The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Human Voice

Episode Date: August 6, 2018

The Human VoiceBrian Cox and Robin Ince are joined by comedian and beatboxer Beardyman, acoustic engineer Prof Trevor Cox and neuroscientist Prof Sophie Scott to explore the amazing capabilities of the human voice. They chat about chatting, vocalise about voices and explore the extraordinary and unique way the human voice works from opera singing to laughter, and discovery why our voice has been so key to our success and survival as a species. Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

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This is the BBC. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince, and today's show is about the human voice. Now, we did ask Brian Blessed to come back for the show, but he said... I don't need to come back! They'll still be able to hear my voice! Because once I've spoken in a theatre, they hear it for eternity!

I'm alive! Oh, it's such a workout. Do you know what? Every morning when I wake up, if I feel a bit glum, I just go, I'm going to be Brian Blessed, but only for a moment. Good. We all have very different voices. I, for example, have a soft, gentle northern voice, according to Robin,

perfect for talking about the universe and the nature of time. The universe will eventually end in heat death and the temperature will approach absolute zero and everything will be dead. Mmm. Whereas Robin has a sort of southern, hectic, gabbling voice. He thinks if he says enough words fast enough, then chance alone will mean that some of it makes sense.

That is correct. Tonight's show is about the human voice. When did the voice develop into the complex instrument it is today? Do we see anything approaching the complexity of the human voice elsewhere in nature and how do we study the evolution of the voice and we imagine what a world without the voice would be like no quote unquote no just a minute unimaginable for the radio for listener so to answer these questions we're joined by a distinguished panel of linguistic academicians dedicated to investigating and then divulging without the resulting discombobulation that often arises when the opaque linguistic tendencies of the frequent if loquacious sesquipedillion are

deployed casually and without reference to the clarity the discerning radio 4 listener demands and they are i'm trevor cox i'm professor of acoustic engineering at the university of salford what i find remarkable about my voice is i've been using it for 50 years and as you can see i've got wrinkles and aging is taking effect but my voice is I've been using it for 50 years, and as you can see, I've got wrinkles and ageing is taking effect, but my voice is still working beautifully. My name is Sophie Scott, and I'm a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London. And what I love most about human voices is that they tell people how we are,

they tell people who we are, and they tell people who we'd like to be. who we are, and they tell people who we'd like to be. Mm. Mm. My name is Beardy Man, but my mum calls me Darren. And my favourite thing about the human voice is that it can do stuff like... HE SINGS And this is our panel. APPLAUSE And we should make it clear that Beanie Man, a.k.a. Darren,

that was just all his voice there creating that. There were no other instrumentalists there, because I've realised that radio listeners may go, oh, someone's got a band in, but they haven't. That was all... I want to ask you, Trevor, before we actually get started, this is that interesting thing about the change of the voice. When you just mentioned in the beginning about the ageing of the voice, because later on we're going to talk about mimicry,

one of my favourite voices has always been John Peel. And if you listen to John Peel in 1963, he's kind of, hi, I'm John Ravencroft and I'm here out in Dallas. And then, of course, by about 1978, he ends up with this very kind of low voice with that timbre so what is happening when you know that that change that we can see from from the young person to even just in middle age yeah and in general your voice doesn't change very much during your adult life which is quite remarkable because how often it's being used and it's and it's really because it's a muscle you're exercising and therefore you keep it in trim and and with blokes it tends to that you know the pitch tends to drop a bit as you as

you grow older it certainly does with women but in older older age it tends to go back up again for men as your as your vocal cords the bit which actually make the sound kind of fail to sort of kind of meet quite so well and they kind of get lighter and they you know the fibers become you know not quite as good as they used to be so for you there's also there's like a shifting window of how we talk changes all the time just as a population so even the queen no longer speaks the queen's english she has picked up some of these linguistic changes and that goes on all the time and it what tends to happen is you go back and listen to somebody from 30 35 years ago and they sound really super posh.

