From psychoanalysis to neuroscience, remarkable claims have been made for the importance of the mother’s voice. It acts as a kind of umbilical cord.1 It’s a ‘sonorous envelope’ that ‘surrounds, sustains, and cherishes the child’.2 Or it’s a ‘sound bath’, an audio-phonic skin, the first psychic space, in which the mother expresses to the infant something about itself that forms the basis of its own developing sense of self and ego.3 Because the aural field is 360 degrees, we can’t shut out sounds as we can sight4 –only smell can suffuse the child in the same way.5 At its best, the maternal voice serves as a container for the child, a sonic version of amniotic fluid.
It’s certainly an exquisitely sensitive instrument. In a forty-second videotape of a mother playing with her 18-week-old daughter, sixteen different voice-quality settings were identified. Analysed, these were found to give a far more accurate guide to changes in the mother’s feelings about the child than the mother’s facial expression.6 The auditory sphere is even believed to play a key role in the creation of the superego7 (that ‘conscience’ or ‘ought’ part of the self where parental values and social rules are enshrined). The actual acoustic sound of the parent heard by the child is surely intimately related to the eventual tenor of its own internal voice.
The maternal voice may also have an important role to play in making separation bearable. When South American rodents were separated from their parents, there were changes in the limbic system in their brain – changes which maternal vocalisations had the power to suppress.8
The ability of the mother’s voice to comfort a child – even in her absence – is now being used to ease the pain of unavoidable separation. Mothers about to be hospitalised for cancer treatment are advised by an American paediatrician to make a tape recording of themselves reading or singing to their children that can be played to them while she’s away.9 In Britain, Holloway Prison’s Story Book Mums scheme encourages incarcerated mothers to record stories on tape to send to their children.
One woman noticed that her son, 10 months old when she began her sentence, was confused when he visited her in prison, even though he’d always recognised her in photographs:
My husband would say, ‘Give Mummy a kiss,’ and Stephen would automatically look around for the photograph because he couldn’t make the connection between the person in the photograph and me. It was upsetting, and I was worried that he was forgetting me. But sending him the tape helped a lot. My husband says that Stephen points and smiles when he hears my voice and he can’t keep away from it. When he comes in to see me now, he gives me a kiss and a cuddle – and I’m sure it’s partly because he recognises my voice.10
An American mother, in the throes of a painful divorce that brought regular absences from her children, developed a similar, if more saccharine, idea – a ‘Mommy doll’ containing a device to record the mother’s voice singing or saying, ‘I love you.’11 Hospitalised children needing mechanical ventilation have been found to be calmer if a recording of their mother’s voice accompanies the soothing music. Recordings like this, some believe, might eventually reduce the need for medication.12
Now at this time Mary … entered the house of Zacharias and greeted Elizabeth. And it came about that when Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb … And she cried out, ‘When the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy.’
Luke I: 39–44
Anecdotal beliefs that foetuses can hear and react to voices date back to biblical times, and yet it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that they began to appear in the scientific literature. Even then the prevailing view was that the human foetus was effectively deaf.13 Only with the development of new ultrasound techniques at the end of the twentieth century did it become clear that foetuses begin to react to some sounds as early as 14 weeks, and from about 28 weeks’ gestation respond to auditory stimulation.14 Remarkably, although the foetus can’t speak or understand speech, it’s already able to recognise voices.
