David Blunkett, the former British government minister, is blind, yet in official meetings he would pick up all sorts of extra information, he believes, from changes in the tone of voice of participants. ‘Sometimes I can detect what I call a shuffling silence and can tell that people aren’t happy.’1
Many people will attribute Blunkett’s skill to the enhanced hearing that’s popularly assumed to accompany blindness and somehow compensate for it, as if nature were so even-handed that for each sensory deficit it bestows a matching sensory gain. But this is hokum:2 it suggests that the aural only really evolves in the absence of the visual. The myth of the blind person’s remarkable innate hearing is just a way for lazy listeners to feel better about our indolence (and other people’s disabilities). Blind people don’t hear better – they just listen more. And their hearing is easily idealised: attracted to a publisher after hearing her on a BBC radio programme, Blunkett was to find that his affair with her ended disastrously, probably proving that no one – sighted or blind – should initiate a sexual relationship on the basis of the sound of another person’s voice.3
Aphasics, whose brain damage prevents them from understanding words, are also said to have a superior sensitivity to ‘feeling tone’.4 When a group of aphasics listened to a speech being made by President Reagan, the so-called Great Communicator, they fell about laughing because they detected his histrionics and false cadences. ‘They have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give – or remove – verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice.’5 When aphasics lose their understanding of speech, ‘Something has gone … it is true, but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that – at least with emotionally laden utterance – the meaning may be grasped even when every word is missed.’6
Potentially we each possess the skills of an aphasic. Most of us have an intuitive, post-Freudian sense of the intimate relationship between voice and psyche, embodied in words like tongue-tied, stiff-upper-lip, or lump-in-the-throat. At some level we’re aware that the voice acts as an exquisite psychic barometer, sensitive to micro-shifts in feelings, registering what words try and conceal. Often without realising it, expert listeners are attentive to intonation, rhythm, and breath, alert to those moments when there’s a ‘shortfall’ of commitment to what’s being said. Though our public and educational institutions may do little to encourage it, an extraordinary array of subtle, skilful voice-reading is practised daily in our work, domestic, and social lives. Since communication, to a great extent, consists of an exchange of vocal cues, being able to grasp the meaning of the modulations of another person’s voice and respond appropriately with our own is probably our most important interactive task.
How do feelings get turned into sounds? Emotions produce changes in muscle tension, breathing patterns, the brain. Depression, for instance, slows down psychomotor activity.7 When we’re stressed or excited, on the other hand, our laryngeal muscles tense up, making the vocal folds tauter,8 so that the speaker has to produce more pressure to force the air through. The vocal musculature is a highly sensitive instrument.9 The larynx is ‘suspended’ between two muscle groups, and undue pressure can disturb the balance and so modify the sound of the voice.10
Emotional states like deception, conflict, and anxiety can change breathing,11 which in turn influences the subglottal pressure and so impacts upon the voice. Breathing faster can alter the tempo of speech,12 whereas when we feel powerful we tend to breathe more deeply, and so our voices become lower. Simply remembering an emotion – a happy event, the shock of an accident – affects the movement of the diaphragm.13 A linguist and historian of literature even claimed that he’d managed to authenticate old manuscripts by studying his own respiratory changes while reading aloud poetry and prose. When the respiratory rhythm was different, he concluded that the lines had been written by a different author.14
Changes in facial expressions also affect the pharyngeal muscles. In a grimace, the corners of the mouth are turned down, the vocal tract shortened and its walls tensed. This helps make the voice higher, more nasal, and narrower. When a person is apprehensive or fearful, their voice ‘shrinks’ as the mucous membranes become dry.15
A whole array of neuro-physiological structures helps in the production of the voice, in particular the neocortex, which activates the muscles, and the limbic system, which activates the autonomous nervous system.16 On their way to and from the brain the nerves from the larynx pass through the limbic area – the so-called ‘emotional brain’ that controls our feelings, moods, and drives. It isn’t surprising, then, that the voice picks up so many emotional qualities, or that our emotional state impacts so powerfully upon the voice.17 As one researcher put it, ‘Spontaneous emotional communication constitutes a conversation between limbic systems.’18
