In the reams of academic research on the human voice, remarkably little has been devoted to people’s feelings about their own. With a few exceptions the comments of a voice specialist in 1955 – ‘The psychology of the voice has been, for the most part, treated from the standpoint of the listener’1 – remain true today. What makes this all the more strange is that an individual’s speaking tune is not only a crucial expression of their personal and social identity, but also helps to create it. We are our jokey cadences, our odd stresses, our fluting tones. Bogart’s ‘Play it, Sam’, Diane Keaton’s ‘Annie Hall’ ‘Lah di dah’, are as famous for their inflections as for their words. So potentially sensitive an instrument is the voice that a psychotherapist has described how her singing teacher ‘could determine my general personality and various mood changes, plus intrapsychic conflicts that unknown to her I was then working on in my own analysis, all according to the way I was singing that day’.2
Our voice gives birth to our thoughts: we use it to think with. Vocalising makes words and concepts concrete. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary how ideas occur to me when I’m talking to you, and not when I’m thinking by myself?’ a patient remarked to her therapist. Another commented, ‘Talking helps. It gives my thoughts air. They were smothering inside.’3
The very act of creating audible sounds and hearing them is a powerful experience that helps to distinguish ’me’ from ‘not-me’. And just as our voice moves physically from the interior of our body to the exterior, so it’s also an important way through which our internal life is externalised. The voice bridges the inner and the outer, the self with the other, and (through public speaking and broadcasting) the individual with the wider world. For some people the very act of using their voice, its kinetic attack, reminds them that they’re alive.
We’re both speakers and hearers of our own voice and most of us react with horror when we hear recordings of ourselves. As a 47-year-old man – a professional opera singer – put it, ‘I hear a much darker, richer sound in my speaking voice and then when I hear it back it sounds tinny, like I’m speaking two octaves higher.’4 At a workshop on the voice where everyone was asked to say something about themselves, the greatest mirth was provoked by a man who announced that he loved the sound of his own voice. He came after dozens of people had confessed to hating theirs. This is partly because we hear our voice not through the air like other listeners, but conducted through the bones of our skull and the distorting vibrations conveyed by the Eustachian tube.5 Cheap recording equipment, and even some of the newer digital answering-machines, make the voice sound thinner and less resonant than it really is.6
But almost forty years ago a pair of researchers advanced another, more persuasive theory. The most disconcerting element of listening to one’s voice, they claimed, is that one ‘hears not only what is unfamiliar as his voice … but also what is quite familiar in his voice … part of the disturbance that people experience when they hear their own voices is accounted for by the unsuccessful or incomplete editing of aspects of themselves that they did not consciously intend to express and which they now hear in the recording’.7 Freud talked of ‘the return of the repressed’ – buried desires, impulses, and traumas that find a way of re-emerging through dreams, symptoms, or parapraxes (verbal slips). Another avenue through which the repressed makes its return is the voice.
It was only when I began interviewing that I realised how intimate a thing it is to quiz people about their feelings about their own voice and that of those close to them. I was asking them, in effect, to divulge very personal information: what they dislike (as well as like) in themselves, and how they manage their relationships through the voice.
Consider this 48-year-old woman, married with three children, and with a successful career:
I hate my voice because it’s harsh and strident and squeaky; that associates with horrid, whiny children. Now with my husband it’s my voice telling him – ordering him, in his eyes – to go to the shop, be organised. So the same aspect has turned from the little girl whingeing to an adult, a nagging parent – the same fault somehow magnified. It makes me feel very bad because it’s very hard to control.
My kids tell me that when I speak on the phone to clients I have a deep client voice, so clearly I can control it. Yet even when I’m trying to control it with my husband it’s still perceived as this high, demanding, strident tone. It’s hurtful because I don’t want to be a demanding, ordering person.
Where did she think this voice comes from?
I was a whiny child. I used to come up with, ‘It’s not fair, why should she always get the better deal?’ about my sister. I felt a huge need to get more of my mother’s attention than I got. Mum perceived me as whining and demanding from the word go. There’s something painful and very deeply omnipresent I hear in my voice that’s somehow shameful, something my fault and yet not my fault … It’s a constant reminder that whatever you think you’ve achieved, it’s an illusion, I’m just where I ever was – my voice shows me up.8
Enshrined in this woman’s voice is the dissatisfied girl who was labelled ‘difficult’ early on. Though there’s an adult side to her that’s expressed in her work (‘the deep client voice’), she can’t activate it in her intimate relationships: the little girl insists on making herself heard, the child voice is too powerful.