And it's like a constant slightly de-poshing of everybody's accents, which gives us all slightly different voices over our lifetimes. Is that the technical scientific term, de-poshing? Yes, that's exactly what we call it. Trevor, how does the human voice work? Well, for something simple like a vowel sound, like an E, what you're doing is you're pushing air out of your lungs and that air is coming up to your larynx.

And at that point, you've got these things called the vocal cords or vocal folds, which open and close and break the flow of air up. So instead of it being a constant flow of air, you get puffs of air. And that puffs of air are actually acoustic waves because acoustic waves are variations in pressure. So if you actually did an experiment where you chopped my head off you and i carried on speaking you'd hear this kind of buzzing sound which is actually the source of my vowel sounds i just checked that i could chop your head off and you would carry on speaking is that you're not it's not it's a thought

experiment rather than a real experiment but then you shape it so you're doing it's a talk i can just feel all my articulators, the tongue, the lips, every part of my anatomy around my mouth is moving to shape the different words. And that part is the top of the throat, the mouth, the nasal passage is called the vocal tract. And that's how we then form the words

and turn that buzz into actually the different vowel sounds, for example. So is that where the complexity is, Sophie? Because I think you described the human voice as the most complex sound in nature. That's coming from the shaping rather than the emission of the sound. It is actually both. So we can do something by just actually the airflow that we produce

when we blow out and make a sound at our larynx, because we walk upright and it's freed up our ribcage from having to support our weight. All other quadrupeds have to engage the rib cage to stay upright and we can do things like take a breath in and we breathe completely differently when we start talking we're actually now using our rib cage with as much fine control as we do our fingers to produce that flow of air at the larynx if i keep talking without taking another breath you start to hear that i'll start to run out of puff and i have to work really really hard

to keep the air flowing i don't keep making this and in the end I'll run out together now one of these days I'm either going to um pass out or urinate at the end of that but no we're good you're probably thinking that is kind of weird but we are literally the only animal that can do that and that gives us quite a long chunk of sound to make we control pitch and rhythm in our voices with all that and then again exactly as you say as Trevor says we have these sets of articulators and no other animals have got this configuration so for example that the human tongue is more like a an octopus tentacle than it is any other mammal's tongue and we're continuously shaping that sound we're making at the larynx

with this it's like a musical instrument where you change the timbre all the time so you add together this amazing sequence of sounds that we then shape, and there's literally nothing. There is no other sound like it in nature. That's a remarkable thing. I didn't think of the voice, actually, as involving your ribcage and almost half your body, essentially. It's like we're engines for sound.

That's going to be the title of my next album, 100%. That's really dope. Darren, you mean, you use the voice in so many different ways, and I wonder if you, just to give us some, obviously we had in your introduction some sense of that, but can you just give us an example of the diversity of where you can go

when you're performing live? Sure, I suppose for me, I suppose I can get about as far as, I mean, I don't know. Let's lay down a little. So trumpets are relatively easy. So that sounds reasonably accurate. I can do a sort of cello. Cello. Os dw i'n ceisio gwneud piano, mae'n sain yn ddrwg.

Mae'n ddrwg. Mae'r rhwystrau. Mae'r rhwystrau. Felly, a ydych chi wedi gallu gweithio allan? A ydych chi'n gallu meddwl am y stwrtur o ran rhai o'r cerddorion? Ac yn sylweddol, a ydych chi'i gallu gweithio allan? A ydych chi'n gallu meddwl am y stwyth o rhai o'r cwmnïau ac yn dechrau meddwl, wyt ti'n gwybod beth, byddai hynny'n rhywbeth lle mae'r cwrdd gwagorol dynol yn dod yn llinell? Ie, roeddwn i'n cael fy hwyl drwy roi dechrau taith i'r cyfnod cywir a recordau a phethau

ac yn sylweddoli bod y ffonim yn newid gyda'r pitch. Felly gallwch chi siarad yn dda. Ond, wyddoch chi, os ydych chi'n teimlo... Y math hwnnw o beth. be talking right now. But, you know, that kind of thing. But yeah, it fascinates me that the human voice can be used for things it's not supposed to. Like, I've got kids and I know that I should be discouraging them from making

extra phonemic noises but I don't. So my little daughter will be like, and I'm like, well done. That's brilliant. Keep that up. Because, you know, if you tune that... You know, it can be a career. That is a... You're right, it is.