Between the 1920s and 1940s a blizzard of studies attempted to prove that listeners could correctly judge a speaker’s personality from their voice.19 Extroverts, for instance, supposedly spoke faster, louder, and with fewer pauses.20 The very etymology of the word ‘personality’ seemed to provide encouragement for this approach: coming from the Latin ’per sona’, meaning to resound, it recognises the intimate connection between the voice and personality.21
In the 1950s an American laryngologist even maintained that neuroses had their own, distinctive vocal means of expression, their oral counterpart. ‘Neurosis in itself is voice-bound … The man who is afraid,’ he argued, ‘will show it in his voice … Voice is the primary expression of the individual, and even through voice alone the neurotic pattern can be discovered.’22 Purely on the basis of a recording of an adolescent boy’s voice, this doctor judged him fearful, cowardly, egocentric, self-conscious, effeminate, intelligent, and gifted. When the boy’s Rorschach test was analysed, almost identical conclusions were reached.23
Many have tried to read off the psychic state from inflections like this; almost all have failed. Dogged by insignificant results, the research was abandoned in the 1950s,24 but came back into fashion in the 1980s, although the contemporary studies aren’t necessarily any more sophisticated.25
Researchers these days prefer to investigate how the voice expresses emotions rather than personality, and are trying to prove that different emotions have their own particular acoustic profile. This isn’t new. Darwin noted that ‘the pitch of the voice bears some relation to certain states of feeling’.26
Depression is most easily identified through the voice. Hippocrates believed that the basic symptom of depression was dimissio animi – lowered vital tone, accompanied by taciturnity.27 By 1921 Emil Kraepelin, the so-called father of modern psychiatry, had observed that depressed people ‘speak in a low voice, slowly, hesitatingly, monotonously, sometimes stuttering, whispering, try several times before they bring out a word, become mute in the middle of a sentence. They become silent, monosyllabic, can no longer converse.’28
The depressed voice is not only quieter and less inflected but also has a dull, lifeless quality. It trails off at the end of a sentence, as if the speaker is sighing while talking.29 The writer William Styron recalls, when he went through a major depression, ‘the lamentable near-disappearance of my voice. It underwent a strange transformation, becoming at times quite faint, wheezy and spasmodic – a friend observed later that it was the voice of a 90-year-old’.30 Manic-depressive patients in their manic phase, on the other hand, speak vigorously, with a wide pitch range, lots of glides, and frequent emphases,31 but revert to flat and halting voices in their depressed state.32
The length of speech-pauses is now considered so reliable an indicator of depression that it’s used both as a diagnostic tool33 and, along with an increase in volume, as an objective barometer of improvement after beginning treatment, even identifying the exact moment when improvement begins.34
Some even believe that the voice can be used preventively. Thirty years ago a clinical psychologist, interviewing patients in the psychiatric emergency room of a New York hospital, found that the sound of certain voices literally caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise. The voice, he concluded, contained important psychological information about a person’s immediate psychological state, and a dull, lifeless, metallic, hollow sound could act as an early-warning system to alert mental-health workers that a person was seriously considering suicide.35 A recent study comparing the acoustic properties of the voices of depressed people and suicidal ones managed to distinguish them correctly most of the time.36 Yet the idea of the voice as an infallible guide to despair remains problematic.
Depression may be detectable by low pitch, but here’s the rub: so too is boredom. Similarly, while anxiety is said to be distinguished by higher pitch, happiness is as well.37 Contempt, meanwhile, is said to be loud and slow. Anger has high pitch and is faster. Stress is high, loud, and fast38 (but then confidence is too39) while grief is low and full of pauses.40 Surprise glides, and scorn has an even, descending melody.41 Only on disgust do the researchers admit defeat, and even here, they suggest that the failure isn’t theirs but the speakers’: we simply don’t encode disgust well, they claim42, clearly never having spent time in the company of small children or teenagers.
