People know you’re in power by your voice alone, as new research shows that people pick on acoustic cues to determine who’s in charge.

“Our findings suggest that whether it’s parents attempting to assert authority over unruly children, haggling between a car salesman and customer, or negotiations between heads of states, the sound of the voices involved may profoundly determine the outcome of those interactions,” said psychological scientist and lead researcher Sei Jin Ko of San Diego State University.

The researchers point to former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration for their investigation.

“It was quite well known that Thatcher had gone through extensive voice coaching to exude a more authoritative, powerful persona,” Ko said. “We wanted to explore how something so fundamental as power might elicit changes in the way a voice sounds, and how these situational vocal changes impact the way listeners perceive and behave toward the speakers.”

Ko and colleagues created two studies and found that voices of participants assigned to a high-power role tended to go up in pitch, become more monotone, and have a variety in loudness compared to the voices of those assigned low-power roles.

“Amazingly, power affected our participants’ voices in almost the exact same way that Thatcher’s voice changed after her vocal training,” said Adam Galinsky, a co-researcher from Columbia Business School.

It was also discovered that people outside the experiment were able to identify the high- and low-rank roles by voice alone with great accuracy, because they associated louder voices with higher power.

“These findings suggest that listeners are quite perceptive to these subtle variations in vocal cues and they use these cues to decide who is in charge,” Galinsky said.

(photo credit: garryknight via photopin cc)

The employee-boss relationship can be a delicate dynamic. Each wants to be liked by the other, and each may have different views about the relationship. However, once it’s all out in the open about how each feels about the other, then productivity and motivation increases.

“Seeing eye-to-eye about the employee-supervisor relationship is equally, if not more important than the actual quality of the relationship,” said Fadel Matta, lead investigator for a Michigan State University (MSU) study about workplace motivation.

Matta and his colleagues surveyed 280 employees and bosses separately across a variety of fields and found that motivation suffered when a worker thought he or she had a good relationship with a boss but the boss thought the opposite. However, when an employee and boss were on the same page about the relationship, motivation increased.

“Some people would say it’s better to fake it, but our results indicate that the opposite is true,” said Matta, a doctoral candidate in the MSU Department of Management. “At the end of the day, it’s better for everyone to know where they stand and how they feel about each other.”

(photo credit: whistlepunch via photopin cc)

It’s only one song. It’s not even my favorite one by the artist. Doesn’t matter, because I’d be on stage next to him. In fact, as I look around, I would be able to see the rest of the band and the stage crew.

That’s what you can experience in Jaunt’s virtual reality (VR) release of Paul McCartney playing “Live and Let Die” at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park.

If you own a VR headset, such as Google Cardboard, just load the app onto your Android phone, put on your headset, and start singing along with Sir Paul.

“[Jaunt VR’s CTO Arthur] van Hoff recounts that when Jaunt gave Macca a demo, ‘Paul McCartney was blown away, saying ‘Oh my god, I’ve seen the future. We need to do something together. I’m playing at Candlestick tomorrow. Why don’t you come record,” Josh Constine wrote for TechCruch.

Constine tested the app and found it to be a very accurate experience.

“You’re dropped on stage and it’s hard not to feel the bashfulness and excitement when you look out onto massive crowd,” Constine wrote. “The picture looked sharp on an Oculus DK2, and everything was laced together well enough to prevent dizzyness. You’ll be shocked by the pyrotechnics, and lament the modern condition when you see no faces in the front row, just a wall of people holding up their camera phones.”

Check out Constine’s article to learn more about VR and Jaunt’s McCartney app.

(Image: Jaunt)

The Philadelphia Orchestra is offering an olive branch to patrons who can’t seem to shut down their phones for a performance. Through its LiveNote app, audience members can follow along during a performance with program notes (including vocal text and translations), watch info slides that advance in real time with the music on the phone’s screen, and access details and images related to a composition.

