Curious Folks Ask 1 & 2 (Bundle)

4. Bodily functions

Music of maturity

You can tell someone’s approximate age by listening to his or her voice. I also think women’s voices age more rapidly than men’s, because I can more readily tell it is an older lady than an older man. What happens to the vocal cords as a person ages?

Shakespeare wrote about the aging individual, “turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound” (As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7). Tests with modern acoustic equipment validate these poetic observations. Older people’s voices can be distinguished by their characteristic decreases in loudness and clarity, changes in pitch, tremulousness, and breathiness.

The medical term for the normal age-related changes of the voice is presbylarynx. ...