Work like this has been seized upon as supplying a foolproof way to understanding the hidden clues and cues to human behaviour. Best-selling manuals proclaim that ‘Pitch, speed, and volume give away a liar … studies show that around 70 per cent of people increase their pitch when lying.’43 (70 per cent of everyone in the world? Or 70 per cent of those in two or three studies?) Communication has come to be seen as cryptology, the scientific study of codes (preferably with numbers – the fourteen personality types, the six ways of saying ‘no’, the twelve steps to just about anything), that need to be deciphered if we’re to achieve professional and personal success.
So how accurately can specific emotions be distinguished through pitch, volume, and tempo? Even those who believe that the voice is fabulously revealing concede that some emotions are read more easily than others. Anger and sorrow are easy, for instance, but fear is harder.44 And people differ in how they express their emotions. Most depressed people may have quiet and lifeless voices, but some get louder in depression, and sometimes go higher.45 There are people who, once they’ve decided to kill themselves, sound calmer and more settled.46 Recovery also doesn’t always have the same acoustic but is influenced by various factors like age.47
One of the things that sank the research on the voice and personality was the realisation that listeners’ attributions of extroversion or introversion were based less on actual personality than on theatrical conventions. The same is true about a lot of the work on the voice and the emotions: it tells us not so much about real anger, more about the sort of stage anger that you find in a silent Charlie Chaplin movie.
Peer more closely into many of the more flamboyant claims made about the voice and emotions and you see on what flimsy grounds they rest. In most of the research, for example, a speaker is required to read a nonsensical passage, letters of the alphabet, or even numbers, with different emotions, which judges are later asked to identify.48 But the speaking voice is different from the reading voice, and simulated emotions aren’t the same as spontaneous ones. Some of the studies even use actors rather than ordinary people:49 one pair claimed extra realism for their study because they used method actors, former members of the Actors Studio!50
Secondly, this kind of research presumes that the way we say something is unconnected to what we’re saying (some studies go to elaborate lengths to filter or mask verbal cues), as though there were pure, abstracted emotions which, although communicated through speech, exist in some kind of non-verbal limbo. They also assume that our emotions are expressed discretely, one at a time, rather than in a cocktail of several simultaneous feelings.51 And they only seem to recognise a single variant of each emotion, or at best two (like ‘hot anger’ and ‘cold anger’52), whereas most of us are Rembrandts of wrath, so many hues of angry voice are at our command.
Finally and perhaps most damning, many studies on the emotions and the voice treat speakers in supreme isolation, completely erasing the person being addressed.53 Yet most of us speak differently to colleagues and family, or parents and child: how we say it depends, to a very large extent, on to whom we’re saying it (as well as where, when, and why). Lose that and you’ve pretty well eliminated the key aspect of vocal communication.
Of course no research design can reproduce the complexity of messy reality: you have to control some features to allow study of others. But life is not a bipolar scale, and yet most researchers accept without demur the fact that the effects of the individual speaker have been factored out of the analyses as ‘an unwanted source of variance’.54
So what’s the alternative? It was the ‘unwanted source of variance’ that I was after in my interviews. Simply asking people how they read the voices of those with whom they live, work, or play can reveal some of the complex skills we use to understand those around us and how, individually, we learn when to discount and when to give credence at least partly on the basis of the voice.
It’s a pretty speedy process. Emotion can be recognised in segments of speech as short as 60 milliseconds (60 thousandths of a second).55 From their opening telephone ‘Hello’, daughters can usually recognise their mother’s mood and vice versa. And not just mothers and daughters: the voice of a person close to you is as viscerally familiar as the smell of their body, a delinquent tuft of their hair, or the way they chomp their biscuit. These are bits of intimate knowledge we accrue about the people around us, which make those movies where one person is substituted for another so implausible. It’s as if we have some internal template of how the other normally sounds – how much warmth and vigour, how free and engaged their voice usually is – and can spot any deviation. We take soundings of each other’s voices.
