The article Hearing Smiles is about using speech to provide suggestions and even mass suggestion. Singers have been using auto tuners for several years now to improve their singing performance and achieve special effects. Singer Cher was the first to use such a tuner in her believe . (1998). Later, others such as hip-hopper Kanye West followed in runaway . New is software with which voices can be changed in order to evoke emotions. It is the result of the work of French scientists Pablo Arias and Jean-Julien Aucouturier. They managed to make listeners smile with special software without them having to see the speaker. More is possible with the French software. You can distort voices better and more realistically with it, but also completely change it to cause different emotions in the audience. It is even possible to suggest the size of a person or his gender. The reactions to this finding seem mainly positive. Imagine if, for example, all calls from call centers always sound friendly or familiar? But now there is even more. What about the software from Sonantic. This can read texts cheerfully, anxiously or sadly. By simply entering a script, any PC can call someone and make an offer to switch energy supplier in the most engaging voice. Those who want to try the demo click here. (Scroll down to: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”
Even without software!
Even without artificial additions or distortions, hitherto gifted singers, elocutionists and stage actors managed to evoke emotions in their audiences. Their reach did not go much further than the hall they performed in front of. That range grew enormously with the advent of radio. Then it became apparent what ordinary voices of gifted speakers could release from their listeners without being seen in the right suggestive entourage.
The War of the Worlds
On Oct. 30, 1938, the American radio music program Mercury Theatre on the Air was suddenly interrupted with disturbing news reports of an invasion of marchers. It is told On Feb. 12, 1949, the radio play panicked thousands of people in Ecuador. Three responsible radio employees were arrested. The radio play made from ‘Das Wasser Steigt’ by Geno von Ohlischlaeger is also instructive. ‘Das Wasser steigt’ it was already broadcast in December 1930 but radio play writer Josef Pelz von Felinau, adapted the story into the radio play ‘Hypnosis’. It was broadcast on 5 July 1945 as the first radio play in Germany after World War II. The story is set in a theater in Naples. There the hypnotist Torro performs. He suggests to his audience that because of a spring tide, – which actually happened in 1898 the hall fills with water. Singer Bettina panics so much that she wants to jump out of her box into an imaginary safety net. Her boyfriend, Capitano Lembo, sees through the danger and shoots the hypnotist. The radio play and performance of the hypnotist is not just an evening of superficial entertainment but is also seen as an image and paraphrase of politics and society during the Nazi regime.