Your voice is you!" affirmed the professor of speech during the opening lecture of a popular course in his department. Some members of the class were startled. Others were not too sure that they could agree with the statement.
A young Seventh-day Adventist doctor was awakened by the persistent ringing of his telephone late one winter's night. His pleasing voice assured the anxious relative that he was glad to be of service, and that he was not the-least bit provoked at having to come at such an unseasonable hour. "How could his voice be so pleasant when he was so rudely aroused at an hour like this?" mused the caller as he replaced the receiver. Further investigation answered his question : The doctor was a Christian. Continued acquaintance led the relative to study and accept the same religious beliefs as those held by the doctor, whose Christianity was from the first contact so well indicated by his agreeable voice.
Prof. William Michael, a teacher of speech at the University of Idaho, had noticed, after years of teaching, that though students of his classes showed more or less improvement in enunciation and breath control at the end of the course, it was difficult to cause any material alteration in the way the pitch, or tone, of the voice was habitually placed. He had also noted that some foreign people with quite small English vocabularies were able to inflect just a few words so well that they could express themselves quite clearly. These observations led him to wonder whether marked intelligence bore any relation to good inflection. He brought his problem to the department of education of the university, and an experiment was outlined and carried to completion by Professor Michael and Dr. C. C. Crawford, of the department of secondary education.
The two educators were convinced that an intelligent student would have a wide range of inflection, and that his inflection would be so controlled that any passages read or spoken would be given the expression that the meaning required. It was assumed that the duller student would read or speak in a monotone with little or no expression, or would give the wrong inflection by raising or lowering his voice without proper regard to the meaning.
Fifty-six students, twenty-seven boys and twenty-nine girls, volunteered for the experiment. The test was to read orally three fairly difficult passages of a total of five hundred words before a teacher of public speaking, who acted as judge and graded the readers. Neither the scholastic standing nor the intelligence quotient of the readers was known to the judge at the time of the presentation.
The result of the investigation showed that intelligence can be judged on the basis of voice. For those with good inflection had the highest I.Q.'s and the best scholarship records. In the words of the researchers, the conclusion was:
"It has been found that inflection, or the pattern of pitch changes in the voice, is a reasonably good measure of ability. The correlation between inflection and scholarship are approximately the tameas those between intelligence tests and scholarship. The three factors, scholarship, intelligence, and inflection, are about equally intercorrelated, and any one of the three is about as safe a basis for predicting another as any two combined."—"An Experiment in Judging Intelligence by the Voice," Journal of Educational Psychology, June, 1927,
"Your voice is you!" And since you are of those who are "a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness," in what kind of wrappings are these "praises" enclosed? What kind of testimony, beyond the mere words used, is your voice giving? Members of the "royal priesthood," children of the King, should show their nobility in a cultured tone of voice.
Everyone wishes to be considered intelligent by others. The way to be so regarded requires effort, and although Professor Michael declares that it is "extremely difficult to change inflection habits," he does not say that it is impossible. Mrs. E. G. White speaks of cultivating the -melody of the voice," and "the full round tones." In this work we may have the assistance of a powerful Helper: "Then do not leave one defective habit of speech uncorrected. Pray about the matter, and co-operate with the Holy Spirit that is working for your perfection."—Fundamentals of Christian Education, p. 215.