A 48-year-old woman described a row with her 15-year-old daughter. ‘I was absolutely furious with her so I adopted a semi-neutral tone which I know in my heart of hearts isn’t a neutral tone – it’s an accusatory tone disguised as neutral. Which of course was picked up as, “Why are you speaking in a funny voice when you say you’re not angry any more?” ’56
A 54-year-old woman describes her husband:
I almost never listen to the words he uses – I listen to the voice he uses: that tells me more, because if I say, ‘Will you do this?’ he says, ‘Yes, of course,’ but you can tell from his voice he really means, ‘I really resent this and I’m going to make a row about this in the future.’ But you wouldn’t know that from the words. Very often there’s a dissonance between the words and voice, the words say one thing, the voice another, and you’re meant to hear the difference. With me they more usually go together – the words and voice reinforce each other.57
She exercises similar interpreting skills with their 24-year-old daughter, currently living in Canada:
You know when she wants you to get off the phone but she’s too nice to show it – I can feel her impatience. I also know from her voice when she’s telling me that everything is fine but what she really wants you to do is rush in and probe so she can tell you what’s wrong. I wonder if you learn to listen to them most when they’re teenagers. With a teenager you want to know who’s coming down the stairs – Miss Moody or Miss Happy. You learn to listen to the message of your teenage daughter’s voice to find out which one it is, and not to say the one word that will trigger an awful day.58
Vocal sensitivity is an important dimension of intimate relationships. A 39-year-old woman says that, ‘When G. conveys with his voice that he’s on edge and has had an aggravating day, then oh yes, I speak to him very differently because I don’t want to add to it. I’m very careful and tend to back off, or sometimes I’ll say, “Tell me what happened.” He does the same to me.’59
Most of us have at least half-a-dozen experiences like this a day. Voice-reading is, ultimately, a form of empathy: we tune into what another person is thinking and feeling – not always successfully. A 44-year-old woman, after spending the night with a teacher for the first time, found him brisk and businesslike over breakfast and assumed that he was trying to tell her that it was a one-night stand. It was only years later that he revealed that this was because he goes into quick, efficient teacher mode in the mornings. ‘Now the name of the school – Rockingham High – has become a sort of code between us, and if either of us sounds cold or is using a very professional, brisk voice when the other feels in need of warmth, we say, “Rockingham High.” It’s become shorthand for, “Hello, you’ve disappeared – come back.”‘60
Voice-reading entails a shift in understanding, from one’s own style of expressiveness to another’s. It invites us to recognise the separateness of listener and speaker – not so much a putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, but rather a putting oneself in their voice. Occasionally one can hear something at the threshold of awareness that’s just too threatening or disturbing to be admitted into consciousness. A 42-year-old woman recalls:
W. had just come back from a work-trip to Milan and I was asking him about it and he was talking about a colleague. There was something in his voice that made me anxious for a fraction of a second – it couldn’t have been more than that, and I was barely aware of it. I just remember turning and shutting the bathroom door with some tiny speck of nervousness that I didn’t allow to surface. Later, when he confessed that he’d been having an affair, I remembered that moment, and wished I’d let myself admit what I’d picked up in his voice, even though I had no grounds for doubting him.61
Many of us are able to hear covert emotions in the voices of others, but prefer not to.
Among the people I interviewed, far more women than men acknowledged the importance of reading the voices of their friends and partners, children and colleagues and were able to give examples. This probably reflects the fact that the burden of emotional care-taking in most cultures still falls disproportionately on women’s shoulders (a degree of psychological skill – aka ‘wiles’ – is still considered an intrinsic part of femininity but an optional extra of masculinity), but also that women are socialised into a language of affect – they’ve developed an ability to translate what they hear non-verbally into words.
