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Why does helium make your voice change?

Why does helium make your voice sound like a baby ?

  • when you breath gas from a helium balloon ( like we were doing last night) why does it change your voice to that of a baby ? also after doing a few goes we got headaches and stopped . i'm not asking why that is because it's pretty obvious.

  • Answer:

    It is not about resistance on your vocal cords, or making your vocal cords get tense. It is entirely because having your head, lungs and trachea filled with helium changes the speed at which sound waves reflected back and forth between your vocal cords, the opening of your mouth and your sinuses. Sound moves more quickly through helium-rich air, so the sound waves reflected back and forth inside you at a higher frequency, raising the natural resonant pitch of your voice as well as raising the pitch of all the other resonant peaks called formants which are caused by your sinuses acting as Helmholtz resonators. The increased speed of sound has the exact same effect on the resulting pitches as if you had kept the air normal but shrunk your head to half its size. You've increased the speed of the sound instead of shortening all the distances, but the end result on the period of the soundwaves is the same. So you sound like you have a baby-sized head. If you breathe in air mixed with a dense gas such as Xenon, and the reverse happens--you get a deep giant's voice.

woodchip... at Yahoo! Answers Visit the source

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Helium is much less dense than air, so your vocal cords meet less resistance and vibrate faster, which is higher pitch. A baby has higher pitch because of short vocal cords. You got a headache because you were replacing the oxygen you should be taking in with helium which does not support life.

Mike1942f

Helium gas is not as dense as air, causing the soundwaves travel quicker through helium thus creating the higher pitch that your voice becomes

crunchymonkey

Helium is not as dense as air, therefore, when you suck it in (which I personally don't recommend [but it's your choice]) it causes in your voice to "go high"

trev_bash

something in the formula

whozit

helium constricts the vocal cords - making your voice go higher in pitch too much helium though and you can get very sick or have a heart attack

T F

Helium makes the vocal cords vibrate at a different frequency and that is the reason, If we were able to breath helium all the time everyone would sound like that. In fact if there were a planet with a helium atmosphere in stead of an oxygen atmosphere how different do you think life would be. Now there's something to think about, All the best.

coofooman

Your vocal cords are like guitar strings....helium makes them tighter, and when you tighten guitar strings, the pitch gets higher.

macjetsfan

ooh I know this, they were talking about it on the discovery channel last night! The speed of sound in helium is greater than it is in air. So the sound resonates back and forth more rapidly in your voice box when it contains helium, this give a higher-pitched sound. http://broadband.discoverychannel.ca/discovery/?vid=4098

♪ ♫Jin_Jur♫ ♥

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