Companies in the AV industry have been espousing the importance of audio for years.
Whether it’s about improving its distribution across large meeting rooms, polarising it so it eliminates background chatter, or just ensuring it’s clear enough to be useful for AI to do its work, the reasons behind good audio are numerous.
However, beyond these more technical reasons for good audio, it sometimes pays to speak plainly about audio and how bad audio makes us feel.
After all, we’re humans, and one of the five senses is audio. Thus, audio connects to us on a deeper, sometimes psychological level.
It was this connection that a recently released Yale University study aimed to explore.
What they found will likely give AV solutions sellers a more visceral selling point when pitching to prospective buyers: bad audio makes you sound less intelligent.
Examining the Yale Study
The study, which saw hundreds of participants listen to audio of various scenarios, including job interviews and claim submissions, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal and overseen by Professor of Psychology Brian Scholl in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
The research was conducted as a series of experiments in which participants listened to a short speech recording and then made judgments about the speaker.
In each experiment, half of the participants listened to a recording that was clear, as delivered through a high-quality microphone, while the other half heard a distorted version of the same message that mimicked the tinny and hollow sound associated with poor-quality microphones.
The questions asked of those in the study were whether a candidate being interviewed for a job should be offered the role, as well as assessing a speaker’s credibility and romantic desirability.
The only difference between the two test groups was the audio quality of the recording.
Participants’ value judgments significantly favored the recordings with richer and more resonant tones.
“In the case of hiring, for example, people said they were much more likely to want to hire the person when they heard the recording with a very clear microphone,”
Scholl told US radio broadcaster NPR.
The study’s findings were consistent among male and female voices, various accents, and even voices that were computer-generated.
Everyone would prefer to talk to someone who has clear audio, as it puts less stress on the listener to understand the content or even not be irritated by a shrill sound.
However, this study highlights something even more fundamental: we don’t just find bad audio annoying; we ascribe poor character traits to the person with it.
Judgments are therefore based not only on the content of the message but also on the vehicle through which it is delivered.
How it Affects UC AV
Of course, having your romantic credibility diminished by poor audio is not likely to affect you much in a business setting. Yet, being seen as less intelligent perhaps will.
Although the study took place by participants listening to an audio recording, what prompted this study was Scholl’s experience on a Zoom call.
Scholl’s initial suspicion was born from an observation he made during the pandemic. During a virtual call, two colleagues were debating an issue.
“One of them was an especially close collaborator,” Scholl told NPR. “We almost always see eye-to-eye. He happened to be participating on Zoom, using the microphone of an older, not-so-hot laptop, and his voice had that sort of tinny quality. I just sort of noticed that his comments didn’t seem quite so compelling as I thought they usually did.”
The researchers concluded that poor-quality audio is a potential source of unintentional bias and discrimination due to the connection people may make between microphone quality and socioeconomic status.
“Every experiment we conducted showed that a familiar tinny or hollow sound associated with a poor-quality microphone negatively affects people’s impressions of a speaker – independent of the message conveyed,”
Scholl said.
“This is both fascinating and concerning, especially when the sound of your voice is determined not just by your vocal anatomy but also by the technology you’re using.”
So if you thought you might skimp on your AV setup for your business, just know that according to this latest study, it could be costing you.
Does bad audio on a call annoy you?
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