Both boys and girls, on the other hand, use voice-reading to steer themselves round the adult world: being finely attuned to nuances in the voices of those people with authority over them like parents and teachers is a form of protection against adult fiat.
One 11-year-old boy, when he hears a certain quality in his mother’s voice, heads immediately for a neighbouring room, ‘so that I don’t get picked on’.62 His 14-year-old sister confirms that when their mother gets this ‘testy, harsh thing in her voice’ they know she’s angry, while a 13-year-old girl gauges the degree of rage in her parents’ voices to decide ‘whether to stop arguing with them or whether to go on’.63 On the other hand the child whose parent says, ‘Stop that at once,’ but in a tone of voice that fully expects him not to comply, usually doesn’t. Parents trying to exert authority over difficult-to-control children, according to one study, often detract from their instructions by using weak voices, and as a result are more likely to be ignored by their children. ‘Vocal intonation, which is not easily self-monitored, mirrors an individual’s beliefs about his effectiveness as a source of influence.’64
Recent research suggests that the ability to read emotional cues in the voices of other children grows in accuracy from infancy to adolescence,65 yet remarkably, children who have trouble decoding vocal prosody are judged less popular and lower in social status by other kids even before they’ve left nursery. Good vocal readers, on the other hand, are less socially anxious and less fearful of being criticised.66
Perhaps anxiety deafens you to the finer emotional distinctions in other people’s voices; maybe your own anxiety drowns out other vocal melodies. One study found that very anxious children confused other children’s fearful voices with angry ones.67 Difficulties in accurately identifying anger in the voice may, one researcher believes, lead to behavioural problems that are the precursor to violent or criminal activities.68 Another piece of research found that male adolescents who’d been arrested for sexual offences made more errors in identifying angry voices.69
Today there’s so much anxiety about children’s decoding deficits that there are books and programmes to help them develop nonverbal skills: these advise parents to teach them rhythm, or encourage the child to practise a sentence in different ways to communicate different intentions.70
Children, in the past, used to learn rhythm from music. And while chronic difficulties in encoding and decoding feelings in the voice can cause painful problems of social rejection, most of the books aren’t aimed at the minority with problems but at everyone else. Titles like Teaching Your Child the Language of Social Success are disturbing, as if it’s never too young for the self-improving makeover. There’s even a new term, ‘dyssemia’, to mean difficulty using or understanding non-verbal signs and signals, as well as a dyssemia website, and a ‘breakthrough programme’ for conquering adult dyssemia.71 Of course you need a syndrome if you’ve got a breakthrough to offer. We used to have other names for ‘adult dyssemics’ – misanthrope, for example, or antisocial bugger. But today they have a skill deficit that needs treatment.
Vocal ability, both encoding and decoding, is a fantastically useful attribute that develops in response to sensitive parenting and a benign environment. But skill in using and understanding it is an aspect of the human imagination, rather than a dimension of health and disease.
Can inauthenticity be detected in the voice? Simulated emotion certainly has a different acoustic to a genuine one: within seconds of listening to speech radio, most of us can identify whether it’s drama or actuality. The spontaneous voice darts and bounces far less smoothly than we (or over-emoting actors) imagine. As a voice teacher remarked, ‘Actors can tend to hold on to an emotion too long. In emotionally demanding scenes, actors tend to stay in one strong affective tone, rather than allow the character’s emotional state to be fluid, changeable, and irrational.’72
The idea that deception is easily detectable in the voice has been encouraged by the success of the new breed of magician ‘mind-readers’ like Marc Salem and Derren Brown. Salem argues that ordinary people can tell when someone is lying by developing ‘focused listening’ and tuning in to momentary vocal wobbles, a rise or fall in pitch or register, ‘especially if quickly corrected … changing rate of rhythm of speech’, a cracking voice, etc.73
Brown also maintains that he can spot people who are lying just from their voice.74 For his 2003 British television ‘Russian Roulette’ stunt, he picked a volunteer to load a gun and, on the basis of tiny inflections in the volunteer’s voice when counting from one to six, Brown claimed that he’d successfully deduced in which chamber the bullet had been placed. Or did he just choose someone suggestible and, through his voice, direct them to a particular chamber?
