What is it about?
This study explores how the body size, strength, and fitness of athletes are connected to the sound qualities of their voice. Researchers examined 88 male professional athletes from Kosovo, measuring their height, weight, body fat, explosive power, jump height, pull-up strength, and aerobic capacity (VO₂max). They also recorded and analysed six voice features, such as average pitch, lowest pitch, highest pitch, and measures of vocal stability. The results showed that taller and heavier athletes with greater power and endurance tended to have deeper voices (lower pitch), likely due to longer vocal cords. However, not all voice features were linked to body measurements—only pitch-related traits showed strong relationships. The findings suggest that voice analysis could one day be used as a quick, non-invasive way to estimate aspects of an athlete’s physical performance without the need for lengthy fitness testing.
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Why is it important?
This research is important because it reveals a strong link between an athlete’s voice pitch and key measures of their physical performance, such as height, weight, strength, and endurance. If these connections are confirmed by future studies, voice analysis could become a fast, low-cost, and non-invasive tool for assessing athletic potential. Such a method could help sports scientists, coaches, and talent scouts quickly identify promising athletes without requiring extensive physical testing or expensive equipment. Beyond sports, these findings also deepen our understanding of how the human body’s structure and function are interconnected with vocal characteristics, which may have applications in anthropology, health screening, and other scientific fields.
Perspectives
The findings open the door to innovative ways of assessing athletic ability. In the future, voice analysis could be used alongside traditional fitness tests—or even as a stand-alone screening tool—to identify talent, track progress, and monitor health in athletes. Because voice recording is quick, inexpensive, and requires minimal equipment, this approach could be especially valuable in settings with limited resources. It also encourages collaboration between sports science, acoustics, medicine, and anthropology, highlighting the human body as an integrated system where changes in one aspect—such as muscle power—can be reflected in another, like the voice. Further research could expand these methods to different sports, age groups, and even non-athletic populations, improving our ability to detect and nurture physical potential in a wide range of contexts.
PhD Agron M Rexhepi
Institute of Sports Anthropology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Biological relation and the predictive possibilities between the morpho-functional and the voice-acoustic parameters, Gazzetta Medica Italiana Archivio per le Scienze Mediche, May 2019, Edizioni Minerva Medica,
DOI: 10.23736/s0393-3660.18.03846-9.
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