The voice is changing, but governments and corporations aren’t the only agents of transformation. Never before have so many individuals tried to alter their voice through so many different methods. If they sometimes underestimate the difficulties involved, this desire for reinventing the voice suggests nevertheless that there’s a new aural sensitivity around – we’re becoming far more aware of how we sound. A Westerner is now expected to improve their voice just as much as an Ancient Greek was. At the same time, today’s multitude of different voice-changing techniques reveals a tension between two common ideas – the voice as a natural phenomenon and as an infinitely malleable personal feature.
The idea that the voice can heal isn’t new. Almost every religion uses some form of chanting to achieve physical and spiritual wholeness. In meditation, the mantra – a sacred sound said to embody the deity – supposedly restores the chanter to a state of harmony. The Hindu and Tibetan traditions believe that the throat is one of the seven main chakras, the energy centres of the body, and unblocking it through sound can improve health: the heart rate can be stabilised, blood pressure reduced, circulation improved, left and right sides of the brain synchronised, molecular structure altered, kidney stones dissolved,1 and even – since chanting is said to cause the release of the hormone melatonin – tumours shrunk.
These Eastern practices have now spread to Westerners, increasing numbers of whom believe that Western society is disenchanted and that the voice is the key to spiritual transformation. They credit it with the ability to reduce stress levels, liberate the inhibited, and create a sense of shared identity.2
Behind most of these methods lies the idea that vibrations can help heal the body: toning bells, bowls or forks, it’s claimed, can unblock stagnant energy.3 Rudolph Steiner even predicted, ‘There will come a time when a diseased condition will not be described as it is today by physicians and psychologists, but it will be spoken of in musical terms, as one would speak of a piano that was out of tune.’
The idea that we each possess a natural voice is also a popular one today. This voice ‘achieves a natural balance of breathing, phonation … and resonance’,4 only not so natural that it can emerge without the assistance of workshops, books, and other training. The natural voice, it transpires, has been lost: curbed and constricted by life, it needs to be found and freed.5
Already in the 1890s Frederick Matthias Alexander, founder of the Alexander Technique, had suggested that vocal difficulties might be the result of problems of posture, tension, and holding the breath. Most of the therapeutic voice work practised today, though, has grown more from the theories of Wilhelm Reich and Alexander Lowen, both of whom believed that psychological conflicts, when repressed, led to a damned-up voice. For the voice to be freely expressive of the personality, these conflicts needed to be discharged.6
For a long time ideas like these seemed outlandish – not so in the new culture of the voice. We may have only limited ways at our disposal in which to talk about the voice when it functions well, yet it seems that we’re beginning to develop quite a lexicon to describe it when it fails. Vocal problems are coming to be seen less as an annoying but essentially random personal difficulty and more as an industrial health hazard for those working in a noisy environment,7 or whose jobs are vocally demanding. The voices of teachers and doctors have attracted particular attention, especially since 1994, when a British teacher who’d lost her voice working in an open-plan classroom won a claim for disability benefit.8 Voice training is increasingly included in teacher training9, and workshops run by networks of speech and language therapists offering practical help with the voice have proliferated.10
Interest in doctors’ voices articulates rather different concerns – the importance of doctors’ nonverbal skills in creating good therapeutic relationships.11 It sometimes seems as if doctoring has become entirely a problem of communication: a prominent figure in the medical profession recently claimed, ‘The poorly performing doctor doesn’t quite know what he is doing scientifically or how to talk to his patients properly.’12 Patients obviously benefit from being treated by doctors who can communicate effectively and with empathy, but already over-burdened, under-resourced junior medical staff might regard the task of developing better speaking skills as one target too far. Since doctors who are more expressive communicators have been found to reduce the length, and therefore cost, of consultations,13 and face fewer malpractice claims,14 the impetus to improve doctors’ nonverbal skills may have come at least as much from the need to save money as from the desire to improve patients’ lives.
Today’s school curriculum also places more emphasis on the development of speaking and listening skills. In some schools pupils now have to give oral presentations of drafts of coursework. In others there are games designed specifically to draw out shy, self-conscious speakers.15 After consultation with employers, the teaching of English is being revamped. ‘Employers tell us that, whereas two years ago managers spent 20 per cent of their time in discussions, now it is 50 per cent. To succeed in business you have to be good at persuasive talking: selling an idea to your bosses, raising the funding, communicating at the workface.’16 There’s even a campaign called ‘Talk to Your Baby’, which tries to raise awareness of how important it is for parents to speak and listen to their child.17
Changing the voice isn’t only deliberate and conscious, but also happens instinctively. When we hear someone we know talking on the phone, we can tell almost invariably who they’re talking to, purely through the sound of their voice, because we modify our voices from situation to situation, picking up other people’s tempo, pause pattern, pitch, volume, and accent – a process known as ‘convergence’. ‘One partner must “set the pace” in speaking as with walking with another, and the other partner must, in turn, comply.’18 ‘Divergence’ is the opposite – where a speaker emphasises the vocal differences between themselves and someone else.19 Together they form ‘speech accommodation theory’.