The mother’s voice affects the foetus’s heart rate, slowing it down significantly, according to some studies,15 which suggests that the soothing capacity is present even before the baby is born. In other studies foetuses got more and not less excited when they heard their mother speaking.16 Either way, they’re able not only to discriminate between their mother’s voice and other people’s, even of the same sex, but also seem to remember the maternal voice and respond to its familiarity. Even foetuses learn from experience.17
They’re also, it seems, able to distinguish prenatally between male and female voices within a few syllables, and shortly before they’re born already demonstrate a precocious ability to discriminate pitch.18 The mother’s voice in utero may also be helping to shape the foetus’s brain.19
But what exactly does the foetus hear through the abdominal wall of amniotic fluids? Low-frequency sounds pass through more easily than high, and vowels are heard more clearly than consonants,20 so that to a baby in the womb the mother’s voice sounds ‘like Lauren Bacall speaking from behind a heavy curtain’.21 The mother’s prosody also appears to be preserved in the womb: remarkably, adults have no difficulty recognising their intonation in playbacks of recordings of speech made in a woman’s uterus –the melody as well as the words was intact.22
Of course, to the foetus, the maternal voice is louder and more audible than all other voices because it’s conducted not just through the air but also through the mother’s body, passing from abdominal tissues into amniotic fluid, via her spine and pelvic arch.23 One psychoanalyst has suggested, intriguingly, that the foetus experiences sound as contact, possibly because sound waves from a person’s voice create tiny yet distinct impressions on the eardrum and skin, so that vibrations are felt as well as heard.24 When mothers speak, therefore, they really are engaged in a body-to-body experience with the baby in their womb, and aren’t just producing some localised vocal or auditory experience.
Because sound to a foetus is solid, almost tangible, a really loud and threatening noise may cause it to fear ‘auditory extinction’.25 The relationship between hearing and touch are closer, perhaps, than we realise. This has huge psychological implications, and might go some way to explaining the intimate connection between maternal voice and secure attachment.
The prenatal studies may be fascinating, but the research on newborns reveals even more compellingly that the human baby arrives in the world with a preference for the human voice over other sounds,26 and fully equipped with the tools to distinguish between voices – blowing a raspberry at the Aristotelian idea of the neonate as a tabula rasa.
The newborn, it seems, knows what it wants to listen to – and mostly it’s Mother. Infants less than two hours old react and orient more to their mother’s voice than to those of other women.27 Newborns younger than three days old also seem to prefer her voice to that of another female – even if they’ve spent most of their short lives up till then in a nursery and so have been barely exposed to it.28
Findings of this kind are based on the intensity of a baby’s sucking on a teat,29 but watching and listening to babies is also revealing. During the first week of life the sound of a rattle or bell stops a baby crying as successfully as the human voice, but by the second week a human voice has become the most effective way of calming them, and by the third week the female voice is more effective than the male,30 any other sound or even the sight of her face.
Hearing the female voice not only has a quietening effect on a baby but also makes them smile. After birth babies smile when they hear their mother’s voice but not when they see her face.31 By the fifth week the mother’s voice has become so successful at eliciting smiles (much more so than the father’s voice or anyone else’s) that when in one study a baby feeding from a bottle – even in the first, hungry minute – heard a woman’s voice, the child interrupted its sucking and gave a broad smile before returning to its food.32
The infant isn’t a passive recipient of the maternal voice, but responds by producing comfort sounds of its own, which in turn make the mother talk more. In this way the mother’s voice initiates an audio-phonic feedback loop, the baby develops a sense of its ability to summon the mother, and mother and child participate in a kind of mutual cooing.33
The past twenty-five years have seen a cascade of other remarkable findings about babies’ reactions to voices. This is what we know:
Newborns prefer to hear their mother’s voice filtered in the way that it would have sounded to them in the womb.34 (The maternal voice provides the only continuity between their prenatal and postnatal life35 – no wonder it can make them feel safe after their turbulent arrival in a strange new world.)
They can also discriminate between two unfamiliar voices on the basis of the different prosody used to say a four-syllable sentence.36
Babies as young as one month can detect changes in average pitch and timbre.37
So attuned are small babies to their mother’s intonation that they suck faster when they hear their mother if, and only if, the mother has recorded a message specially addressed to them.38
In other words, babies are supremely gifted voice-readers. In the early months – before they’re subject to the imperialism of language and the despotism of the eye – they rely much more on voices than faces for identification39: they can pick out their mother’s voice from other voices well before they’re able to distinguish her face from other faces.40
Sadly, although it continues well into the preschool/nursery years, infants’ preference for voice reverses as they age: by the time they turn 4, children are already switching between auditory and visual modes. And once they’ve grown up, the contest is over: adults rely much more on vision than hearing. When it comes to the nuances of vocal melody, growing up in some sense means growing deaf.
