I agree that 4 is wrong. At least I've never asked to speak to a manager in my life. If I'm upset, I'll just press things until the guy I'm talking to thinks of getting a manager on his own.
I think 3 is "white", but probably limited by geography and social class in ways that would make me sound like a shithead snob if I articulated them.
There's something to 5. Neutral polite 'we're just having a commercial interaction' here is a notch perkier from white people than from black people -- like, if I'm talking to a white sales-clerk who's not being perky at me, my antennae go up because they're being weird and if there's something that could be fucked up about the transaction they're likely to. Black sales clerks and similar might happen to be perky if they happen to be in a chipper mood, but it's not a default the same way.
I'm not sure what #1 buys you, exactly; restricting your vocal chords in an unnatural way is required for learning any accent. It's not wrong, it's just not specific enough to be useful.
No, there's a definite thing there, that someone with a better vocabulary for it (not me) would describe better. White American men's voices have a very narrow range of pitch, maybe? They stay on or close to one note? That's still not quite right, but there's a clear difference in how people project their voices depending on ethnicity.
I'm the world's worst person for judging pitch, but I think that black men tend to be disproportionately represented on the high end and low end. I'm assuming Barry Gibbs isn't singing in hisa real voice and many black artists are.
So if we take it to be entirely about pitch, I agree that probably applies to men who speak General American. (I think the case for women is more complex--the level of acceptable pitch variability is context constrained.) Self-analysis is useless, but I don't hear much melody in my voice. On the other hand, there are non-GA white American accents that have more pitch variability. I only know it at the level of stereotype but I think that holds for the Minnesota accent. (I wonder if "sound like a white person who's not from around here" would help.)
I figure that the vowels and rhoticity matter more, though.
Does anyone remember Dave Chappelle's bits where he'd play a white guy? Have I racistly mis-remembered, or did the cadences he'd use sound a bit like Obama's? And I think he'd make his voice deeper, if anything. But then again, he wasn't trying to be too convincing.
8.last And yes, Dave Chappelle does an excellent white guy.
I often think white American men have quite high voices. It's something I've picked up on enough that if you'd asked me to describe American men's voices, I'd have mentioned it. It's a generalisation. Far from universal, but I associate middle class white American men with a particular 'set' of the voice box.
I do the same thing myself. I raise the pitch of my voice in certain contexts. Talking to children, but also in other contexts, too.
Like LB, I don't really have the vocabulary for this (I know timbre is a thing!) but I can often also pick out Asian and Iranian American voices--not with nearly the consistency that people can pick out a black voice, but there are some very subtle markers there.
When Dave Chappelle calls, I never know it is him. When the underdog candidate for the Democratic nominee for mayor called (tape recording), you could hear both the Yinzer and the old-person-with-rake-on-lawn in her voice. It was sort of startling.
12: Americans of East Asian descent, sometimes, but I'm not sure what I'm keying off of. I think in some cases it's nasalness plus a suffusion of sibilants, but that can't possibly generalize over the breadth of possible inputs. I'm not familiar enough with the Iranian accent.
I guess I do associate the deepest non-singing bass voices with African-American men. There's an (apocryphal?) story of Americans assuming that Rick Astley was black, but that might be more than pitch.
13.last: Does she ever. (Off topic, but the cyclist from the viral video is a coworker and so she's been a constant topic of discussion around the office.)
Like LB, I don't really have the vocabulary for this (I know timbre is a thing!) but I can often also pick out Asian and Iranian American voices--not with nearly the consistency that people can pick out a black voice, but there are some very subtle markers there.
Omid Djalili has a bit on this, in a British context, unsurprisingly.
I know this isn't racism confessions thread, but IMHMHB that in my early teens I genuinely assumed there were physical reasons for Black people talking differently - and I thought this extended past AAVE. In particular, I think I was thinking of the speech of Avery Brooks. Of course underlying this was the idea that white speech was "normal". I had a revelatory "no, white speech is just as much an accent, we just think of it as normal" moment when I saw a snippet of a comedy with a Black guy briefly doing such an impression.
Deeper pitch in men is associated with higher testosterone levels in adolescence. Black men have testosterone levels 20% higher than white men so they unsurprisingly have deeper voices. Raising the pitch comes across as less threatening (or comically weak which is why black comedians do the white guy voice )
Rick Astley's singing voice is about dropping the larynx and maximizing resonant space in the back of the throat.
