On Venus Our Voices Would Sound Like “BASS SMURFS”, Awesome.

Here’s a tidbit upside your head. Professor Tim Leighton and a crack squad at  the University of Southampton have calculated what we would sound like on different planets. Provided, you know, we could speak on them. What they’ve found is that humans’ voices would be so alien to us that we’d look  physically different.

io9:

That’s one of the more intriguing conclusions from a team led by the University of Southampton’s Professor Tim Leighton, who have calculated all the different sounds we might hear if we could listen in on the other worlds of our solar system. That includes the whirlwinds of Mars, the lightning of Venus, and even the sounds of methane and ethane falling like water on Saturn’s moon Titan.

But perhaps the most interesting is how we would sound if we could actually talk on these faraway worlds. Because of differences in atmospheres, pressures, and temperatures on these worlds, the human voice would sound very different, and since we’re adapted to hear voices in Earth’s atmosphere, these changes would actually play havoc on how we comprehend the voices of those around us. Leighton explains how this would work on Venus:

“We are confident of our calculations; we have been rigorous in our use of physics taking into account atmospheres, pressure and fluid dynamics. On Venus, the pitch of your voice would become much deeper. That is because the planet’s dense atmosphere means that the vocal cords vibrate more slowly through this ‘gassy soup’.

“However, the speed of sound in the atmosphere on Venus is much faster than it is on Earth, and this tricks the way our brain interprets the size of a speaker (presumably an evolutionary trait that allowed our ancestors to work out whether an animal call in the night was something that was small enough to eat or so big as to be dangerous). When we hear a voice from Venus, we think the speaker is small, but with a deep bass voice. On Venus, humans sound like bass Smurfs.”

Odd as fuck.