All sorts of reasons for this switch have been touted. Babies begin to hear (at around 28 weeks of gestation) before they start to see (at birth), so perhaps it takes sight a while to catch up.41 Or maybe the privileged status of hearing is due to its vital role in helping us learn language, and once that’s achieved – at least according to this theory – it’s done its central job.42 Or could it be that, as they become part of adult culture, they begin to recognise and share our disdain for hearing, and our society’s apparent indifference to the voice?
Whatever the explanation, there’s no denying that the glorious sensitivity to the human voice exhibited by infants and young children atrophies steadily on the route to adulthood. Yet the piece of research I find most exciting is much more suggestive and upbeat. It regards our stunning pre- and postnatal auditory abilities not as talents that we eventually lose but as harbingers of skills to come. When they heard happy vocal expressions, babies ranging from 12 to 72 hours old either opened their eyes or kept them open, and when they heard sad vocal expressions, they sucked rhythmically or stuck their tongue out, clearly able to discriminate between the contrasting sounds of the two emotions.43
This early aptitude seems to result from their exposure in the womb to the distinctive prosody (pitch, volume, rhythm) of their mother as she expresses different feelings. When she talks angrily her breathing, heart rate, and degree of muscular tension, as well as the movement of her diaphragm, change, so that the baby not only bears its mother’s angry voice prenatally but feels it too. And, astonishingly, this capacity to discriminate between the vocal sounds of different emotions and respond differently to them is evident within hours of birth.44
Darwin suggested in 1877 that the infant at a very early age understands the feelings of those who tend it in part from their intonation.45 Many studies since have shown that infants from birth onwards are fabulously sensitive to other people’s feelings, especially those expressed through the voice, and in particular positive emotions.46 This ability of newborns to decode the acoustic communications of adults is the beginning, according to one psychoanalyst, and may be the prototype, of all future discriminatory learning.47 In other words, our remarkably precocious vocal understanding of whether our parents are happy, angry or sad might be launching us on to the path of not only emotional intelligence, but also other equally vital kinds of intelligence.
There’s more. Women, across different cultures and down through history (just look at paintings, statues, and sculptures), tend to cradle their babies on their left side. Girls playing with dolls do it too. The right side of the brain, as we’ve seen, is where the interpretation of emotions and vocal intonation is centred, so left-cradling allows information about the baby’s psychological state to flow swiftly from the infant via its mother’s left ear and eye to the centre for emotional decoding – her right hemisphere.48 By cradling her baby on her left side a mother can better understand the feelings it’s expressing through its face and voice.
Equally importantly, although the right ear of a baby cradled on the left side is buried in the crook of its mother’s arm, its left ear remains free – to gather up the sounds of the mother’s voice for processing in the baby’s own right hemisphere. Decoding its mother’s prosody and interpreting her inflections is no mere idle pastime for a baby, but an issue of survival: from the very beginning, it needs to be able to secure for itself care and nurturance, and voice-reading is a powerful aid. No wonder babies are so gifted at it.
The few experiments on paternal voices that have been conducted have uncovered an almost shocking indifference in babies. While they can distinguish between their father’s voice and that of an unfamiliar man, they don’t prefer their father’s.49 Even at 4 months old, infants express no more interest in the voice of their father than in that of a male stranger.50
Perhaps this isn’t surprising since, as we’ve seen, newborns prefer their mother’s voice even if they’ve hardly heard it since birth. When it comes to the importance of a voice, prenatal experience, it seems, counts for more than postnatal. Babies have done some important auditory perceptual learning in utero, which no amount of billing and cooing received after birth can rival.51
Plato defined rhythm as ‘the order in movement’.52 Rhythm, by promising repetition over time, allows us to anticipate what’s going to happen, and so helps us process and structure our emotional dealings with other human beings. In our early lives, rhythm also enables us to experience absence and discontinuity in a safe, manageable way – sucking itself has a rhythm, a pulling and letting go.53 And vocal rhythm is a kind of non-verbal language: through it we communicate how much proximity and reciprocity we want from another human being.
