Living in a culture so saturated with images and books, it’s extraordinarily hard for us to imagine ourselves back into one without print, where all beliefs, values, and facts are communicated face-to-face, stored only in human memory.1 Try to conjure up a world without any means of preserving on paper or recording digitally: instantly what’s possible both contracts dramatically and expands in unexpected ways. The relationship between a citizen and the law, a citizen and their government, is acoustic. ‘A communication system of this sort is an echo system, light as air and as fleeting.’2
Without books the meaning of words is pinned down by context and the inflection in which they’re spoken, rather than by the dictionary.3 (Inflections were more important in oral culture, and it was more important to understand them – more depended on it.) A whole array of mnemonic devices – rhythm, repetition, antithesis, alliteration and assonance, epigrams, proverbs and formulaic expressions – were developed to fix words and ideas in the mind of both speaker and hearer. (You only have to read transcripts of interviews even today to see how differently the voice travels when the only requirements it has to satisfy are those of the now.)
No wonder oral cultures regard hearing as so powerful: phonetics and sound are their chief means of communicating information, a fact echoed in the metaphors they use to describe knowledge. The African Basotho – and modern-day New Yorkers – consider ‘I hear’ to be equivalent to ‘I understand’,4 while among the Ommura people of New Guinea, the verb ‘iero’ means both ‘to hear’ and ‘to know’. The word used by the pre-classical Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, to signify ‘know’ (ksuniemi) originally meant ‘to know by hearing’; by the early fourth century BC Plato still equated individuals who knew a lot with individuals who heard a lot. Religious texts, too, put the aural in prime position: in Scripture, Calvin observed, the phrase ‘to hear’ was virtually synonymous with ‘to believe’,5 and the Israelites believed that God made the universe by speaking (‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light’).6 It wasn’t until the Renaissance that God was portrayed visually: before then he was conceived as sound or vibration.7 All this allows us to understand why traditional societies, as we’ve seen, so often attribute magical properties to the voice and spoken word. Once the word was written down, it began to lose some of its magic power.
It’s only when you stop to think that you realise how stupefying a human leap it is to use a graphic symbol or letter to represent a sound that makes up part of a word rather than an entire object. In fact human society became literate relatively late in its history.8 Not until the fifth and sixth centuries BC in the city states of Greece and Ionia were there societies that could be called literate. The Iliad and the Odyssey were basically oral creations.9
The spoken, as compared with the written, word ‘must have one or other intonation or tone of voice … it is impossible to speak a word orally without intonation’.10 Literacy, however, downgraded intonation and our sensitivity to it, preferring to use grammar to help establish meaning.11
Literate societies tend to treat written words as labels attached to objects.12 When words are written, they become part of the visual world. ‘Like most of the elements of the visual world, they become static things and lose … the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken world in particular.’13 While sounds, paradoxically, come into existence only when they’re going out of existence – aurally, not all of a word can exist at the same time – the alphabet makes a word seem like a thing (rather than an event), and one that’s present all at once.14 Phonetic writing divides ear from eye, giving humans an eye for an ear.15 The implications of such a shift are simply endless.
In oral cultures the role of the voice was pre-eminent: as a communicative tool it had no rival. Now it has several. Today, even with the development of digital media, official status can only be conferred by print – stamped with the authority of the written.16 In many professional or legal environments the voice and spoken word count for little: they rank as an appendage. The arrival of printing and literacy changed the voice’s status – decentred it from official life. The voice knows that it no longer has to communicate everything.
On a personal level, memory down the generations has atrophied: we’re able no more to memorise huge chunks of narrative because we don’t need to – unless, that is, we’ve got a so-called ‘photographic memory’, in other words, one based on the eye rather than the ear.17 This change has happened alarmingly fast: people schooled in the 1940s and early 1950s were expected to memorise long pieces of poetry that many of them can still recite. But by my late 1950s and early 1960s education, that requirement was no more.
Indeed as oral exams diminish in importance (except in the case of foreign languages, as though sound only matters when it’s alien), students can leave university without ever having had to deliver a formal speech.18
The differences between speaking and writing are profound. Once released, the voice or spoken word can’t be recovered – these pigeons never return home. Written words, on the other hand, are infinitely correctible. ‘To make yourself clear without gesture, without facial expression, without a real hearer, you have to foresee circumspectly all possible meanings a statement may have for a possible reader in any possible situation.’19 No wonder, this author added with feeling, writing is so agonising: we have to do it without the colours of spoken intonation.