You've had one of those moments that I have quite often as well where you suddenly go, wow, this is my job. This is, you've just, people have just gone, what a brilliant thing. We saw a man make a farty noise and then he pressed some buttons and he made it into something else. That's what I want to be. And that's a beautiful thing.

There's some very angry people listening to this show now. Any bloody chances of, you know, waste rules. Useless. Sorry, just one more quick question question on that which is just um when did you i mean because beatboxing when did that actually come in as in terms of now that the you know there's more people experimenting with that when did you become aware that like wow this is something that i can take to this level that you are able to i mean huge audiences in in festivals and stuff when you yeah yeah i mean so beatboxing

started in uh new york in 1979 ish because um you know actual beat boxes were hard to come by they were quite expensive so people realized that you could be like and it was a very unrefined art form and the noises were very Raspberry-esque that's a scientific term and yeah, so that's how it started but over time there's grown this lexicon of sounds which thanks to the internet has now grown into this vast

kind of panoply of different, I just wanted to say panoply, did it sound good? I see so you can find tutorials as to how to make the trumpet or the there are eight-year-olds in like tunisia that are way better than i'll ever be it's it's amazing because it's just the skill set's exponentially increasing well that's the reason you're on this is we look to the cost of flights from tunisia and you would definitely

cheaper than those eight-year-olds. But can I say one more? Is there a certain noise that you make where, you know, maybe halfway through a gig, where the audience properly go, oh, that one was one that they just cannot believe that a human being can really... Yeah, if you give it the whole two-vint throat singing thing, it always sounds impressive, but anyone can do it. Can I give it the...

Which is weird, but... But you could all do it if you wanted to. Brian, you do it. Sophie. Sophie. Sophie, you've been working in a scientific sense with beatboxers like Darren so why scientifically um well initially because we just wanted to know what the beatboxers were doing so my my postdoc Serena Agnew and Carolyn McGettigan went to the UK beatboxing championships and ran

down the front were shouting can we scan scan your brains? Literally. And some people said, all right. So we, and that was just because we wanted, we'd been looking actually at a vocal impressionist. So we just started to think, you know, hang on, people don't only talk with their voices. There is more to this. And then I got really like struck by the beatboxing. So I used to start all my talks by saying human speech is the most complex sound in nature and then I met beatboxers and I realized we do the bare minimum when we're talking talking is hard but we're scratching the surface like like Darren says any of us could do we might not do it as well but we could do what he's doing and it's like an indication I think of a lot of very interesting things about possibly why we have this instrument at all but But it's also very interesting as a way of looking at music,

as a way of looking at vocal expertise without looking at language. And we're even starting a study on the genetics of beatboxing with a group in Nijmegen this summer. So treating it there as an example of a really complex vocal skill. Darren, does it feel different, the idea that different areas of your brain are being used when you're beatboxing to when you're speaking? Does it feel different to you mentally? y sgiliau golygol. Darren, a ydy'n teimlo gwahanol? Y syniad yw bod ardalau gwahanol o'ch gynhwysedd wedi'u defnyddio pan fyddwch chi'n gofalu, pan fyddwch chi'n siarad, a ydy'n teimlo gwahanol i chi yn ysgolol? Ie, mae'n teimlo'n anodd. Weithiau, rwy'n cael profiad allan o'r cyfrif os ydw i ar ystafell a byddaf yn ymwneud â... ac rwy'n meddwl amser, beth rwy'n ei wneud?

Felly ie, rwy'n gwybod beth ydych chi'n ei olygu. Mae'n dda, oherwydd rwy'n cael mynediad amser, mae pobl yn dweud, wel, bod gwneud f. Because I get asked sometimes, people say, well, doing physics or mathematics is very similar to doing music because of this kind of alleged association between musical ability and physics or mathematics. But I don't see the connection at all. They feel completely different to me as activities mentally. So I just wonder whether you have analysed it.