Babies can detect rhythm, and from early on they do things rhythmically. Prenatal life is played out to the accompaniment of the mother’s heartbeat, which serves to structure the baby’s world54 but which is lost suddenly at the moment of birth. New-borns exposed repeatedly to the sound of the beat of a human heart cry less and gain more weight.55 And when the cooing sounds made by a 2-month-old baby were analysed, they had a rhythmical structure corresponding to the heartbeat of an adult.56
There’s a tempo to almost all basic human activities. Babbling babies make syllable-like sounds that last roughly 350 milliseconds, no matter what culture they’re from. In early ‘proto-conversation’, when the infant is 6 months old, turn-taking takes the form of a slow adagio – 1 beat in 900 milliseconds, or 70 per minute. Within a month or two, shared vocal play accelerates to andante (1 beat in 700 milliseconds, or 90 per minute), or moderate (1 beat in 500 milliseconds, or 120 per minute).57 The heart beats on average 72 times per minute, but we don’t know by what processes the body manages to maintain all these rhythms –perhaps by means of biological ‘oscillators’ or neural clocks.58
Since a baby’s sucking and the cycle of attention between a baby and its carer last between 3 and 6 seconds, and an average musical phrase, a line of spoken poetry, a spoken phrase and a breath cycle all last between 2 and 7 seconds, the cognitive psychologist Paul Fraisse has gone so far as to suggest that the 3- to 6-second temporal period might be fundamental to human motor function and perception.59
One researcher discovered that there was even a regular rhythm to oral tests in primary school: because the teacher expected the child to answer on the downbeat they didn’t hear and therefore ignored correct answers that weren’t produced in this regular, metrical interval (about 1 second apart). When child and teacher don’t achieve rhythmic synchrony misunderstandings can result.60
Infants have a precocious understanding of time. From the first few weeks and months of life, they can distinguish between different lengths and intervals of time, as well as between simple rhythms.61 Their delight in rhythm is often expressed through music. Nursery songs across different cultures and languages use the same rhythms and melodious forms, as if babies were teaching adults some universal principle of rhythm.62 The repetition of sound and gesture intrinsic to rhymes, games, rocking, chants, bouncing, clapping, and song soon begins to emerge in words and speech.63 Listening to infants, you realise just how arbitrary it is to separate music from speech, when both depend so crucially on rhythm. Babies, as we’ll see, use rhythm to help them learn language. Indeed the point at which they begin to babble coincides with the peak period of rhythmic activity, the moment when they shake rattles most.64
A mother is talking to her baby in short bursts. The baby ‘replies’, matching not just her pitch but also her rhythm. Although it obviously can’t understand the meaning of her words, through pitch and tempo it’s already an equal participant in the communication process, responding to the metrical and melodic qualities in her voice. For at least some of the time mothers and babies exist in a vocal harmony65 that not only expresses their emotional connection but also helps to create it. For the preverbal infant, the key aspect of being in communication with a parent may be sharing the same rhythm, which in turn provides the basis for the development of empathy in the child.66
Over thirty years ago a landmark piece of research found that, as early as the first day of life, the body movements of the human neonate are synchronised with adult speech. When William Condon and Louis Sander analysed, frame by frame, film of babies moving and adults talking, they found an extraordinarily close relationship between them, undetectable at normal speed. Nor did it only extend over the course of a few words, but through an entire sequence of 125 words.
Condon and Sander called this ‘interactional synchrony’, and believed it was unconscious and not deliberate. The same effect was observed whether the language was English or Chinese.67 They claimed they’d found evidence of interactional synchrony occurring within twenty minutes of birth! Although there have been several unsuccessful attempts since 1974 to replicate their findings,68 even the possibility of such sustained coordination at this micro-level raises profound questions about the role of auditory ability and rhythm in human development. Those elements in the baby’s psycho-neural organisation that control the timing and form of body movements seem to react keenly to another person’s changing rhythms and accents.69 The human voice penetrates deep into our sinews, and long before we’re able to say a single word, our bodies have bobbed millions of times in the precise, repeated, shared rhythm of our mother tongue and native culture. A baby begins to speak through its limbs before it’s able to do so with its mouth.