On the other hand many people now have traces of writing in their voice: in the way we structure our thoughts and arguments, we’ve increasingly begun to talk as if we were writing. Those whose speech owes more to oral cultures meet with prejudice. Anyone moving their lips when reading – the body-trace of an earlier age that celebrated reading aloud – is sneered at as a poor reader. The so-called ‘restricted code’ of speaking identified by Basil Bernstein was oral in origin, while the (more highly prized) ‘elaborated’ one was based on reading and writing.20 Ironically, although written cultures are more reflexive and self-conscious, oral cultures have an entire lexicon to describe the voice and speech that we can only listen to with envy.
In celebrating oral culture, though, there’s a real danger of idealising it (‘Oral cultures encourage fluency, fulsomeness, volubility’.21 ‘The eye has none of the delicacy of the ear’22). People in auditory societies are often described in terms also used for small babies, as though they lived in a pure world of sound that somehow existed beyond the purview of society. In fact oral cultures, necessarily slower to change than literate ones, can be conformist and controlling places where power relations are rigid.23
There are also risks in polarising Europeans as people for whom ‘seeing is believing’, and rural Africans for whom ‘reality seems to reside far more in what is heard and what is said’.24 It’s a circular argument and a self-fulfilling prophecy: once you start seeing modernity as built on ‘the inexorable rise of Newtonian sight’, not only do you romanticise hearing but you also write off Western culture’s capacity to integrate ear and eye.25
In fact the arrival of printing didn’t eclipse the voice. Although silent reading was rare until the advent of printing – before then, books were mainly used for reading to others – reading aloud remained a common practice throughout the nineteenth century. The very look of early printed books owed more to speaking and reading aloud than to our present sense of textuality: printed title pages of sixteenth-century books appear comic to us, often dividing up major words, spilling them over to the next line, and altering typeface within sentences without any notion of inconsistency. The text was fashioned not by our print conventions but by the needs of the ear, with some of the eccentricities of font size and placement acting as a reminder of the individual voice. ‘The early age of print still felt … [reading was] primarily a listening process, simply set in motion by sight.’26
Even the most resolutely visual and literate societies retain traces or residues27 of the oral tradition. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New England there was still a lot of speaking about speaking – the power of talk was a favourite topic of conversation. Words and deeds retained a close relationship, and preachers’ voices were in some sense supposed to echo that of God himself.28 The writing of James Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins, with its spoken rhythms, is another example of oral residue,29 as is the defence of the doctoral dissertation in some universities, in person and orally, and the way that children like to hear story cassettes over and over again.30
But are these just residues? Although most of our official lives are recorded on paper or, today, hard disk, we use our voices in daily life just as much as our ancestors did. What’s changed is that we don’t recognise the fact. Some of the historians of literacy have contributed to this by suggesting, for example, that rhythm, which had been essential to support oral memory, is now no longer needed.31 In fact, as chapters 6 and 7 show, it remains the bedrock of vocal interaction and learning. By concentrating so hard on those quarters where print has supplanted speech, these writers sometimes risk taking their agenda from literacy rather than orality. Of course the starting-point for all of us is our own society, but by casting back from the vantagepoint of the literacy that in some respects supplanted orality, we risk regarding oral societies as ones that existed before writing rather than without it.
It’s practically impossible not to treat literacy as inevitable, and oral societies as the precursor of literate ones. If nothing else, chronological bias encourages us to think of the former as being supplanted by the latter. But this kind of either/or-ism isn’t helpful, because literacy didn’t replace orality, only supplemented it. Indeed in certain quarters the voice has become more and not less important – to American presidents, for instance, as the next chapter shows. Between parents and children, couples and friends it also remains, as I’ve tried to show, central.
The experience of childhood is the nearest we come to understanding what pre-literate, oral societies were like – in this sense we all develop from our own personal primary orality. Yet although children live in an aural culture, it’s not long before they realise that their elders are bi-cultural. But just as Western society hasn’t lost its dependence on the voice even as it’s developed other forms of communication, so too do children to some extent hold on to their own orality. Even fluent child readers love reading aloud.32
Studies of orality seem to acknowledge print and writing’s more sublime creations sometimes only as an afterthought, and yet the idea of a schism between eye and ear, the written and spoken word, is hard to sustain when you think of the oral treasures that Shakespeare produced through the medium of writing. Though they obviously differ from Homer’s, they’re no less glorious. Yet to the historians of literacy, print sometimes seems like an insensitive, marauding coloniser, with the oral reduced to disenfranchised native.