Above all, this woman recognises that some arrested part of her, some aspect of her psychological development for ever frozen in childhood, is expressed in her voice. It therefore becomes a source of shame and self-blame but also, as she’s fleetingly able to acknowledge (‘and yet not my fault’), a marker of some ancient unsatisfied need.
An American analyst suggested, in 1943, that ‘since the tone of voice is such an important medium of expression in infancy and childhood, it can later readily express unconscious emotional conflicts originating at that time’.9 Though this woman has been able to bring the conflicts into consciousness, she hasn’t yet managed to integrate the different aspects of herself into a cohesive whole.
Our voices often embody a split-off part of ourselves that we haven’t metabolised. In the course of another interview, a 57-year-old woman tries several different ways of disowning her voice:
I hate my voice – I sound like Princess Anne with a cold. It’s not a voice that I identify with at all, not in any way associated with my personality or who I feel I am – it’s just grafted on. I don’t know where it came from. I know that my cheekbones come from my heritage but my voice doesn’t seem to, it seems entirely artificial. It’s a very upper-class voice and there’s nothing in my background that should suggest that … I think it must have been formed by schoolfriends who had posh voices … It also feels false to change it, and I don’t have control over it.10
Unlike the woman before, who recognised herself all too clearly in her voice, this one feels thoroughly alienated from hers, and believes any other voice she might develop would be equally inauthentic. The phenomenon of ‘false self’ is well known: perhaps ‘false voice’ is its acoustic counterpart. A number of the people I interviewed felt this way about their voice. One, a 38-year-old woman, said:
I used to have a very false self inside a lot of the time and one’s voice echoes that … My mother and I were as false as each other with our voices; we put all our energy into squashing our anger and power. My father and my sister were much more real in the expressiveness of their voices – very angry and powerful. Perhaps because of that I’m very attuned to whether there’s a discrepancy between how people present themselves and how they really are and I think a large part of that is how they use their voice.11
Another woman, aged 42, remembered:
I noticed after my first baby was born that I started talking in this peculiar way, with a slightly funny accent. It felt like when I opened my mouth someone else’s voice came out, though nobody else seemed to notice. I realised that this artificial voice was connected with my struggles to see myself as a mother: I felt I had to take on a different persona, become Mother with a capital ‘m’, and my voice was reflecting that, like I was impersonating someone.
When my baby was around 3 months and I started mothering my own way, realising that I could be me and be a mother, that peculiar voice vanished. Now, very occasionally, I hear that same odd quality – like I’m giving a performance – and I immediately start to think about what’s going on, why has my own voice been displaced?12
Vocal self-dislike isn’t universal – some of those I interviewed were happy with their voice, less for its acoustic qualities than for what it enabled them to do. A 7-year-old girl likes her voice ‘because it can go high and low and make different sounds … I like my voice because it can express itself, it can tell people how I’m feeling’.13
Almost everyone who confessed to liking their voice did so a little sheepishly, as if to apologise for contravening the social norm. The 7-year-old was sometimes frightened by her own vocal power. ‘When I shout, it feels like I’m a big giant and I get to smash all the pieces up in the world … I get scared that it might boom me … I want to run away from it but I can’t, it’s part of my body … I feel as if it might do some harm to me or others.’14
A vital voice can galvanise an entire hall. A 38-year-old woman spoke at a public meeting to save her village school:
The man who spoke before me knew his stuff but had such a boring voice I could see him lose the audience almost completely. I knew that my most important task was to revive them, and I did it through my voice. It was partly because I was talking about something I felt so passionate about … concerning my children’s future, and I just allowed all that passion to come into my voice. I could see the audience come back to life – it was a wonderful feeling, and of course my words helped, but it was the attack and energy in my voice that mostly did it.15
We manage our personal and social relationships through our voices. We may not have a shared, public language in which to talk about the voice, but my interviews revealed how much individual private awareness there is about its importance, especially in the world of work. From scenic artist to politician, physiotherapist to judge, people described how they use their voice to establish authority, make themselves approachable, and make it more likely that what they say is heard, absorbed and remembered. We tend to think of certain obvious occupations as relying on the voice, but these interviews convinced me that this category is almost infinitely expandable. Today we’re all professional voice-users.