Again we see how sound can create a powerful sense of closeness. As Condon put it, ‘We’re almost in auditory touch. When I speak to you, my thoughts are translated into muscle movements and then into airways that hit your ear, and your eardrum starts to oscillate in absolute synchrony with my voice … it takes only a few milliseconds for a sound to register in the brain stem, 14 milliseconds for it to reach the left hemisphere.’70
Attunement extends in both directions. The gazes of 6-week-old babies are coordinated with the rhythm of adults’ voices and vice versa.71 Babies can start vocalising in response to the mother’s voice as early as three days after birth.72 For the first two years of life, according to one study, babies’ vocalisations and pauses last for almost exactly the same length of time as their mother’s.73
Mothers, too, possess formidable imitative capacities and astonishing perceptual sensitivity: they can match their baby’s pitch, pitch contour, loudness and almost every other aspect of their baby’s voice.74 (In this respect we’re all Rory Bremners.) Most mothers use vocal rhythm intuitively to help regulate their baby’s moods – speaking faster to stimulate them, and slower to calm them.
Synchronicity can even be used deliberately to make a connection. A 12-month-old girl spent most of the time throwing toys on the floor. But when a female researcher imitated the child’s ‘spit’ sound, ‘Suddenly, I had her attention. She offered another spit sound and this time I roughly matched it, and then slightly elaborated it. She then offered her own elaboration, and then we slowly moved into a vocal dialogue, which gradually took on increasingly rich and evocative variations.’75
The timing of the preverbal, vocal exchanges that babies engage in with their mothers is remarkably similar to the timing of verbal dialogues between adults76 – not for nothing are they known as ‘proto-conversations’.77 Babies learn to speak with rhythm far earlier than with words. This interpersonal sophistication isn’t necessarily ‘innate’ or ‘hard-wired’ into the biology of the neonate – it might be the result of the major developmental achievements that occur in the first few weeks of postnatal life.78 For the baby, ‘the music comes before the lyrics’.79
It’s obviously a thrilling business for babies, this ability to share a common pulse, a correspondence of rhythm, intensity, and tempo. And yet irregularities of rhythm are essential too. A major study found that, purely through the pattern of vocal rhythm between mothers and their 4-month-old babies, it was possible to predict which babies would be the most securely attached at 12 months. But the most secure infants weren’t to be found, as one might have supposed, in the most rhythmically coordinated pairs. On the contrary, these were the ones who seemed to be least securely connected to their mother – over-monitoring her, wary, vigilant, and rigid in interactions with her, already perhaps trying to offset some disturbance in the relationship. In the face of too much uncertainty, these infants had had to find ways of making communication with their mother predictable.
The least vocally coordinated pairs also seemed to lack enough coherence and predictability for the babies to attach securely, leaving them trying to avoid attachment. The most secure infants occupied a middle position, with space for flexibility and variation. Their mothers provided enough regularity of vocal rhythm and tempo to allow them to predict the pace and shape of their interaction, but also enough variability and novelty to be exciting. As a result, the mid-range pairs could be playful with each other.80
Timing gives partners feedback about the other. It can help control the flow of information from mother to baby, regulating the speed of her response and ensuring this doesn’t exceed what the baby can reasonably handle without feeling overwhelmed or under-stimulated. Patterns of vocal rhythms organise the infant’s experience of being with another person.81 Again and again, in this pioneering research area, studies have found mothers and babies sharing cycles of attention and inattention, of looking and turning away, of being ‘on’ or ‘off’, in which they adjust to and match each other’s rhythms. Through this they learn reciprocity.82 Vocal-rhythm coordination may even in itself be an important means of forming attachments.83 ‘We suggest that the capacity for interpersonal timing is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for two human beings to enter into an effective dialogue with one another, be they 6 weeks or 60 years old.’84 The corollary may also be true: that when each communicating partner insists on their own rhythm, producing a vocal ‘arrhythmia’, they’re liable to be in ‘serious interactional trouble’.85
Although mothers use facial expressions and bodily gestures as well as their voice to attune to their infants, the voice seems to be the critical component.86 It certainly seems to set in earlier, causing some researchers to argue that vocal exchanges play a special role in early human experience.87 Vocal matching also seems to be specific to humans.88
Synchrony isn’t only about timing and duration but also, crucially, intensity. This was first recognised by psychiatrist Daniel Stern, who coined the phrase ‘vitality affects’ to express qualities of feeling like ‘surging’, ‘fading away’, ‘fleeting’, ‘explosive’, ‘crescendo’, ‘decrescendo’, etc.89 What’s important to babies about parental behaviour, he argued, is the level of excitement it produces. Vitality affects take the form of a ‘rush’ of anger or joy, a wave of feeling – the texture of experience, for which we have almost no vocabulary.
