Why does your voice break?

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:05]What do we mean by saying a boy's voice breaks?

[00:00:11]>> [music] >> What do we mean by a breaking voice?

[00:00:21]Well, it only happens in boys and happens when they change from being boys into men. Lots of things change including the voice for very good reasons. First of all, let's see why have a voice at all.

[00:00:31]When you breathe and it's through the lungs and the breathing apparatus that we make our voice sound, we vibrate little things up in this part of the neck here. It's called the voice box or the larynx and it's sitting there in a rather tough tube called the trachea or the windpipe. It's a bit like this thing. I can breathe through this as well as my own.

[00:00:51]>> [snorts] >> But up in that part of the neck is this thick region or the larynx.

[00:00:57]And sitting inside that are two things called vocal cords. While they're called cords, they're not like string cords.

[00:01:03]They're really like little flaps of skin and they sit across there like this.

[00:01:08]I've got some bits of rubber cut from a balloon. I'm going to make a model of the vocal cords to show you. First of all, I stretch one across like that across that aperture and I'll put that on with a rubber band and then I'll put another one across to make them in a sort of V pattern. Here it goes.

[00:01:33]And there they are.

[00:01:35]Both sit across the larynx like that in a sort of V pattern. Of course, when you're breathing normally, they're open wide and they don't make any sound at all. The air rushes through. But when you want to speak, you engage little muscles that bring them into that pattern and if I blow through there, you watch them closely. You might see them vibrate and you might hear the sound of me making a voice with these vocal cords. Here we go.

[00:01:57]And there you have a boy's voice. Of course, boys can raise or lower their voices, too. They can talk in a squeaky voice or low one because they can adjust those vocal cords while they speak. We do it with little muscles but on my model, I'm just going to squeeze the larynx a little and you'll hear the change in pitch.

[00:02:17]So, we can change the pitch of our voice even before it breaks. When it breaks, that larynx gets bigger and the vocal cords get both thicker and longer. So, here's the boy's voice box in yellow and the man's in orange. I've used double thicknesses of rubber there.

[00:02:32]And when I puff through that, you'll hear a different sort of sound.

[00:02:39]Much deeper cuz the voice has broken.

[00:02:41]Well, of course, those aren't the only things we do when we speak. We make that sound down here but we modify it up here and here. It echoes around our head and we echo it in the in the mouth chamber and change the sounds with lips, tongue and teeth.

[00:02:53]And so, if we want to say something like "Wow", see we change this cavity going "Wow" and open it up and close it again.

[00:03:01]And I can even do that with my hands to make a little model mouth.

[00:03:09]So, that's how your voice starts, how it gets changed in speech and why when you change from a boy to a man, it breaks.

[00:03:21]>> [music] [music] [music] >> Shh.