Sound of your voice reveals clues to what you look like

JUST listening to a stranger’s voice is enough for most people to be able to predict someone’s age, height and state of health, according to a study.

It seems our voice gives away much more about us than we had previously thought - including what we look like.

Simply by hearing someone speak, people are able to estimate someone’s age to within four years.

Researchers at Nottingham Trent University found that, in many cases, study participants accurately matched the faces and voices of people they had not met.

The reverse was also true: looking at someone’s photograph was usually enough to identify what sort of voice they had.

Scientists suggest that while the face is the most attractive signal for mating in humans, the voice may provides a ‘back-up’ to help us pick a healthy partner.

For the study, 48 people were shown 18 still pictures and silent videos of nine men and nine women along with recordings of 18 voices. They were not told the faces and voices belonged to the same people.

The 48 subjects were asked to rate the voices and images, using a sliding scale, from very feminine to very masculine; very unhealthy to very healthy; very short to very tall; and very underweight to very overweight. They were also asked to guess the ages of the people in the images and recordings.

Psychologists found the scores were near perfect for masculinity and femininity – matching 95 per cent of the time – suggesting that someone who looked masculine would also tend to sound more masculine, and if more feminine they sounded more feminine. They were also remarkably accurate for height (85 per cent) and health (77 per cent).

In a further test, researchers found participants matched faces to the right voice 60 per cent of the time.

Dr Harriet Smith told the journal Evolutionary Psychology: ‘People talk to someone over the phone and build up an image of what they look like. We wanted to investigate how accurate this is likely to be.’