Stern’s examples conjure states that only exist in time, and have an auditory dimension: they track the development of a feeling, small shifts in arousal, the ebb and flow of excitement. (They also beautifully describe the human voice.) When we hear someone speak, it’s this trajectory of energy that we monitor, often more than the fixed meaning of any individual words. Stern believes that infants experience their world in patterned flows of feeling that can last for seconds or fractions of seconds. ‘Mother and infant … interact in a split-second world.’90
For example:
A 9-month-old boy bangs his hand on a soft toy, at first in anger, but gradually with pleasure, exuberance, and in a steady rhythm. His mother falls into his rhythm and says, ‘Kaaaa-bam, kaaaa-bam,’ the ‘bam’ falling on the stroke, and the ‘kaaaa’ on the upswing.
An 8½ -month-old boy tenses his body to stretch for a toy just beyond his reach. His mother says, ‘Uuuuuh … uuuuuh!’ with a crescendo of vocal effort matching the child’s accelerating physical effort.
A 10-month-old girl finally places a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, and with an energetic punch of her arm partly raises herself off the ground in triumph. Her mother says, ‘YES, thatta girl,’ the ‘YES’ with an explosive rise that matches the girl’s own flinging gesture.
These examples are a kind of interactional synchrony in reverse, this time with the mother’s voice and volume matching the baby’s movements rather than the other way round. Attunement like this, argues Stern, plays an important role in helping a baby realise that its internal feelings can be shared with others: it’s how parents contour and contain the psychic experiences of the child. ‘The experience becomes a “we” experience, not only a “me” experience.’91
Of course parents and carers aren’t always able to tune into a child’s mood or emotions, sometimes over-valuing one aspect or under-matching another. Infants, Stern contends, recognise these mismatches and mixed messages because they can decipher tone of voice. Although gradations of feeling are also expressed through facial expression and gesture, voice is a prime conduit through which a parent conveys to their child just how engaged they are with the infant’s state, how much they’ve noticed and are acknowledging it.
Although rhythmic patterns seem to be partly innate, there are also cultural differences. When an Italian psychoanalyst, during a long stay in South Africa, observed a newborn baby and his mother for the first three months of his life, she noticed how different the rhythm of their interactions was from that found in Western countries. The baby, Bambata, was fed very often, spoken to only occasionally by its mother but in a rhythmic, swinging tone of voice, and patted to sleep to a rhythm that matched the call of one of the most common birds in South Africa. ‘Both mother and child were immersed in … [a] shared rhythmical and musical consonance.’92 Up to the age of 3 months, Bambata was never heard to vocalise: he didn’t need to, since his mother was always to hand. Compare this rhythmic continuity with the separation present between most Western mothers and babies, to some extent even from birth.
If cultures pattern themselves round different temporal rhythms, what happens to mothers who move from one culture to another? Indian mothers, according to one study, tend to have more vocal overlap with their babies than French and American mothers, pausing less, and producing more non-verbal vocal sounds. But the communicative style of Indian mothers who’d recently emigrated to the United States had begun to change. Positioned halfway between the Indian and Euro-American approaches, they used less overlap but more pauses and verbal sounds than Indian mothers use in India (although they still differed from the French and American mothers). In the process of becoming vocally acculturated, they experienced a conflict between the practices of their native and host cultures. Struggling to juggle two different ways of being with their children, these women had lost their supportive social networks and were now losing confidence in their mothering abilities. As a result they were getting depressed. Immigration might disturb the temporal rhythm and synchrony of mother-baby interaction, leaving mothers less attuned to their infants.93
Postnatal depression is audible. The voices of depressed mothers are more likely to be flat, and they usually talk less than non-depressed mothers, using shorter utterances as well as longer pauses.