Was your time in DREAM not spent figuring out equations in your head? I don't know, actually. He's one of the few individuals in the music industry where, on top of the pops, the lead singer's turned around and gone, you've got to decide, Brian! Do you want to be an internationally famous pop star, or do you want to be a physicist?

I don't know. Someone actually asked me a question to ask you. Does the phrase, things can only get better, fly in the face of the second law of thermodynamics? Yes. It's a grotesque misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the science. It should never have been written. It should say, things inexorably get worse.

It is a statistical certainty. The universe is going to fall to bits and die. There will be no structure left in the universe at all. The heat death is inevitable in an expanding universe. And that's the end of it. And that's the lyric that I submitted to Pete Cunner and he said no i think things can i get better is more catchy that is great in fact why did you leave the band well i peer-reviewed our lyrics terrible terrible issues scientific differences that's what it was anyway

trevor what is um going back to what we saw Darren do before, what is going on in terms of the actual vocal cords there? So at that point, that variety of activity, compared to... I mean, how could you compare it to when just talking and then the variety of noises that he creates there? So one of the interesting things that they do that I don't do as an English speaker

is he has to make these sounds with an out-b an in breath because otherwise he can't keep beatboxing because in the middle of his beatboxing he would have to go and it'd ruin the kind of effect so there are some languages where you know in breaths happen say Iceland you say ja and you go you say yes on an in breath but actually in English we don't really do it so there's all sorts of tricks like that you have to learn. And you get things like, I don't know, how do you do your snare, for example? There's a bunch of different ways. You can do a kind of a snare with a, which is aggressive.

Or you could do a, which is ingressive, but it doesn't sound like it is. So we're used to using kind of a, it's a plosive sound. So we're used to going, which is where we plosive sound so we're used to going which is where we sort of build up pressure and and hold that pressure with our lips and then let it go to give us a p sound but you're doing the same kind of thing you're holding holding everything closed and then you're dropping your diaphragm to create a vacuum or partial vacuum in your lungs and then opening up and then suddenly you get the ingress and you get that plosive sound but it's on an in-breath rather than out-breath. So these are skills that I don't have,

or most English speakers don't have. You have to spend a lot of time learning how to do it. And if beatboxing is incredibly sexy, then I suppose in a few generations' time, once it's been selected for, you'll sort of get these incredible beatboxing super people. Oh, that is a more horrible vision than The Walking Dead. Oh, the planet of the beatboxers.

No, thank you. They blew it up. They didn't blow it up. They just made a noise like it blew up. The beatbox championship is a bit like that. It's a really strange place to be. But don't you think that's already where we are? I mean, I genuinely think that one of the things

that's driven the evolution of the human voice is it as this incredibly diverse musical instrument. It may well have already happened, it's just we then learnt to talk with it and we got really judgmental about people who started going... at each other. We've been very delighted to rediscover it, but I suspect it may have been always there.

This does lead to the question of what do we know about the evolution of the human voice? Well, there is a very good reason why this was a subject banned by the french academy of sciences at the end of the 19th century because voices don't hang around you know we can't go and listen to a voice from the past and a lot of the body parts involved in speaking don't fossilize so you can hypothesize a lot but we do know that everything that has happened to us that has led us to be able to use our voices it entirely used structures we already had so we were breathing we turn that breath into the voice the larynx is a structure that keeps things from

falling into the lungs and that has been very widely adopted by mammals as a way of making sound by breathing out now we have a descended larynx and that larynx means it can no longer do its job of things falling into our lungs and we can and do choke what it's given us is a longer pipe to make the sounds of speech and also arguably makes it more efficient for us to be able to raise the level of our breath control and get a sound out of it then we've adapted our tongue that's normally there for you know manipulating food the even the roof of the mouth and the shape of the face is different in humans we've got these flat faces and the domed roof of the mouth very different from other animals that means we've got a different space to make these shapes to make the sounds so it's it's all