A 51-year-old physiotherapist recognises that he uses his voice differently at work and at home:
With my patients I have to be able to produce something that is often not consistent with how I’m feeling. I can’t come in and just be low-key and tired and depressed … the voice has to be imbued with some kind of energy … you might have to crank it up a bit. The people I deal with are often deaf or they’re at various states of deterioration in their cognitive or mental states such that tone probably conveys more than content.16
One commentator pointed out in the 1950s that, ‘Certain occupations seem to develop an indigenous speech melody. That is why it is so easy to parody a politician, a teacher, a minister. It is as if the individual wished to hide his particular shortcomings behind the mask of a socially approved stereotyped score.’17
A judge, after listening to advocates in court down the years, feels that he now knows what works vocally in the law and what doesn’t:
In describing to the jury an incident of rape you find advocates using almost the same timbre of speech, the same pace, the same modulation at the beginning of the story as they do at the end. They haven’t set aside the appalling moment it actually happened, which they could have done easily by altering the pace and gravity of their tone … You don’t get any stirring or shuffling of papers in the court at a moment like that … I think the voice is the most important tool in the courtroom, and the great advocates are those who know how to use it. The ham actors fail, and those unable to create any atmosphere with their voice fail.18
He himself, when sending repeat drug offenders to rehabilitation programmes, uses a warm and soothing conversational tone, but is deliberately cold and flat if, after breaking an order, they return to court again for sentencing.19
A British Member of Parliament worries that her public voice doesn’t convey the passion that she feels. ‘I tend to have a very controlled and rational voice. I’d like the passion to come through but I also don’t want to bare my soul with the outside world. I suppose your voice functions as the guardian of that private space.20
Most of the people I interviewed were conscious of the role played by their voice in that private space. A father described what happens when his 11-year-old son ‘loses it’:
He gets himself slightly out of control, and you’ll see him in the middle of it looking for some way to get out of it, and he doesn’t know how to so you have to offer him lifelines – just reduce the temperature, give him the time and space to calm down, and you do that partly through the voice. I’ll often really lower it and sound quite sympathetic or conciliatory, just so he doesn’t feel he’s being confronted.21
Many of us try to regulate problematic relationships at least partly through the voice. A 38-year-old woman observed that, in talking to her younger sister, ‘I’ve got to control my voice – there’s a sort of strangulation in the throat where I’m somehow trying to curb what I’m thinking.’22
In conflict the voice can be an incendiary device, setting off explosions between warring couples or parent and child, ratcheting up the levels of hostility, or it can soothe and defuse. The voice of the UN General Secretary, Kofi Annan, seems to embody the institution’s mediating, tension-lowering aspirations in its levelness and solidity. A 36-year-old woman feels:
fairly certain that somehow my voice developed as a way of controlling the level of expressed emotion and tension in the family. When I began working with groups of people who were violent and out of control, as an adult, I heard my calming voice again – saying what I wanted to say, but in a way that didn’t inflame anyone’s emotions – and realised that this was how I used to speak in my family, trying to control explosiveness in the others, and also of course in myself. I’m good at calming down groups where the tensions are getting high, but I sometimes squash the potential for argument between people that they need to have – so it’s a skill, but it’s also a deficit.23
We don’t just have one voice but many – a 15-year-old girl immediately identified five of hers:
1. Talking to people I don’t know on the phone – here I use a formal, carefully enunciated voice.
2. When I’m babysitting, I’m trying to relate to the children, and to sound as much like them without being patronising. But when I’m angry with them, I try and put on an authoritative tone.
3. Talking to people I don’t really like and am trying to ignore, I’m, yeah – monotonous, without much energy in my voice. My parents phoned me on my mobile recently when I was at a friend’s house, and they were trying to get me to come home earlier, and I was talking in such a monotone that all my friends were falling about laughing.