Whichever the case, such stunts reduce vocal understanding to a party trick, and vastly overestimate its predictive power. For while many of us can tell when a family member or close friend is lying at least to some extent on the basis of their voice, the idea that you can do the same with anyone you might happen to bump into on a train, or that we can confidently generalise about the acoustic of lying, is fallacious. So although some studies have found that liars tend to speak more slowly,75 in a higher-pitched voice, and with a greater number of pauses76 and speech errors, typical nonverbal behaviour doesn’t exist – there’s no vocal equivalent of Pinocchio’s nose.77
As the burgeoning field of deception studies makes clear, the relationship between voice and behaviour is far more complex, and we all vary in our ability to encode emotions in our own voice and decode those in the voices of others. Good encoders of emotions also tend to be good decoders, but we’re not necessarily equally good at encoding and decoding the same emotion – you might be good at showing fear in the voice, for instance, but bad at detecting it in the voices of others.78 And some people’s voices are easier to read than others.79 ‘People behave differently in different situations, and different people behave differently in the same situation.’80 In fact the detection rates of most professional lie-catchers are modest, and people trained to look and listen for non-verbal clues to deceitful behaviour often do less well than ordinary, untrained listeners.81
Our opinions about other people’s voices are shaped by the sound of our own – unwittingly we may be comparing theirs with ours. A comment like ‘It’s too loud for me’, might really mean ‘It’s too loud in comparison with my own voice’.82 At the same time, what annoys us in the voices of others may be qualities that we haven’t learned to tolerate in ourselves. One woman I interviewed described her irritation at her 8-year-old daughter’s ‘mouselike voice’, but then acknowledged that quiet voices always made her feel aggressive. Her own voice was forceful.
Our personal history also helps shape our reactions to other people’s voices. A psychologist, writing in 1931, said, ‘Whatever the physical sounds produced by a voice, the effect upon the hearer depends largely on his own past experience … in judging a voice, we may – usually unconsciously – be reminded of another earlier voice, significant to us in the past, and our judgement may thus be powerfully influenced.’83
A 43-year-old woman who had a ranting father thinks this has led her to overreact to her husband when he rages:
My radar for an angry voice is highly developed because of being flooded by my father’s anger, so I might perceive a higher volume in an angry voice than someone else might because I’m so anxious about it. When my husband first got angry I felt immediately panicky, an immediate reminder of a level of expressed emotion that was out of control, in a way that terrified me. When my husband sounds very angry, I’m transported back in a time machine.84
The sound of the human voice has an unrivalled capacity to flood the listener psychologically. A lifeless voice can reproduce the speaker’s stagnancy in the hearer. On the other hand, one night in 1956 the playwright Arthur Miller, staying in a motel in Nevada, received a desperate late-night Hollywood phone call from Marilyn Monroe, whom he was to marry later that year. Miller heard ‘a new terror’ in her. ‘I kept trying to reassure her, but she seemed to be sinking where I could not reach, her voice growing fainter. I was losing her, she was slipping away out there …’
Miller feared that she might commit suicide, but couldn’t think of anyone near by he could summon to help her. Out of breath and dizzy, he slid to the floor and passed out. ‘I came to in what was probably a few seconds, her voice still whispering out of the receiver over my head. After a moment I got up and talked her down to earth, and it was over.’85 Through her voice alone Monroe had managed to project her feelings of overwhelming despair directly into the receptive Miller. Monroe was sinking and Miller sank. A voice can plant feelings deep into the core of another person, even down a crackly telephone line.