of it uh kind of pushing us in a direction where we are able to make the sounds so it's it's all of it uh kind of pushing us in a direction where we are able to make the sounds but whatever it was that happened it happened before we could talk with it so it's somewhat something else was deriving that evolution so so there's no sense in which we think physiological changes um are somehow speech is being selected for we think it or is it now well there's such a cost to us being able to choke it's phenomenally risky it's why you know if you have a stroke that affects your ability to swallow the main risk to your life is then choking and people you have to learn to swallow when you're a baby you have to learn fast so it whatever it was that was adaptive about that, that there was a positive aspect to, it was powerful

because we've literally got a perfect trade-off. It kills us and it gives us voices. So it must have been strong. Trevor, that is, I mean, that to me is a facet. I know this is going to be conjecture, so I'm sorry to put a sign to it, but is there a point where we are able to, for instance, But is there a point where we are able to, for instance, look at what appears to be structures of a primitive society and in any way start to think this may well require a level of communication where at least we can draw a very blurred line of the beginning of a more eloquent sense of communication i think the problem with that is this this sort of the limited

amount of data so if you'd asked me that question say a hundred years ago i would have probably said homo sapiens modern man was the only people who speak and this neanderthal group were a lot of dumb people but now the oldest art you know we actually have found is 70 000 years ago it's neanderthal art and so we're having to reconsider other species of man and whether we actually, they should speak. They had all the anatomy that was needed. In fact, you could actually argue that chimpanzees have got quite a lot of the anatomy that's needed. Certainly they can do the hearing part. Hearing is an incredibly important part of learning to speak. And they had, you know, you can cheat a chimp to obey command. So they certainly can take the sounds in and understand

them. But also, I mean, they couldn't talk that well because their larynx is high, but actually to obey command so they certainly can can take the the sounds in and understand them but also i mean they couldn't talk that well because their larynx is high but actually they probably if they really wanted to they could speak but they can't it's interesting that chimpanzees can can gesture you can teach them some language but they can't vocalize that's interesting but but mechanically it is possible because i thinking of other animals, like a parrot, for example, it can speak in the sense it can form words that we understand. But, of course, it's not talking, it's not having a conversation. So I suppose the chimpanzee, you're suggesting that it could be a little bit different.

They're mentally capable, perhaps, of understanding communication. I think most people would say that the issue is about the neurological control, the mental abilities, which actually preventing chimpanzees from actually being able to vocalise. I mean, their anatomy is slightly different, but recent studies have shown that if they had the neurological control, they certainly could form enough to be able to speak, even if it wasn't that clear.

And I think that is a really important part when you look at evolution it's not just developing the structural changes in your body it's being able to control it so it's not enough that our hands are this shape we can do this with our fingers if you go to the zoo and you look at the squirrel monkeys they can only do that they've got very similar looking hands they can simply don't have the neural control so we've got phenomenal neural control over lots of parts of our articulatory system and our breathing that other animals simply don't have so the two must progress together so what what is happening with a parrot or a minor bird well they have they have what's called a syrinx so they actually have a slightly different vocal anatomy uh and so they

actually have two way you know they have their their bit of the anatomy which makes the sound, instead of our vocal cords, is actually in the two branches of their lungs. So they actually can make two sounds at the same time if they want to, and some birds do. But they're doing the same thing with those syrinxes. They're breaking up the sort of flow of air. And what they're doing there is doing imitation because it's how, for example, they might impress in terms of impressing mates or how the length of their song or the complexity of their song

might be very important for territorial fighting. So there's lots of birds that use mimicry and mimic all sorts of things. They don't just mimic their own species, they mimic other species and they'll mimic things like if they're in a forest, they'll mimic the sounds of humans driving their cars past or using chainsaws and it's thought that they get this mimicry ability and then they use that kind of how how impressive am i as a mimic as a way of kind of attracting a mate or defending their territory well that like my dad had an african grey parrot and i was i wanted to know what it was about certain voices or certain sounds that some sounds were heard

regularly but the parrot would never uh repeat them but things like the microwave going off uh my dad picking up the phone uh whistling for the dog the poor dog he's so glad that because a parrot whistling for a dog doesn't have enough process to really quite understand what's going on there and he would pick up certain different voices but there would also be a lot of family members who probably spoke as much but didn't get picked up is there anything we know about why it might be for for whatever reason a parrot will decide that's something i'm going to mimic and that is not i think the honest answer is i don't know but i think one of the interesting things is how we all adapt to different people's voices.