A depressed woman’s voice, some have suggested, might even impact upon her foetus, since the unborn child is receiving clues to its mother’s state of mind through the sound of her voice. Whereas the maternal voice normally stimulates or soothes the foetus, the depressed mother’s slower rhythm, weaker tone and lower pitch might already, prenatally, be depressing it.94 (So here’s another thing for a pregnant woman to anguish over: that when her baby is still in utero, her feeling low – a mood her pregnancy may itself have helped create – might already be causing psychic damage.)
Depression continues to affect the voice after birth. Nondepressed mothers have been found to respond nearly twice as fast as depressed mothers to their 3-month-old babies’ vocalisations.95 Depressed mothers’ timing in response to their infants is less predictable.96 Depression, by affecting the mother’s ability to co-ordinate her vocal behaviour with that of her infant, might reduce the synchrony between them.
If we’re persuaded of the benefits that follow from attunement, then clearly its absence must also produce consequences, yet the conclusions of some researchers are more than a little disturbing. ‘If a mother does not react with precisely attuned rhythms of speech and facial expressions, a 2-month-old becomes withdrawn and distressed. When a mother has postnatal depression she finds it very hard to satisfy this critical attention of her baby.’97 Given the extent of at least mild postnatal depression and mothers’ differing abilities to attune to their babies, you might wonder how any small baby ever gets stimulated or avoids becoming depressed itself.
Pitch too is affected by depression, with an unmodulated voice supposedly less effective at stimulating a child’s attention and promoting learning.98 But mothers with postnatal depression seem to be damned if they use unmodulated voices and equally damned if they use over-modulated ones, because another study found that depressed mothers used significantly higher pitch and more modulation when talking to their babies than undepressed ones.99
Why could this be? Research into her mothering skills is anxiety-inducing for any woman, let alone a postnatally depressed one. A woman already doubting her ability to mother may try to make herself sound more competent than she really feels by raising her pitch and over-modulating her voice.
Maternal depression undoubtedly has an impact on children, and the maternal voice may well be one route through which it gets communicated, but findings like this probably cause further depression. Couldn’t the researchers have built into their research design some major support and confidence-building for the mothers, as well as reassurance about the fundamental resilience of children, and seen what effects this too had on maternal pitch?
Long beyond infancy, the parental voice remains a major force in children’s lives. A pioneering American study of how ordinary families talk to their very young children observed some parents using ‘a loose social bond of talk in which words were used less to organize conversation than to create and sustain social closeness’.100 These kinds of parents talk for sociability and to signal to the child that, whatever else they’re doing at the time – washing up or tying the child’s shoelace – they’re still intimately involved with them. Their voice acts as a connective tissue.101
The tenor of the voice – affirming and encouraging, or consistently negative – also has powerful consequences. ‘Parents … instruct, enthuse, yell, or cajole. Children capture equally the emotional tone and the sound pattern of the words they hear. Long before they begin using words, they begin learning about how families interact in the culture, what people are like, and who and how valued the children themselves are.’102
Reading bedtime stories can develop intimacy:
The adult’s voice isn’t just a carrier wave, bringing to the child’s ear the same fixed batch of words they could obtain if they read the book to themselves. The adult voice creates the book for the child. It brings it to life between the speaker and the hearer, as a shared possession both can enjoy … When the adult voice performs the story, it is doing some of the work of deciding what the world of the story is like.103
Increasingly, as children get older, the parental voice takes on a directive function. One 46-year-old woman found it easy to control her first child through physical means, until the second arrived. ‘And then I realised that I could only control my daughter now with my voice. My son was a babe in arms, so I couldn’t use them with my daughter, so I had to rely on my voice.’104 For a parent, the voice may be all that stands between domestic order and chaos.105
As we age, our voices tend to start resembling those of our same-sex parent, as many of the people I interviewed (often ruefully) testified. A 44-year-old woman admitted, ‘My voice is very similar to my mother’s in intonation. It’s strange – it’s like a physical memory: I have a sense of what it must be like to be in her body saying those same things because it’s so exactly the same.’106