4. When I’m having a deep conversation with someone on a difficult subject to broach, I might drop back to my low voice, but with a lot of energy.
5. When I’m shouting at my mother – well, I shout. But then so does she. She sounds like a posh hawk when she shouts, and she says I sound like a battering ram.24
Some kinds of voices are shamefully pleasurable to use, if hard to admit to – like the ‘hobby-horse’ voice or rant, where you talk at others rather than to them. A 36-year-old said, ‘Sometimes the slightly manic voice in me takes over. It loses the capacity to be in tune with other voices. I feel embarrassed about it … but actually when I’m in it I quite often enjoy being in it because it feels powerful and energising.’25
The sound of our own voices, as one study found, raises our blood pressure, even if no one else is present.26 Talking is quite literally an exciting business. A 49-year-old man admitted that:
sometimes when I speak I bore myself, but other times when I start speaking I really fascinate myself and then you can’t shut me up. It can be like a runaway train, my voice, and you know, one of the things I have trouble with is volume control, at least according to some people around me. My wife and daughter are embarrassed by it … but there’s nothing more pleasurable than letting my voice go … it makes me feel not small, not depressed, not withdrawn … I have this explosive way about me in a lot of situations that will become vocally expressed.27
This man’s explosive voice, he believes, once saved his life. Having just returned from work, he was lying down in his New York apartment at five in the afternoon with his shirt off:
Our apartment had very noisy floorboards and I heard what was the unmistakable sound of a human footstep in the house … I made a very quick decision that the best policy was an aggressive one. So I decided to charge out of the room and face this person but I realised there would still be a distance between me and him and, rather than actually mount a physical charge, I would use my voice as my first line of assault. And I came out with the loudest sound I could make, saying, ‘What are you doing here?’ Even as I turned the corner … I saw that he flinched and stepped back. And in that moment, I realised that the effect of my voice meant that I had the upper hand. He tried to speak himself but I kept overwhelming him with this loud voice as I crossed toward him … and I grabbed him by the collar … he was fairly large but I was able to push him back out of the apartment.28
Non-Western cultures acknowledge the impact on a speaker of speaking. The Ojebway Indians won’t even say their own name, believing that to do so would stunt their growth. They don’t mind other people saying it – it’s simply the owner who can’t. According to the anthropologist James Frazer, ‘When a man lets his own name pass his lips, he is parting with a living piece of himself.’29
Spending a lot of time alone can lead one to forget the actual sound of one’s own voice, and hear only the inner one. Going for a long time without speaking, one loses touch with the self-in-the-world carried by the voice. A voice needs a listener. Although you can talk to yourself, you then have to be both speaker and listener.
The answering-machine finesses these torments. The comic writer Michael Frayn has described recording an answering-machine message:
’Hello’, you begin, certainly – but as soon as you’ve said it you realise you haven’t said it in the usual way. There was no upward inflection, no note of query. Your voice fell instead of rising. You have no sense of an audience. You know you are talking to yourself, and you have begun to feel rather foolish … You are not speaking politely or impatiently, confidently or cautiously. You are speaking slowly and carefully … you are speaking portentously … you seem to believe you are making a statement which may be used in evidence in some future court case. You are broadcasting a last message to the world from the besieged city. You are speaking to posterity.30
The caller, meanwhile, is in a lather of embarrassment of their own, unsure whether the beep has already sounded, whether to speak with all the normal conversational cadences used when someone’s actually there (a pointless performance – an eavesdropper can almost always tell when someone is speaking into an answer-phone rather than to a living person), or whether to adopt a special answering-machine register. Despite their ubiquity, there’s no good way to leave a message on an answer-phone. However much we try and coax our voice to sound natural, the knowledge that the machine’s owner can replay the message with all its slips and pretensions induces in most of us a fatal degree of self-consciousness.
It’s a similar experience talking to someone who’s had a stroke or who’s in a coma: you hear your own voice prattling on normally in the hope – as the evidence suggests – that the other person can hear, but without getting feedback. You speak as if there’s been a response – a duologue for one.
Voices need regular exercise. Unused, they rust up and creak. (People who live alone in isolated places or speak little develop shorter expiration times.31) Those who don’t speak a language for a long time lose the oral sensations accompanying it – the moues and trills particular to each language. Returning to it is like kissing an old friend.
