“Late Night DJ Voice” and Why You Need it 🎧🎤

You know it when you hear it.

Late Night DJ voice. You know it when you hear it. Author and negotiator Chris Voss uses it to define a voice that makes your shoulders drop just on hearing it. Certain voices have that power in the same way that music does.
 

In the UK there are a few presenters on BBC Radio 4 who do that for me.

In the podcast sphere, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman definitely calms me.
I’m with Shakespeare in his assertion in King Lear that a voice “soft, gentle and low” is generally an excellent thing and not just in women either. He recommends it as a way to take the heat out of a tricky discussion when used with awareness.

And when two of my favourite soft, gentle and low voices, Chris Voss and Andrew Huberman got together to talk about why the late night DJ voice works so effectively on our brains, it was all just too perfect. Podcast heaven.

So what’s the science behind the late night DJ voice?

As Huberman explains, in our brains there are certain auditory neurons that respond to different frequencies of sound, just as there are neurons that respond to different colours. And in line with what we intuitively know about the impact of the “late night DJ voice”, the neurons that respond to low frequency sounds also fire at low frequency. They entrain to the lower sound. As Huberman puts it “you’re essentially playing a piano in the low keys of their mind,” the low frequency sound shifts the emotion of people who hear it.
 

But my plea to anyone reading this is that the best way to access late night DJ voice is NOT to push your voice down to a forced low note. You do not have to find your inner Barry White or Margaret Thatcher. The secret to the late night DJ voice is ease and openness. Put some music on and sing along for 10 mins. Or hum gently and feel the resonance of your voice open up as you hum. Then your voice will have the natural easy buzz that is the secret of late night DJ voice. If it sounds effortful it’s not late night DJ, so find the ease and notice your impact on the minds and energy of others.

See you on Monday!

Caroline x