Cadences are carried into successive generations, too. A 42-year-old woman finds it ‘spooky when I sometimes hear my intonation coming from the mouth of my 7-year-old daughter when she speaks to her younger brother. She’s internalised my voice but I’ve also to some extent internalised my mother’s voice – all the stuff I don’t like in it. Sometimes I wonder, whose voice are you speaking in?’107
Given the importance of mothers’ voices, perhaps it’s not surprising that they’re so often either idealised or demonised – sometimes by mothers themselves. I never had such a long, willing queue of interviewees as when I was writing an article for a national newspaper (anonymity guaranteed) on shouting at one’s children, after a piece of research purported to show that the practice could permanently and significantly alter the structure of children’s brains (and not for the better).108 In a kind of negative competition mothers tried to outbid each other in convincing me that they shouted more persistently and louder than the others.109 (In a village in the South Pacific, they apparently practise a unique form of logging. When a tree is too big to be felled by an axe, a villager with special powers comes each morning and screams loudly at it. After thirty days of screaming, the tree dies and falls over. The villagers claim that it works because screaming at living things kills their spirit.110)
Mothers’ self-criticism isn’t surprising, given the number of newspaper articles recommending that parents should go back to school ‘to relearn how to talk to their offspring’,111 and childcare manuals instructing parents on what kind of cadences to use. ‘When telling a child off, parents should use low-key voices, a monotone that states calmly but firmly what the child has done wrong and what the punishment will be.’112
So the maternal voice is no longer regarded as an all-purpose comforter: in the popular imagination it’s been reformulated as a problem, one which can only be solved by learning a whole new set of vocal skills.
Sometimes the mother’s voice is depicted as actively malign. A monotonic, metallic voice, it’s been said, can have a powerful effect on a child. ‘Such a voice disturbs the constitution of the self: the sound-bath no longer envelops the subject … It contains holes as well as producing them.’113 This French analyst went so far as to claim that the mother of a schizophrenic could be often recognised by the discomfort her voice produced in the doctor or psychologist consulted. Much of this work is highly speculative, articulating prejudice as much as demonstrable fact. More anxious and angry maternal voices might well produce more irritable, insecure children – as one ambitious and provocative American study found.114 But, as its authors themselves acknowledged, who’s to say in what direction the influence flows? A child’s individual characteristics also affect its mother’s emotional reaction: some babies are more intrinsically lovable than others, a fact probably echoed in the mother’s voice, which may betray far more conflict, inconsistency, and ambivalence than our idealised image of the maternal voice is able to tolerate.115
Nevertheless, the smothering rather than mothering maternal voice has become a modern villain – less of a nurturing umbilical cord than an ‘umbilical web’ that allows ‘no chance of autonomy to the subject trapped’ in it.116 In Hitchcock’s Psycho the mother’s voice is so powerful that it survives even her death. By the end of the film Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) lies pathetic in a police cell, reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy, completely controlled by his mother’s voice.
The triumphant maternal voice emerging from the son’s body in Psycho is a grotesque reversal of the usual order. Instead of helping the child to produce sounds of its own, the mother annihilates them. Psycho is mother and not child.117 Here, all that can’t be tolerated in the male voice is projected on to the mother’s. Her voice becomes identified with the pre-linguistic, subjective state that must be repudiated (it’s commonly believed) if a man is to be able to develop a masculine or paternal voice.118
Although it’s the omnipresence of the mother’s voice that’s indicted here, could it be the exact opposite – its absence – that is really so enraging? The ebb and flow of the mother’s voice – a kind of ‘sound-object’ – may give the foetus its first experience of separation. ‘At times the voice speaks, and at times it is silent. It is an external object, as unpredictable and uncontrollable as the breast will be after birth … and can therefore be a source of both well-being and frustration and anxiety … the disappearance of the enlivening and stimulating voice might give the child a proto-experience of absence and loss.’119
The mother’s voice starts and stops – this may be its true crime.
And yet our fantasies about the maternal voice are irresistible. Almost everyone I interviewed, no matter how difficult their relationship with their mother when she was alive, seemed to preserve an idealised memory of her voice after her death. One 43-year-old woman put it neatly: ‘I hear my mother’s voice all the time, and it’s so sweet, and it comforts me. I think of it being tender much more than it probably was. I don’t have many flashbacks of the neurosis that would come zapping with the voice, oy, oy.’120 Both before and after we come face-to-face with our mothers, her voice leaves an ineradicable trace.