One of the greatest boons of having a pet, surely, is that it allows one to talk to oneself. Since we’re the first hearers of our own voice, the vocal endearments we lavish on our pet grace our own ears too. Having a pet and petting it activates a loving voice that cossets not just the pet but also its owner.
In 1900 the 18-year-old Ida Bauer, who suffered from recurrent aphonia or loss of voice, reluctantly agreed to be treated by Sigmund Freud in Vienna; as Dora she became the subject of probably his most famous case history.
Dora had been the object of sexual advances by Herr K., a family friend. When she was 14, Herr K. had ‘suddenly clasped the girl to him and pressed a kiss upon her lips’,32 creating a ‘violent feeling of disgust’ in the girl.
Dora’s hysteria, Freud concluded, was a ‘displacement of sensation’: when Herr K. pressed himself against her, instead of feeling the pleasure that Freud thought a healthy girl would, ‘it was dismissed from her memory, repressed, and replaced by the innocent sensation of pressure upon her thorax, which in turn derived an excessive intensity from its repressed source’.33 This was ‘a displacement from the lower part of the body to the upper’,34 a way of transforming her own covert sexual feelings towards Herr K. (along with her fantasies about what her father was getting up to with Frau K., with whom he was having a sexual relationship) into disgust, the conversion of a psychic experience into a physical one, and an oral experience – the attempted kiss – into an oral absence.
Though ‘Dora’ became a honey-pot for feminist debate about sexual difference and desire,35 it wasn’t the first time that the mouth and throat were identified as a site for the expression of trauma and hysteria. In 1880 Josef Breuer, Freud’s collaborator and co-founder of psychoanalysis, had treated 21-year-old Bertha Pappenheim (known in Breuer’s case history as Anna O.) for recurring loss of speech and disordered speech due to anxiety.36 As a result of ‘deep hypnosis’ Breuer elicited streams of material from her unconscious, which, he argued, had produced the symptoms: ‘Finally her disturbances of speech were “talked away”.’37
Together, the cases of Anna O. and Dora represent the beginnings of psychoanalysis, and it’s fascinating that both involve the voice. But what’s curious is how little interest Freud and Breuer showed in the voice per se. Freud seemed concerned exclusively with what Dora converted from rather than into. For him the symptom remained a symptom. His interest lay in how the unconscious spoke through the body, rather than how the body itself spoke; in the voice’s absence more than its presence.
What makes this all the more bizarre is that, together with Breuer, he was the inventor of the ‘talking cure’ (Anna O.’s term for the therapeutic process).38 Remarkably, he developed a way of accessing the unconscious ultimately through the medium of the voice. (Ironically he was himself to die of cancer of the jaw.) And yet Freud paradoxically seemed to be much more interested in visual hysterical symptoms than vocal ones. The index to the standard edition of his complete works lists one single entry for ‘Voices’, in contrast to over 100 for disturbances connected with vision. On the subject of vocalising, it seems that Freud himself in some sense suffered from loss of voice.
And yet Freud and Breuer established an important association between vocal problems and psychological states. Today vocal problems like aphonia (loss of voice) and dysphonia (voice disorder) are routinely traced back to states of emotional tension that put pressure on the body, and ‘psychogenic’ loss of voice, caused by underlying psychological factors, has attracted a considerable literature.
Much of it is frighteningly crude – moral judgements parading as science. Indeed there are pejorative attitudes enshrined in the very language of loss of voice. It’s commonly linked with ‘the hysterical personality’,39 ‘the neurotic personality’, and other ‘personality disorders’. Non-organic symptoms like hoarseness and pressure on the throat are often known as ‘globus hystericus’,40 and children suffering from vocal strain or (hyperkinetic dysphonia) have been labelled aggressive and immature.41 In these circumstances it’s amazing that they have any voice at all.