So my vocal anatomy is different to everyone else on stage. And yet you can hear me, even if you've never heard me before. You can quickly calibrate to what the size of my vocal anatomy is and what it can do. And that might be one of the reasons the parrot would struggle to imitate different voices. It's because they're probably not trying to normalise and understand the difference between humans so they're latching onto a familiar voice but I'm afraid that's a bit conjecture really. It's also quite interesting that mammalian hearing is very similar that your your ear and a dog's ear and a cat's ear and a bat's ear they're pretty much the same they just scale up or down and they're completely different from reptile and bird's ears all reptile hearing

and bird hearing cuts off at about 10,000 kilohertz, and we can hear much more than that. Many mammals can. So we can hear birds, we can't hear bats. And so the parrot may also simply be hearing a different auditory world. So really you're saying, I suppose, that our speech and the ability to speak is a large part of being human that differentiates us from other animals well i think our voices definitely are there's so many there's as i say that the cost of having our voices is

profound in the terms that we can and do choke and it's taking up a lot of real estate in the brain and our brains are big and our brains are expensive and it's it's something that we are it is our primary for most people it's your dominant social tool, how you interact with other people is by talking to them. Even in a world where you can be communicating in all sorts of different ways, to see a friend, you want to sit down and talk to them, you want the voices to be there. And that doesn't seem to be showing any signs of going away. For example, one of the other main differences between human adult men and women is voices. We have sexual dimorphism in our voices. We don't know why, but it clearly matters enough that it exists as a thing. And there are actually not that many other differences.

So it does seem to have a very, very important role to us. And because we see people talking, we think it's always about the language but when you're speaking you are communicating a lot about yourself your emotional state as Travis says when you're talking to someone you will change your voice to adapt to them you will change your voice depending on who you're talking to and that has an important social role your emotional state will influence it it's it's it's an absolutely extraordinarily complex thing that exists in our lives in which huge amount of the sort of emotional and social work that we do in our day to day interactions hangs off that trevor you're gonna uh well i was going to say sophie was talking

about how important the voice is for identity and one of those kind of sort of stark reminders of that is if you if you ever meet someone who has foreign accent syndrome or hear about these cases so these are people who often have had head injuries or have had stroke, and they suddenly start talking in what appears to be a different accent. So the most famous case is probably the first case, which was an unfortunate Norwegian woman who, during World War II, was hit during a raid

and then started talking in what the locals assumed was a German accent. And therefore the shopkeepers stopped serving her because they thought she was a conspirator and so this is completely changing your identity your vocal identity and if you read the cases of what that does to people it often when they you know they've got brain injuries they've got lots of problems but often it centers around the voice is what they kind of the major issue they're struggling with and that is sorry yes i just want to know more because that is i saw the one where there was a a texan woman who again she had some some form of nogre and then she became a very posh english woman and i mean these

are how much of this is do we know is actual physical damage and how much of it has some connection something i suppose more more outwardly psychological? I have worked quite a lot with people with foreign accent syndrome. What it tends to be associated with, as Trevor said, it's brain damage, but it's a small amount of brain damage, because if it was a bigger amount of brain damage, you would have a very frank problem of speaking. So people can still talk, and it's basically a form of what's called dysarthria. A lot of different strokes and head injuries can give you dysarthria,

a problem of what's called dysarthria. A lot of different strokes and head injuries can give you dysarthria, a problem with speaking. There happens to be a problem with speaking that to our ears sounds like a foreign accent. There'll be enough cues there. So the first woman I worked with, she put sounds at the end of lots of words. And that starts to give a rhythm that to the UK people's ears sounded more Italian-ish maybe um and of course it's not and if you played her speech to somebody who was

