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How does 'Helium Beer' make our voice squeaky?

4,850 views · Published 19 October 2015 · 2:57 · Indexed 8 October 2026

Channel: ScIQ · 2015 · Science & Technology

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You may have recently seen a hilarious video where two German men sample Helium Beer.  But why did their voices change? Well, it turns out the answer is more complicated than you might think!

First, a Sound 101:  Sound is made by passing air over our vocal cords (flaps of tissue in our throats). But a single sound is made of more than just pitch – it’s actually a number of waves of different frequencies, which give a sound quality we call 'timbre'. 

Normally, we talk with air, so the sound waves are moving through air. Compared to helium, air is dense, so the sound is pushing through at a speed of about 350 meters per second.  Helium is less dense than the air we normally breath – so sound waves can go much faster than usual (around 900 meters per second).

Because the air is less dense, higher frequency are amplified.  Or to put it another way; the higher frequency waves have more power as they come out of our mouth, giving our voice a higher TIMBRE (not a higher pitch). If you don’t believe me that our voice pitch isn’t changed, try singing next time you have a helium balloon!

If you’re wondering how they get helium into the beer ) I'm sad to say that video was a PRANK!  Their voices are altered digitally. How do we know this?
Because Helium is one of the least soluble gasses - it could never dissolve into beer the way air does.  It would just sit as one giant bubble – and if you did force the gas to dissolve in the beer under immense pressure, as soon as you opened the beer it would explode and probably kill you. 
You can’t liquefy helium either, unless you drop the temperature down to like, 200 degrees below freezing. Which would just make a beer popsicle. 
Good video though. 



This video is presented by Jayde Lovell, produced and edited by Yohana Yoshe, at Youtube Space NYC.

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