But then some voices are more penetrating than others, and some listeners more permeable. A 48-year-old woman finds her husband’s voice soothing in much the same way as her late mother’s. But, ‘When he’s angry he yells … it’s really explosive … It makes me feel bludgeoned even if I hear him in the kitchen, shouting, because he’s dropped a saucepan. It assaults me, the level of anger in the voice. I don’t feel physically threatened by it but it makes me feel unsafe emotionally.’86 Similarly a 7-year-old girl said of her mother, ‘She shouts a lot – it feels like being locked up in a cage and there’s a dog barking at me and I can’t get out and I can’t get the dog’s barking out of my head.’87
Many of the people I talked to spoke in these terms – as if a raging voice wasn’t simply an expression of anger but also had the power to invade and injure them. As a 56-year-old man put it, ‘You can be lashed by a person’s voice. There was a famous man when I was at officer-cadet school – it was said he could curdle milk at a distance with his voice.’88 You can turn your back on an angry face, but an angry voice surrounds, saturates and sometimes deluges. A very loud voice can even be a form of abuse: louder than 80 decibels it’s potentially destructive to physical tissue and mental processes.89
Freud may not have been terribly interested in the texture of individual voices, but he created a therapeutic method in which both the analyst and patient’s voices played a crucial transformative role. Today nearly every kind of therapy has as its basis two or more people talking together.90 A psychotherapist argued in 1943:
The voice is a sensitive vector of emotional states and is used by the ego as a vector for neurotic symptoms and defence mechanisms. To hear the voice solely for what it has to say and to overlook the voice itself deprives the analyst of an important avenue leading to emotional conflict … since resistances are constantly being acted out by means of the voice (and with much less shame than in other types of acting out), it is doubly important that such behaviour be exposed and analysed.91
One American psychiatrist even described himself as an ‘aural’ therapist, claiming that, purely by tuning in to a patient’s vocal cues, he was able to gather all the significant information about them, and judge when to intervene.92
Jung believed that his patients used their voice to disconnect from psychic pain and ‘speak quite unemotionally about things that have the most intimate significance for them … So long as the complex which is under special inhibition does not become conscious, the patients can safely talk about it, they can even “talk it away” in a deliberately light manner. This “talking it away” can sometimes amount to “feeling it away”.’93 On the other hand, sometimes patients lower their voice when saying something important, as though they don’t want other people – but also perhaps themselves – to hear it. According to one therapist, ‘When they hit a buried piece of psychic shrapnel … the voice will drop or the person will pause for a moment and have a hard time finding a word or there’s a change in the register … there’s a shift in the quality, it gets throaty or it gets hesitant or a little cracked … you’re listening for metaphors, shifts in volume.’94
Research carried out in Chicago in the 1960s identified four different vocal styles in patients: ‘focused’, where they grope towards putting their internal experience into words and move into new territory; ‘externalising’ – an energetic and expressive voice that talks at someone rather than with them, leaving no space for newness to emerge; ‘limited’, involving a holding back or withdrawal of energy, as if the speaker were distancing themselves from what they’re saying; and ‘emotional’, where an overflow of feeling distorts or disrupts the speech.95 Patients might move from style to style within a single session, but the ‘focused’ style ushered in insight or resolution on the part of the patient, and the more that it was used in the first two sessions, the more favourable (in the opinion of both patients and therapists) was the outcome. When the ‘externalising’ and ‘limited’ vocal styles dominated, on the other hand, both parties (in this research) found the sessions relatively unproductive. Trainees, it was suggested, should be taught to listen for those moments when a client’s voice slows, softens, and becomes ‘focused’. ‘Even though the content being discussed may be less than exciting, this is a sign that something here may be alive for the client.’96
The therapist’s voice is just as important as the patient’s in the therapeutic encounter. It can create a bridge between themself and the patient.97 In psychoanalysis the patient lies on the couch and the analyst sits behind them, out of sight98 – theirs is like the voice of God, but their voice also envelops like the mother’s. Some patients don’t want to lie down because they feel it would make them vulnerable, partly because a voice disconnected from a face feels so omnipresent, and deprives them of the information that comes from a face.