Marshall McLuhan, who wasn’t just the epigrammatist of the ephemeral (as he’s now usually characterised) but also a serious scholar, was especially dismissive of print, which he compared unfavourably with orality – either ‘primary orality’, or the ‘secondary orality’ he believed was ushered in by the electronic age that succeeded the 500-year-long typographic era.33
The philosopher Jacques Derrida took up the opposite position, complaining that Western thought regarded speech as superior to writing, a prejudice he called phonocentrism. Its origin, he claimed, lay in the fact that both speaker and listener (unlike reader and writer) are joined by the unity of time and space. ‘My words are “alive” because they seem not to leave me: not to fall outside me, outside my breath, at the visible distance …’34
Both camps tend to treat sight and sound as rivals: the propagandists for the ear have turned into the detractors of the eye, and vice versa. Isn’t it time to make peace between them?
All this talk of orality remains surprisingly mute about the real, embodied voice. Despite eloquent descriptions of its transitory qualities (see chapter 1), the scholars of orality still equate voice mostly with speech, the acoustic with the spoken word. In one of the most important texts35 ‘voice’ simply doesn’t appear in the index, as if orality were a phenomenon without agency or medium. These scholars, all too often, wed voice to language: while it’s hard to divorce them, we limit our understanding of the voice if we’re unable, even temporarily, to think about it without immediately focusing also on its language partner. And when these scholars finally attend to acoustic matters, they usually concentrate on how sound shapes speech and thought, as if voice and sound were interchangeable.
In a peculiar way the orality debates have marginalised the voice almost as much as contemporary visual culture does. One writer even makes a point of insisting that theories of orality can’t and shouldn’t deal with the expressive, impermanent aspects of orality, i.e., ‘a performance of a person’s mouth, addressing another person’s ear and hearing with his own personal ear the spontaneous personal reply’.36
Why not? Because, apparently, ‘oralist theory has to come to terms with communication … as it is preserved in lasting form’.37 What a contradiction! If these theorists lose contact with the fleeting nature of the physical voice, if its tones and cadences aren’t ringing in their ears, how can they hope fully to comprehend the extent of the shift that’s occurred, how can the voice they track be anything more than a simulacrum, a model as inert and flattened as they feel the text to be?
Part of the difficulty, of course, lies in finding ways of talking about the voice – that slippery, elusive (and exquisite) thing. Without speech and words, the voice seems to consist purely of sound – the grunts, cries, and laughs that are the body’s own soundtrack. Yet although the voice is made of sound, it’s also more than sound – it’s charged sound, revved by a private, bodily engine. But music and abstract art have developed their own lexicon, so why not the voice too?
The ‘eye’s eclipse’ of the ear’38 hasn’t gone unchallenged. It’s the written word and not the spoken one, some say, that ‘is a fragile thing’ – just think of how the library of Alexandria went up in smoke.39 On the other hand, even in cultures steeped in print for centuries, spoken knowledge is still a major form of human exchange. Science, for example, depends as much on the lecture, discussion group, lab work, conversation among friends, as on reading and publication.40
The philosopher Michel Foucault has argued that at the beginning of the nineteenth century the relationship between the invisible and the visible underwent a radical change.41 A host of new inventions enabled the inside of the body to be seen for the first time. These instruments of the eye were themselves made possible and inevitable by an emerging new world-view – a belief in the primacy of sight, in the credo that seeing leads inexorably to knowing (and thence to believing). This new conviction held that, exposed to the effulgence of the medical gaze, obscurantism would dissipate. Each fresh invention widened and deepened the certainty that the human body need never be opaque again. Samuel Johnson had defined ‘to enlighten’ not only as ‘to illuminate … instruct, to furnish with increase of knowledge’ but also ‘to supply with sight, to quicken in the faculty of vision’,42 and these new instruments of the gaze, it’s sometimes argued, helped to marginalise the voice by downgrading the faculties of speaking and hearing.