In reality the relationship between psyche and voice is far more complex. A more sensitive approach sees voice loss as something precipitated by conflicts associated with anxiety, fear, and aggressive feelings.42 A 38-year-old woman described how, within two months of becoming head of department (a promotion she’d been striving for), she lost her voice. ‘I was absolutely terrified about being that powerful and having that degree of responsibility in such a grown-up job. Losing my voice seriously interfered with my status, power and position – effectively I used my voice to demote myself.’43
The voice both reflects and mediates our relationship with the outside world, and can be used to express attitudes and feelings that would be derided or dangerous if articulated through words. Losing one’s voice can be a way of going on strike, a withdrawal from the social world, sometimes deliberately. Analysts distinguish between elective mutism, where a person is able to speak but chooses not to, and the traumatic mutism that follows shock or injury. A psychiatrist who treated an elective mute boy observed that he ‘found not speaking the only way he could find a voice in his family. He spoke to me first, saying that if he spoke to his family they would stop listening. He found a way of speaking to them through me and then totally regained his speech.’44 The singer Shirley Bassey experienced traumatic mutism, temporarily losing her voice after the tragic death of her 21-year-old daughter. ‘It was the combination of the guilt and the grief and the nervous strain. I was grieving through my vocal cords.’45
Trauma can rupture the circuit that makes up the vocal process, disturbing the boundary between inside and outside. Making sounds is an act of trust: to allow the intake and expulsion of air you must open up the body. A traumatised person finds such openings too risky. Psychotherapists and voice teachers often work with the ‘crashed voice’ to resolve deeper psychological issues or psychic trauma.46
A person who loses their voice permanently is excluded from normal social life just as surely as the immobile are by a flight of steps. After surgery to remove his cancer left him effectively voiceless, the British journalist and broadcaster John Diamond wrote eloquently about its social consequences: having to point at things in shops like a tourist,47 relishing the Internet because there ‘I am just as articulate as I ever was’,48 and dreaming that he hears himself using his old voice.49
Even more disorientating was the ontological effect of losing his voice. If we are what we sound like, then the loss of that sound diminishes some core aspect of the self. ‘In not being able to talk, I am not me. Or, at least, not the me I think of when I think of me.’50 Diamond lost not just the capacity to speak but also his former ability to speak with great fluency. ‘Thus I am forced to entertain the unwonted thought … would the people I love love me, know me, have taken trouble with me, if this is how I was when they first met me?’51
But we devoice ourselves daily in far less dramatic fashion. Since our emotions leak so easily into our voice, speaking is an intrinsically revealing and potentially dangerous experience. Most of us use a variety of strategies to protect ourselves from exposure. Are Prince Charles’s tortured circumlocutions and near-stutter connected with decades of paternal criticism? The actor Mel Gibson said, ‘I … tend to use the bottom register of the voice a lot … It’s a security thing – you don’t want to express yourself vocally too much to other people.’52
An uninflected voice often serves as a psychological defence, the dirge and drone of uniform pitch protecting a speaker from the risks of emotional display. A 42-year-old man complained that his father-in-law’s voice is ‘so monotonous that just five minutes of listening to it makes me lose the will to live. I know that he had a tough childhood and probably learned to protect himself with this very level, unmodulated voice. But hearing him makes me as depressed as he must be, to be able to produce such a lifeless sound.’53
Vowel movements are as much of a discharge as bowel movements: a person can be vocally retentive just as much as anally retentive. The fear of letting the voice out has been called ‘phonophobia’.54 ‘For many people the fear of being too loud or emotionally committed creates a common habit of pulling the vowel back in moments when volume is required. The vowel starts on its natural pattern of release but then is denied and trapped by either swallowing the sound or clenching the jaw … All the energy stays bottled in the throat.’55
This form of swallowing the words sounds as if the speaker is attempting to retrieve what they’ve just said, or can’t fully commit themselves to it.56 Of course there are powerful social pressures that often inhibit such commitment, as an American voice teacher has suggested. ‘How many times people have said, well, I can’t talk to you when you’re feeling so upset – just calm down and we’ll talk about this,’ as if it’s wrong to speak with feelings.’57 A 36-year-old woman remarks:
I’m a pretty volatile person myself but when I hear my husband shout at the children or me it drives me mad because he doesn’t actually let his anger out: it rises up but then he shouts it back down into himself so that he sounds like a bad imitation of Hitler. And that’s what I find so infuriating: he seems to be letting it all out by shouting, but the actual sound of the shout locks it back in again, which makes it much more frightening. Perhaps that’s why his shouting doesn’t clear the air.58
This is the Basil Fawlty school of rage – simultaneously released and repressed. The mismatch in harmonics between this husband and this wife’s voices might be contributing an additional, hidden difficulty to the way they resolve conflicts.