Psychotherapists, like other professionals, have their work voices. One recalls how her husband, when he heard her answer the phone, knew from her first sentence whether she was speaking to a friend or a client. ‘He could just tell from the tone of my voice and the structure of my voice … I become more formal, more businesslike, trying to maintain that kind of blank screen of the voice.’
Her voice plays an especially important role in family sessions:
Sometimes it can get so heated if a couple begins to argue that … I find myself sort of taking a moment and thinking … how to modulate my voice because I’m not going to join the fray … I’ve got to speak in the lower register, it’s got to be a quieting firmness rather than an escalating one … I sit for a moment … I don’t think how I’m going to speak but I feel how I’m going to speak.99
Another practitioner consciously alters her voice with her patients: Sometimes … I use my voice to stimulate a depressed and hopeless one. On … other occasions … my words are less important than the vocal indication of my presence. Sometimes I remain silent to encourage separation from me. Occasionally my voice backfires on me, as when a patient notices my anger or my anxiety through the sound of my voice.100
In analysis the unbearable gets siphoned from the patient’s to the analyst’s voice, where it’s made tolerable, and is no longer expressed manically or lifelessly. Along with the physical boundary of the consulting room and the chronological boundary of the fifty-minute session, the therapist’s voice acts as a container for the patient’s overwhelming emotions. As one analyst put it, ‘The “music and dance” of an interpretation – the poetic or lyrical aspect of language and the emotional tone in which it is spoken – that is transformative to the infantile aspects of the analysand, whatever his/her age, whether or not the literal meaning of the words has been understood.’101 A 39-year-old woman remarked, ‘Someone once told me that after a successful lengthy analysis very often people don’t remember any of the words spoken but have a sense of the tone of their analyst’s voice, and its rhythm.’102 A skilful therapist even begins, through their voice, to alert their patient to the imminent ending of the session (and over time the patient learns to understand the meaning of this particular modulation, the therapeutic equivalent of ‘last orders’).
The very first contact between therapist and client is usually by voice alone, exciting fantasies, hopes, and fears through the medium of the phone. Today some therapists also give sessions by phone. One was surprised at how easy it was to transmit feelings this way, finding that the lack of visual interference produced a ‘paradoxical intimacy’.103 A patient who has telephone sessions twice a week with a therapist in a different city lies down for them in what she calls her ‘snoring room’. ‘I get to hear my therapist’s voice in a far more intimate way than I would in the consulting room, and have learned to read it much better. He feels he’s losing out on all the visual, expressive and body cues.’104
Tellingly, Freud actually used the analogy of the telephone about the therapeutic process itself: the analyst ‘must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone’.105 In effective therapy, the patient not only internalises the psychotherapist’s voice but also, perhaps, in some sense learns to copy it, so developing the capacity to soothe or stimulate themself. In the process the patient’s own voice can change – become lighter, or slower, or less grating. Together, the therapist and patient’s voices can make a vital, if often unacknowledged, contribution to the patient’s growth.106
Freud advised the analyst to turn their ‘own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient’.107 One of his first students called his 1949 book about his experience as an analyst Listening with the Third Ear. In it he said that ‘he who listens with a third ear hears also what is expressed almost noiselessly, what is said pianissimo ’.108 Ordinary people do this too.
As communication and service industries displace manufacturing ones, and social mobility increases, along with the number of divorced parents whose main contact with their children is by phone, the ability to interpret voices becomes an increasingly prized skill – too often unacknowledged. It atrophies with disuse, but can be regained with practice. A mixture of concentration and relaxation is involved:109 You have to direct and focus the ear while allowing it to remain loose and receptive. Athletes and yogis, musicians and writers do something similar with their instrument.