The Voice Of Sarah Palin

OK. This post is going to be about sound.

More specifically, I would like to address the SOUND of Sarah Palin's voice.

For the sake of full disclosure I have to admit something to you: I have not been able to watch to completion, nor desire any longer to finish watching the movie "Fargo" because the accent of the main characters voices drives me absolutely INSANE!

The gentle, and fabulous dispositions of the people from the Dakotas aside...I'm afraid that my problem with the accent might go back to my childhood, where I had a teacher in 5th and 6th grade (One teacher...small school...two grades...all of us together in the same room for both years) named Mrs. Bowen.

Mrs. Bowen did not WASH the blackboards...she WARSHED them. She didn't drive a car she drove a CAAAHR. Hockey wasn't Hockey it was HAAHWKY.

She did NOT proclaim: "I want y'all to be quiet and listen to me while I read" (as any good southerner would)
Mrs Bowen proclaimed things like "IWanchAH t'AHL beQUITE and listen t'ME whiile iREEEED)

It was an excruciating two years, so my aversion to the accent, I am willing to admit, might simply be a psychological one.

But neither Mrs. Bowen nor the lead characters in "Fargo", though they share the same accent with Governor Palin, cause the hair on the back of so many necks to stand on end.

Sarah's voice goes beyond accent alone. Her vocal quality, in an entirely scientific sense, takes things to an entirely new level.

What I came to find MOST interesting were the hundreds, maybe thousands of posts from people across the nation who described her voice as being like fingernails on a chalkboard.

…so being the scientifically minded creature that I am, I decided that perhaps a tad more study was needed.

I used a digital tuner to calibrate her voice using Madame Governors speech at the GOP convention as reference.

What I found was that Ms. Palin stretches the vocal boudaries of human-kind.

For a majority of the time she speaks, her voice registers at between G3 (on a piano that's the G three keys to the left of Middle C) to D4 (the key next just to the right of Middle C). This puts Ms. Palins voice in the range of a Mezzo-Soprano. This is really high for the spoken word, even for a female. But I can assure you that if my examination revealed only this, that I would never have taken the time to sit down and put ANY of this into words. 

What I discovered, was that during several points in her speech, most notably during her most famous phrases...

• "The difference
  betweeen a Hockey Mom and a pitbull is lipstick"
• "We put it on eBay."
• And the first part of the now debunked phrase "Thanks but no thanks..."
  comments

...she flies all the way up a complete octave range that average G-5 for whole sentences!! For reference, G-5 is two notes higher than the highest note of the opening lyrics of Black Dog by Led Zeppelin ("Hey, Hey Mama like the way you move, gonna make you sweat...gonna make you groove.)

Even more astonishing, was that her voice actually gets EVEN HIGHER.

The word "Actual" where she castigates Obama's community organizing with the phrase "Actual responsibilities..." punched my digital tuner to E-6 for an instant!!!  

I could not believe this…so I played it over and over and over again. Each time…the meter jumped to E-6.

This is nearly an octave higher than the "Sher-ry, She-e-e-e-ry Bay-yay-bie..." from Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons song "Sherry Baby".

….AND C-6 is generally thought to be the limit of the human vocal range, with but a few people who can SING notes higher than this being referred to as sopranino’s.

....I was astonished.

Know what else? (and I'm not making this up) The octave from C-5 to C-6 is also the octave where nails dragging across a chalkboard gets it's unbelievably annoying quality. This phenomenon produces 4 or 5 different notes from this register at once.

Nails dragging across a chalkboard that produce sound from around G-5 to C-6 is the sweet-spot frequency range where humans find the most amount of annoyance.  Someone at Vanderbilt University even did a study about this.  Turns out, the sounds created by nails across a chalkboard are remarkably similar to the sounds that primates make to warn each other of impending catastrophe in the wild.

I also ran the sound of scratching on a blackboard
provided by Randolph Blake who did the study at Vanderbilt over my
tuner...and that scratching fell precisely in the range of guess what?
SARAH PALINS VOICE. It fluttered then grabbed G-5!

In the recording booth, when someone sings a melody over backup singers in the range of Sarah's speaking voice...we generally mix them down.

When Frankie Valleys backup singers "The Four Seasons" chime in with the baritone lyrics "Why don't you come out...." their voices are actually mixed a scode LOUDER than Frankie's voice, because at that octave, his voice is much more pronounced than their Baritone.

The same is true of the Tokens "Lion Sleeps Tonight"...where the "Wee-Mo-Wehs" are much louder than the melody of "In The Jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight...." Again, the falsetto of the melody is mixed lower because the highness of pitch would blow your speakers and make the song un-listenable were it otherwise.

But when Sarah speaks, Sarah's voice is all we hear, nailing the worlds ear drums with precisely the same auditory range as, you guessed it, FINGERNAILS ON A CHALKBOARD.

I can only hope that someone in McCains camp has the blessed foresight to either get her a speech therapist, or to assign her a dedicated sound reinforcement professional (who leaves his compressor at home) for the sake of the 300 million people in this country who are going to have to listen to her for the next 2 months.