Italian they go this sounds like somebody speaking with difficulty and with effort that it's awful like Trevor says it's really disruptive you suddenly sound like you're not a fellow country man I worked with one woman who lives in the middle of, I'm going to be general, the middle of the UK in a rural area. And she ended up carrying a piece of paper that says, I come from round here. Because she'd go to catch the bus and everyone would start explaining to her

how the money works because they thought she was Latvian or something. And she's like, no, I know how it works. I live down the road. I've been here all my life, Pauline. And it was really really really hard for in fact she carried around with her a tape recording of herself where she called into local radio and taking part in a competition and she would make you listen to that before you

had any further conversation with her and she'd go that was me now that's what you should be hearing and it's terrible we don't think about this until it's gone it's appalling if people make we make assumptions about people all the time based on what they sound like and frequently of course we're wildly wrong but it doesn't stop us doing it and those people on the bus they were trying to be helpful but she felt like she was being isolated and pushed out and in fact i've heard several people say they feel more comfortable when they come to london to see their neurologists because they're surrounded by a thousand different accents accentsents must demonstrate to us how complex and subtle vocalisation is.

We are tuned. I'm from Oldham and around there you can tell, I can tell where people were brought up or grew up within a couple of miles because I'm used to that particular area. It also shows you how flexible the voice is because accents are changing because I'm used to that particular area. It also shows you how flexible the voice is, because accents are changing,

and gradually accents are tending to smooth out across the country. But there are some factors staying on, and one of the interesting ones is the pronunciation of last or last. That north-south divide is still being maintained, and accents is about group identity. And of course, are you northern or you northern or southern it's a really important group identity in britain and therefore i come from the south so i say bath but my children who are born in manchester say bath and that's you know that that differentiation is still maintained

i couldn't say it but bath i can't do it's bath i cannot it's bath i came from the bath it is such a strange alien thing for me to say and i can adapt to the words and i have done you know you sort of lose your accent to some extent i've never felt more like rex harrison than i do now the rain in spain falls mainly on the plane brian historically i don't want to think of you as my rex harrison just think about. Think about that film. Historically, it was the southerners starting to say bath that was the aberrant and unusual thing. Just to make it clear, the northerners are right.

Okay, you've got that. It's spelt bath, isn't it? But it just changes all the time and you can see that when you go back to old poetry or jokes that were puns in Shakespeare that aren't puns anymore because we don't say those words that way anymore. It just changes all the time and you can see that when you go back to old poetry or jokes that were puns in Shakespeare that aren't puns anymore because we don't say those words that way anymore it just changes all the time but I think the other thing that's really interesting about accents as you say it's something it's speaking to the fact that we we learn a language and we're learning it from

the people around us and you do find tremendous variation so I grew up in Blackburn where we do the same you know we consider people from Accrington to speak hilariously because they say buzz and not boss um but my parents were from the south of England and they used to go ballistic if I said bus you know so I spoke two accents growing up and I still do I'll change quite happily depending on where I am if I take my son to Blackpool on holiday he starts going mum why are you talking like that within two minutes of me getting off the train but it's it's a it's as much to do and I'm delighted when that happens I love it because it's not just a physical thing that I've learned to do it's part of you know reminds me of an aspect of who I am that I love and I'm really fond of and I'm proud of so it's somebody once

said to me oh you're from Blackburn you must have really lost your accent when you came to London and became a professor and I was like no i definitely did no i did do that i absolutely did do that you know it's i would not talk that way at work we're um getting towards the end actually but we wanted to well that was that was actually the final question we had wasn't it man so we kind of but we wanted to um nope that's it but it is it very, I mean, there's lots of things. I wanted to talk about Coco, the gorilla who recently died, and, you know, the inability to, you know, how far we can go with other animals being able to learn language, but there's no time for that.