Creating small, often inaudible and unresonant sounds can be a method of grovelling, or might be the result of having had your voice suppressed in childhood. This reduces not just the volume of the voice but also its energy: the vocal folds quiver rather than vibrate. ‘Devoicing disconnects the speaker in the throat, making it hard to express levels of emotion and sound truthful … Imagine being defended by a lawyer who devoiced!’59
An American voice teacher describes it like this:
There’s this 2-year-old who comes into the kitchen with a life or death need for a chocolate-chip cookie and says, with all the passion in her little soul, ‘I want a chocolate-chip cookie, I want it right now, I have to have it.’ And the mother/father/carer says, ‘Well, that’s not a very nice way to ask for a chocolate-chip cookie. I don’t give chocolate-chip cookies to little boys or girls who don’t know how to ask for it nicely. You go away and come back when you know how to ask for it nicely.’ So later that day, the child comes in. Their need for a chocolate-chip cookie is even deeper because it wasn’t satisfied before and they’re about to speak with all the passion in their heart, and in taking that breath, they remember, you know, nice little girl, and they go, ‘May I have a chocolate-chip cookie, please?’ And their voices get stuffed into this tiny high little place, which probably is a lot to do with the tongue muscles bunching up. And so what’s happened is that their initial passionate impulse, their primary impulse, has been redirected into a secondary, maybe even a tertiary expression.60
If the mouth is a gatekeeper, then sometimes the lips are recruited to help prevent emotions from exiting. You can hear it among speakers with tears-in-the-voice, who sound as if sobs are trapped in their vocal tract, a characteristic often detectable in frequent smilers. The woman who thinks she sounds like Princess Anne with a cold may have painful feelings that are literally stuck in her throat. With little prompting she volunteered that, ‘I speak from the base of my throat – I can feel that’s where the strongest vibrations are.’61
Of course we all do it, this repudiating with our voice. An aunt gives me a brooch for my birthday similar to half-a-dozen other brooches that she’s forgotten she’s given me down the years. ‘Fantastic,’ I respond, the ‘Fan’ exploding with excessive enthusiasm, a sharp drop of energy on the ‘tas’ as I hear my enthusiasm, note that it sounds false, and try to reduce it. But my voice plummeted so dramatically that she will have detected it too, and I must decide whether to soar again in another, even more rhapsodic burst of fake joy or plump for a medium-level expression of delight on ‘tic’ and hope that this will convince. That’s what I go for, but by now I’ve so distorted my rhythmic sense that I hold on a fraction too long, so it sounds like I’m saying not ‘tic’ but ‘stick’ because this is what I’m actually doing, ’sticking’ embarrassingly to the syllable.
The coda: a few days later I phone her and say that, beautiful though the brooch is, I have quite a few already and could I change it for some earrings. Comes the reply, ‘I thought you didn’t like it. I could tell from your voice.’
Finding one’s voice – speaking out for the first time on a subject that preoccupies or impassions one – is a powerful experience, with the capacity to alter one’s view of oneself and one’s place in the world. Many people believe that releasing emotions through the voice can be healing.
Being heard can have a similar effect, and can change the actual sound of someone’s voice. A 47-year-old man says that, when he’s really being listened to, his own voice calms down and gets less angry – it no longer has to take on the world. ‘We’re all screaming to be heard, and when you occasionally are, it dawns on you, oh OK, I don’t have to scream so much.’62 A heard voice is rarely an ugly or a whining one, even to its owner, and a heard person is less likely to feel alienated from their voice, or believe they sound like Princess Anne with a cold (unless they actually are).
So powerful is the alchemy of being listened to that it can transform the quality of one’s own listening – reciprocity drives the cycle of communication. A 48-year-old scenic artist described a new person she’d just hired. ‘He really listened, he heard and he anticipated and that’s an unusual quality. That then made me much more attentive to him. It’s an interesting thing that, when someone hears you, you listen back much more carefully.’63