As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and most professionals were forced to quickly change their work environment to virtual, planners were no exception. One of them was Dr. Brian Scholl, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at Yale University. He found himself during this time making a lot of these connections virtually on Zoom. While creating these soundscapes, Scholl had an interesting realization regarding audio quality. It is this preliminary finding that launched a chain of illuminating experiments that he and his team put college students through.
Scholl said he would see two different colleagues on these video calls. One was on a potato-quality sounding mic and the other from the home studio of a world-class, professional-grade, recording artist. To Scholl’s surprise, he was actually agreeing much more with the colleague who had the bad mic. Most of the time, that meant he was opposite the one who had the better sound rig. This realization sparked another question that led him down a rabbit hole – how does audio quality affect the way we perceive things.
The team carried out experiments for audio recordings of both human and computerized voices that read the same script. In order to test their hypothesis, these interviews ran the gamut in audio quality. We were able to recruit more than 5,100 participants online. They were tasked with listening to the scripts and reporting back on how the speaker did in their delivery.
In a series of studies, participants rated speakers with tinny voices as less hirable, datable, credible, and intelligent than speakers with higher-quality audio. This outcome suggested that poor audio quality could negatively affect listeners' judgments of speakers, even when the message content remained unchanged.
"We tried to use a manipulation that’s relevant to daily life," said Robert Walter-Terrill Scholl, highlighting the everyday significance of their findings.
Scholl noted that everyone is suddenly very familiar with how they look on Zoom. They don’t tend to think about how they’re perceived by other people. This omission can deeply affect how they are represented in virtual spaces.
"When chatting on Zoom, everyone is familiar with how they look, but we don’t typically take into account how we sound to other people," Scholl noted.
Above all, these findings reinforce the critical role of audio quality in any virtual communication. Even when aware that auditory manipulation does not indicate characteristics, our judgments can function independently from more conscious reasoning.
"But our perception is operating, in some ways, autonomously from higher-level thought," Scholl remarked.
This glimpse into human cognition further illuminates how small technical features can backfire and sway decisions in virtual settings. Scholl encourages people to review their audio experience and consider how they might tweak it in order to put their best virtual foot forward.
"You should really find out how you sound to other people online. And if you don’t sound good, take some remediable action," advised Scholl.
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