Yet, paradoxically, the invention of a whole array of instruments of observation produced greater knowledge about how those aural faculties operated. The Enlightenment, according to one cultural historian, advanced not only the study of optics but also of acoustics, encouraging a wide and fluid interest in all the senses, even if ‘the new experimental philosophy sought at a number of levels to make sound intelligible by rendering it manifest to the eye’.43 As well as the Enlightenment, another scholar of sound has suggested, there was also an Ensoniment – a series of ideas, institutions and practices that made the world audible in a new way. The sense of hearing, in particular, was ‘measured, objectified, isolated, and simulated’.44
The desire to view the organs of speech didn’t originate in any case in the Enlightenment. Already in the early sixteenth century the anatomy textbook of Leonardo Da Vinci included several drawings of the larynx. Dissecting corpses in hospitals in search of new information about the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the human voice, Da Vinci attempted, as befitted a painter, to visualise the organs that produced it.45
Though the Enlightenment, too, tried to visualise the voice, it also generated an astonishing amount of talk. Taverns, salons, clubs, theatres – metropolitan venues like these thrived. The explosion of print – 56,000 titles were published in Britain in the 1790s46 – and the multitude of newspapers and pamphlets, far from silencing the voice, only gave rise to more public places, like the coffee house, in which it could be exercised.
In the coffee house there was no seating according to class or status:
Distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the coffee house had a right to talk to anyone else, to enter into any conversation, whether he knew the other people or not, whether he was bidden to speak or not. It was bad form to even touch on the social origins of other persons when talking to them in the coffee house, because the free flow of talk might then be impeded … Tone of voice, elocution … might be noticeable, but the whole point was not to notice.47
It therefore marked a certain democratisation of the voice – ‘certain’ because women were completely excluded.48
Beyond the metropolis, too, the voice was the main medium for leisure activities. Poor country people passed the long winter nights by reading aloud. And the advance of print culture sparked a corresponding interest in what remained of traditional oral culture, creating a drive to ‘pickle and preserve folklore, songs and sayings’.49
So have the voice and hearing been displaced by the printed word and sight, or is the acoustic just as omnipresent as ever? There’s no doubt that contemporary culture graces the visual with a special status. Expressions like ‘I see what you mean’, ‘I’ll see to it’, ‘Point of view’, ‘seeing is believing’, demonstrate how we equate sight with understanding, doing, and reality, fetishising the graphic. And yet the uncritical acceptance of the idea that ours is a visual culture has seduced us into believing that the voice has been somehow superseded, even though new technologies, as we’ll see, have enhanced its importance rather than diminished it. In fact it’s as much the propaganda of print culture as its reality that has marginalised the voice: the voice hasn’t lost its centrality, only its representation – it’s a citizen stripped of the vote. The voice is still the connective tissue between humans, even if the Stalinists of vision have tried to erase this from the public record. Let’s not be deluded by optic’s own illusion.
There’s a coda to this story, one that demonstrates that, if underestimating the role of the voice is dangerous, so too is exaggerating it. In the 1960s and ‘70s, just at the point where Marshall McLuhan and other historians of orality were drawing attention to the differences between the ear and the eye, another researcher was attempting to measure the relative importance of the voice, the face, and the word in communication. The way in which UCLA psychology professor Albert Mehrabian’s limited (and frankly tenuous) conclusions were taken up by the public imagination and distorted by a klaxon of publicity is a fascinating case-study in the popularisation of science, as well as a dispiriting example of the human desire for certainty.
Those who’ve never heard of Mehrabian will almost certainly be aware of his conclusions. Bandied about in TV advertisements for cars or banks, or simply part of common currency, they claim that only 7 per cent of meaning in human communication comes from words, the rest from the voice and face.
In the first of Mehrabian’s studies, three women had to say the word ‘maybe’ three times, to express like, neutrality, and dislike, and then seventeen other women were asked to imagine that the speaker was saying the word to someone else, and guess the speaker’s attitude to the addressee.50 The second study, to test the decoding of inconsistent communications, was more ambitious – two women read out eight words (‘honey’, ‘thanks’, ‘dear’, ‘maybe’, ‘really’, ‘don’t’, ‘brute’, and ‘terrible’) in positive, neutral, and negative tones, and ten people were asked to imagine that the speakers were talking to someone else, and to judge the information given by their tone. The study concluded that ‘the tonal component makes a disproportionately greater contribution to the interpretation of the total message than does the content component’.51 On the basis of the results of both pieces of research Mehrabian tentatively touted the idea that the verbal content communicated 7 per cent of the meaning, the vocal 38 per cent, and the facial 55 per cent.52 By the time he came to write Nonverbal Communication, published in 1972, he was less hesitant in expounding his ‘simple linear model’ of ‘Total feeling = 7 per cent verbal feeling + 38 per cent vocal feeling + 55 per cent facial feeling’.53
So an entire theory about human communication was based on three women saying one word, followed by two women reading eight words – reading, not even spontaneously saying – and two dozen listeners ‘imagining’ these words being spoken to someone else, and speculating about what feeling was being expressed! My primary-school daughter is currently studying what constitutes a fair test: I doubt these two would pass muster.