“Today, we all are finding ways to merge technology with the things that we love in our lives, including listening to music,” said Philadelphia Orchestra Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the organization’s website. “I welcome the opportunity to facilitate this in the concert hall in a thoughtful manner, providing listeners with the choice to use the LiveNote application, or not. It is yet another option for our audiences to appreciate and enjoy the music differently.”

LiveNote was developed in collaboration with Drexel University engineers, and the app is designed to mitigate its impact on attendees. For example, the text is grey on a black background in order to minimize light.

While I love the idea of being an active attendee at a classical concert, others may not be so keen.

“The one subscription Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Kimmel Center’s Verizon Hall to use LiveNote so far had 30 percent of the audience downloading the app,” wrote David Patrick Stearns for WQXR.com. “But whether because they lost heart or hit a snag (which was this writer’s problem), fewer actually used it.

Stearns wrote that only around 18 percent of the audience members at the performance he attended interacted with the app.

“The Philadelphia Orchestra has a rich legacy of being at the forefront of technical innovation, and curating new ideas is part of the very fabric of our organization,”  said Philadelphia Orchestra President and CEO Allison Vulgamore. “LiveNote is the latest initiative to experiment with harnessing the power of technology in service to the power of music, and we look forward to working with our audiences as we test and evolve this long-nurtured application.”

Please watch the video below to learn more about LiveNote.

(Image: The Philadelphia Orchestra)

The unprecedented lake effect snow storm that has gripped large parts of Western New York and Buffalo has had little impact on the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center so far. Until today, the facility was open and operational. We have had three local events cancel that have already rescheduled for December.

The storm named the “Winter Storm Knife” or “Snow-Vember” by the local media had been limited until yesterday to a area about 12 miles wide x 20 miles long, literally one to two miles south of downtown and our location. This area includes South Buffalo, first ring suburbs, and the south towns as we call them, including Orchard Park—home of Ralph Wilson Stadium, which is buried under +200,000 tons of snow. The south towns area of Buffalo is traditionally the snow belt and the location of major ski resort areas.

As you may have seen in the media, the conditions are dangerous, the snow amounts historic, and the concern for the safety of residents are at the forefront of clean-up efforts. We have a number of staff that have not been at work since Monday and will likely remain out for the week. The event cancelations earlier in the week have allowed for us to reduce part-time staffing in some areas. Late yesterday and overnight, the storm did move to the north and into the city of Buffalo, and we went from a dusting of snow to a little less then 12 inches, which for us is very manageable. Because we had no scheduled events—and with all city and county of Erie facilities being closed today to allow for clean up of streets and roads—the building is also closed.

There are contingency plans that call for the convention center to be used as a emergency shelter and for the use of our kitchen facility as a commissary as needed. Those plans have not been enacted, and, as previously stated, there has been little impact on the downtown area.

We do have a large black tie gala event (1,000 guests) on Saturday evening, which at this point is still scheduled to take place, and the week of Thanksgiving is by far one of our busiest weeks of the year. We host two large annual local events—The Turkey Trot Post Race Party (14,000 people) and The World’s Largest Disco (7,000 guests). At this point, we are making contingency plans, adjusting personnel schedules and orders for food product for the Saturday night’s gala banquet. There is some concern about the ability of trucks to make deliveries today, and some vendors are simply not open or unable to fulfill requests. With some luck, use of alternative sources, and flexibility among our staff and clients, we should be all set to move forward with this event tomorrow and Friday.

The events next week are already falling behind on the set-up and move-in schedule due to difficulties of trucks delivering production equipment into the Western New York area with all of the major routes in and out of Buffalo being closed for the last three days. This will make for a more compressed schedule next week and possible overtime staffing as needed.

In Buffalo, we tend to not let snow or winter weather interrupt our daily lives. In fact, we have have the experience, resources, and expertise to deal with just about any winter storm safely and efficiently. This storm is certainly a challenge and there is great concern for residents in the areas hardest hit by the storm. We will get past this. The Buffalo Niagara Convention Center is prepared to support the clean-up efforts as needed and accommodate our schedule of events.

(Image: Facebook)