Michael McDonald does the same thing in a completely different range.
Rick Astley and Michael McDonald? This thread is getting super racist.
In other weird, if not necessarily racist, voice news, I asked TWYRCL to listen to some samples of Steven Seagal speaking Japanese. She said, "His Japanese is excellent! He's very fluent, but he sounds like a girl." Apparently this is a common phenomenon among honkies who speak Japanese, because they tend to learn it from women. Because they are sexist.
Also, Steven Seagal's whispery, throaty tough-guy voice is apparently not how Japanese tough guys talk: with lots of rough, chesty sounds.
Racism is bad.
Huh, I thought I wrote a response, but apparently either I didn't actually post it or it disappeared.
21
This is true with white men in China and Taiwan too. Mainlanders already think Taiwanese sound effeminate, so they find white men talking like a Taiwanese woman to be extra hilarious.
11
I don't really speak Norwegian, but I have something approximating native speaker phonology (at least for single words), and my voice is distinctly lower in pitch when speaking Norwegian than in English. Also, the sound production comes more from the back of my throat.
If my son ever learns Japanese, I'm confident he's watched enough "Naruto" that he'll scream everything.
How to sound like a white man: Say "I revealed highly classified information to the Russians while they were in the Oval Office the day after I fired the top cop who was investigating me" and if nothing bad happens to you you're a white man.
"Be Benign"? This is not the droid you're looking for.
Black men have testosterone levels 20% higher than white men
That might be way overestimating. As I recall that number is from a study 20 or 30 years ago with more recent attempts not finding significant differences or only finding a difference in low income young black men.
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fsoc.2016.00001/full
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-lookup/doi/10.1210/jc.2007-0028
My paternal grandfather, who was born and raised in Canada, never could quite properly pronounce the English "th." It always came out as "d." Not "those," but "dose;" not "they," but "dey;" and so on. His parents and grandparents were immigrants from Ireland, and his speech patterns and pronunciations were a reflection of that emigrant background.
However, I have no problem whatsoever with the English "th" sound, it just comes naturally to me. It's not "ethnic" or "racial," in other words. It's just about how the people around you actually talked in your early childhood.
I suspect "Black English" is highly regional, and with an important Southern American component. When I first moved to Baltimore as a clueless Canadian, I recall overhearing a conversation between two guys who I mistakenly assumed were African-American (because they sounded like African-Americans from a TV show I had watched, or something), and then I turned around and realized they were actually white! (but Southern, of course).
26: That sounds righter than "there's a pat, biological explanation for difference vocal patterns by race."
The literature on gender and language find that there are indeed physiological differences between men and women, however they are not enough to account for the consistent difference in pitch between the genders. Something like that re. race seems likely too (I mean, that there could be a minor physical difference which does not fully explain the difference in voice, not that there are physiological differences in vocal anatomy).
27
I grew up in a black neighborhood in Portland, and I remember as kid meeting a woman who said when she called her family in the South, they assumed it was a white woman on the phone. To me she sounded black, but clearly the "Portland" accent was strong enough to make her sound white to Southerners.
Curtis Mayfield's "Right on for the Darkness" has an extended string section tone poem sounding segment close to the end. Great groove, goes somewhere completely different at the end.
Not sure if this is totally the right thread for this...
It's not just african-americans. The Queens accent (amongst whites) is so thick, there are special schools to which parents can send their children, to be educated out of it. B/c it's a major class marker to speak with that accent, and will adversely affect one's life chances.
Similarly, growing up in Texas we had an "at home" accent and an "out there" accent. The "at home" accent was somewhat South Indian, and the "out there" was a thick, thick Texas drawl. I recall distinctly acquiring this drawl in the first few months of 6th grade, after moving down from Delaware. Protective coloration, yo. Gotta stay alive amongst the crackers.
This doesn't mean that Americans-for-generations should have to unlearn their accents in order to be accepted, but .... well, gotta say, when I meet somebody who doesn't look white or black in the normal way, and they have a strong accent, I figure they're an immigrant who came here as an adult (and hence could not unlearn their accent).
Yeah: I know -- my bad.
[funny: when I went to grad school in New York State, I would fly home for holidays, and the Texas accent would come back in the air over Tennessee (or thereabouts). Friends at school thought I had a Maryland accent. B/c yaknow, don't need that drawl to protect yourself, in Upstate New York.]