According to the philosopher Karl Popper, a proposition is unscientific if it’s falsifiable by observation or experience.54 Imagine, then, that I ask someone the way to the bus stop for the no 24 bus at nine in the morning. Were I only to pay 7 per cent attention to the verbal content of their reply, I might well still be wandering around looking for the bus at nine in the evening. It’s palpably absurd to suggest that in human conversation words play such an insignificant role, and the face such a major one: it clearly depends on who is talking to whom, when, where, and why. And yet Mehrabian’s theory has been disseminated all round the world, gathering such facticity on its way that it’s now often referred to as ‘the 7 per cent rule’. Seminars on public speaking are based upon it; it’s the mantra of management-training and communication-skills workshops; and it underpins New Age therapies like neuro-linguistic programming. Mehrabian’s percentages have entered the culture as if they somehow contained information about the genetic basis of effective communication.
To be fair, Mehrabian can’t necessarily be blamed for the ways in which his work was popularised, or perhaps even bowdlerised. Although research like this is really no more than a ‘Let’s pretend’, a simulation that’s one step up from rank speculation, it goes largely unchallenged, as most scientific work does (except by other scientists). For, despite the development of more critical attitudes to science over the past two decades, we still tend to accord it a privileged status, as though it were thought with the thinkers removed, discoveries just waiting to be discovered.55 When an American psychologist did the promotional media circuit for her new book on anger, she noticed that she was rarely asked by reporters how she knew what she knew. Most of them couldn’t evaluate her work, and simply seized on it for its value as controversy.56
Mehrabian seems not a little embarrassed by the independent life his ‘research’ has acquired. ‘My findings are often misquoted,’ he said. ‘Please remember that all of my findings on inconsistent or redundant communications dealt with communications and attitudes. This is the realm in which they are applicable. Clearly it’s absurd to imply or suggest that the verbal portion of all communication constitutes only 7 per cent of the message.’57 Even when his studies were originally published, Mehrabian envisaged them chiefly being applied to inconsistent communications in the families of schizophrenics.58
On the other hand, Mehrabian has appeared to encourage the application of his findings to all sorts of everyday situations, as when promoting his later volume Silent Messages on his website. And a man who also wrote a book purporting to give ‘scientifically based information for choosing baby names’, with chapters on names that connote success, or sound masculine and feminine,59 is clearly no enemy to popularisation.
But what’s more interesting is why the findings from two such plainly minor studies spread like a particularly virulent infectious disease. It’s especially intriguing since Mehrabian wasn’t the first person to try and quantify the role played by the voice in communication. In 1955 a linguist called Lotz maintained that only I per cent of the acoustic signals emitted by the adult human voice were of linguistic use, the remainder being vocal or phonic.60 Yet Lotz’s claims were never, to my knowledge, seized upon with such enthusiasm by the extra-linguistic world. The reason for Mehrabian’s fame as compared to Lotz’s is surely that, in the decade or so that separated them, communication had come to occupy a much more vexed place in social and community life – it was now a problem for which solutions were sought. The point about Mehrabian’s work is that it carried the tang of scientific exactitude: it offered the promise that the ingredients of successful human communication could be precisely calibrated. Of course you can more easily pin the tail on the donkey than fix a percentage to the role played by the voice in conveying meaning: if Mehrabian’s studies measure anything, it’s the extent of our desperation to find a formula to help us communicate.
The overselling of the voice is to some extent a consequence of our failure to develop a shared language of the voice. In that vacuum exaggerated claims and unfounded fears have flourished. Lacking a lexicon of nuance, we’ve developed one of hyperbole instead. The challenge is to acknowledge and celebrate the role of the voice in both public and private life without distorting it.