film and therefore not necessarily the need to create one's own metallic acoustic when speaking or singing, that paradigm has pretty much flipped over.
Derideo_Te Mertex - I thought this might interest both of you.