Robin always does this. Please let me tell my Coco story, please. Which one? Talk about it. Let me tell my Coco story. Of course you can tell your Coco story. So, she's an amazing gorilla, learnt to sign. You know what she mostly signed? Nipples.

And that's what she wanted to see. It wasn't random. She'd be like, no. And then, you know, any bit of film of Coco, this great big gorillary hand starts. I'm not going to do it to you, Trevor. But she starts... And there's a fabulous bit of film I show of her

with Robin Williams, because he makes her laugh by tickling her. But then she also just keeps taking his shirt off. And going, what have you got going on underneath here and she genuinely was very very interested so it was a good example she was taught a sign and she was like thank you I have been waiting to ask to see these nipples I want to see nipples you were the same weren't you Brian what is it that you can... A certain level of language is possible. And, you know, even the variety, the different...

We were thinking before we started recording, we were talking this afternoon about, you know, a blue whale, how much variety, how much expression. You know, we think we can express ourselves in many ways, but now we're beginning to learn the nuances, the very, very subtle tonal nuances, maybe some that we can't even pick up. What do we have in terms of in the animal world,

the non-human animal world, what are the nearest we have for actually seeing an incredible variety of possible expression? Well, sea mammals like whales and dolphins, they do seem to be probably the best contenders for having very, very complex vocal behaviour. We have literally no idea how they're making the sounds because they can't make it on a breath of air out because that doesn't work under the water.

They're sort of shunting air around inside their heads. Dolphins have at least two larynxes. They make two sounds at once. One is probably echolocation, one is almost certainly communication. So I may have to revisit everything I've ever said about beatboxers and human speech when we know a little bit more about dolphins.

I mean, I could give it a go. I don't know how they do it, but I was doing it with my laptop. APPLAUSE That brings us to the end of the shipping forecast. That's something about nipples, I think. You speak Dolphin too. So, thank you very much. We asked the audience a question as well, as usual.

We said, if you could have somebody else's voice, whose would it be and why? Andrew, I'm not allowed to say Brian Cox. Well, I've got one here which looks like a list of your impressions. It's John Peel, Alan Bennett and Stuart Lee. Do you do Stuart Lee? No, I don't do Stuart. It's like...

No, ah, you know, some of the audience, oh, yes, that's Stuart Lee. Do you do Stuart Lee? No, I don't do Stuart. It's like... No, ah, you know, some of the audience, oh, yes, that's Stuart Lee. And then some of the others are like, oh, I don't listen to Stuart Lee. I don't know. And my favourites always do Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan, which is the universe, which is everything there is, everything there was,

and everything there ever will be. We were talking about this. Why I can, and I think you're the same way, Darren. You can only do impressions of people you like. Yeah, I've tried doing Donald Trump, but every time I try I'm just like, ah, get out of my brain! I don't want him in there.

I've found my ability to impersonate Morrissey has become less and less week by week. What is it down to now? No thank you. This one is quite sad, actually. It's my primary school teacher, so I could give myself the approval I never got as a child.

Oh, that's from Patrick. God. I think this says God, doesn't it? Does that say God? God. Yeah. Because even though people still wouldn't listen to me, at least some would pretend to. This one, it would have to be Patrick Stewart, just so

I could say, engage and make it so. You know, yeah, I tried to learn German. I did my PhD in Germany, and I tried to learn it by watching German television, and Star Trek The Next Generation was on. So those are two of the things I learned how to say. A Mackenzie Das, which is make it so,

and a Zeehab and DeBruyck in the mines, which is you have the bridge, number one. And that was no use at all in shops, it turns out. I love the fact that that's what you've got. I can speak Star Trek in any country in the world. That is brilliant. Well, thank you very much to our panel, Trevor Cox, Sophie Scott, and Darren,

a.k.a. Beardy Man. And we thought we would leave, rather than the final word to Brian, we're going to leave the final noise to you. Oh, finished. That's it, we're not great. Thank you very much. APPLAUSE Thank you. In the infinite monkey cage. Without your trousers.

In the infinite monkey cage. Turned out nice again. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet,

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