You can converge upwards, to a more prestigious style of speaking, or downwards, to a less prestigious variety,20 and people do it in Hungarian, Frisian, Hebrew, Taiwanese, Thai, as well as many other languages.21 Convergence, like divergence, can be mutual or non-mutual, total or partial.22
Why does it happen? Convergence reproduces the feeling of being in harmony with another person that, as we saw, parents and babies can achieve – it’s an adult version of attunement. It’s also a way of trying to gain another person’s approval (the more you crave social approval, the more you’ll converge23). A converger might be trying to improve communication between themself and someone else: because it reduces the vocal and verbal differences between people and brings them psychologically closer,24 convergence also expresses the desire to integrate into a group, or identify with another person.25
It rests on the fact that we compare other people’s behaviour with our own, and the more they resemble us, the more we like them. People in one experiment judged those with a speaking rate similar to their own more competent and socially attractive than those who spoke slower or faster than them.26 In another experiment the more that the other speakers matched the length of university students’ pauses, the warmer the students thought them and the more they wanted to invite them to dinner.27 On a psychiatric ward, psychotic patients are less likely to be labelled ‘difficult’ when staff spontaneously match their rhythm and prosody.28 People were more willing to buy a book after hearing an audio review on the Internet from a voice that sounded like their own.29 Another experiment got computer users to work with animated screen characters that mimicked, to a greater or lesser extent, their speech patterns – rhythm, intonation, loudness, and pitch. When the users were asked to rate the characters for friendliness, sympathy, comfort, and cooperation, those that had imitated 80 per cent of a user’s own vocal qualities got the highest approval.30 We like other people who are, literally, on our wavelength and share the same beat; if these are very different, communication might even be jeopardised.31
Convergence provides a fascinating guide to social status, because lower-status people converge up to higher status. In fact you can almost read off status or dominance from the degree to which one speaker accommodates to another.32 A major study in Taiwan found that salespeople converged much more towards moneyed customers than the other way round.33 When interviews between the host and guests on an American talk show, CNN’s Larry King Live, were analysed, it was found that King shifted his pitch towards that of high-status celebrities or politicians like Bill Clinton or Elizabeth Taylor or Barbra Streisand, but lower-status guests like Henry Kissinger or Dan Quayle accommodated their pitch to his.34 A study of the televised debates of American presidential candidates between 1960 and 2000 also found that the less dominant candidates accommodated to the more dominant ones: you could predict the winner of the election from the amount and direction of convergence alone.35 In close elections, it’s even been claimed, pitch may exert a strong influence over the popular vote, favouring the candidate with the most commanding presence.
But does this tell us anything other than that confident people impose themselves on the less confident, vocally as well as by other means? Or that candidates accurately assess their chance of winning and communicate it through their voice? And though accommodation may be a form of social glue, a way of speaking in tune, doesn’t it also express a fear of difference, a conformism, even narcissism? Doesn’t authentic communication take place between people who are distinct rather than merged? There’s certainly a limit beyond which accommodation turns into over-accommodation. Japanese businessmen, for instance, don’t want their Western counterparts to try to act Japanese because they believe that the Westerners sound false or patronising.36
Convergence can also exact a price: a speaker can lose their sense of identity.37 A 15-year-old girl said, ‘I’m conscious of adapting my accent – I do it quite a lot. With the childminder I also have a bit of a cockney accent, with Mum and Dad [who are both Americans] I have a bit of an American accent. I do it to try and build up a connection with people.’ Does she ever wonder what she really sounds like? ‘Yes, I do.’38 Not surprisingly women, traditionally, converge far more to men than the other way round.39
In divergence we maintain our nonverbal characteristics no matter what the situation, sometimes even accentuating the differences between ourselves and another speaker to establish a unique social identity.40 Sometimes we deliberately diverge to influence the person we’re talking to, slowing down our own speech rate, for instance, in order to slow down theirs.41
Convergence is now being exploited commercially. Japanese researchers are trying to produce robots, computer games, and toys that mimic users’ speech patterns in order to build ‘rapport’ between them.42 And here’s a celebrity voice coach, giving advice on how to use your voice to deliver a sales pitch ‘virtually guaranteed to sell’. ‘People respond best to people who are like them … If [the client has] … a high voice, raise the pitch of your voice a little; if they speak quickly, speak more quickly yourself; if they speak slowly, you should slow down too.’43
NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming, a New Age type of behavioural training, promises to enhance communication partly by getting adherents to ‘model’ other people’s voices. ‘Voice matching is another way that you can gain rapport. You can match tonality, speed, volume and rhythm of speech. This is like joining another person’s song or music: you blend in and harmonise.’44
Although some people believe that trying to mimic other people always sounds inauthentic,45 a 52-year-old woman described using convergence when cold-calling companies. ‘I hate it, so I made it into a game, because most of the time you get voice-mail. I listen to the voice-mail and hear them speak, whether they sound up or down, and then I just mimic it, sounding exactly like them, hoping they’d feel some kind of affinity with me because I’m sounding more like them. It seems to be rather successful.’46
A 16-year-old girl says:
My voice adapts to the people I’m with. When I started school, I consciously changed my voice to fit in with the other children and sound more working-class. My mother used to say that when I said the word ‘no’, it sounded as if it had every single vowel in it. When I did a drama course last summer with a lot of working-class people, I adapted to their voices, not entirely consciously, but so much that when I phoned up one of my oldest friends she said, ‘Who’s this?’ and when I told her it was me she said, ‘You sound so different.’ Then a week later I went to a summer camp and my voice went all posh. Naturally it’s somewhere in between those two extremes.47
The voices of people talking to each other are like the periods of women living together: they automatically synchronise. We become entrained to other people’s rhythms: their voices are our tuning-forks. The urge to converge seems irresistible.
Most of us are vocally versatile and have different voices for different occasions (the performance artist Laurie Anderson once reckoned we each had fifty), but this 24-year-old British solicitor, with his many voices, is positively promiscuous:
I’m very slow and formal with clients – I try not to get too animated with people at work. I think it’s more professional to sound slow and well-enunciated. I want to sound considered and intelligent. I use a sympathetic voice to achieve what I want from a secretary. Imagine that a 35-year-old woman has been at the firm for ages and suddenly this young man comes straight from law school and starts bossing her around – potentially there’d be a tension there. Your tone of voice has a big effect on how successful your relationship with your secretary is. I try to put a lot of appreciation into my voice. Phoning up a woman I don’t know for the first time, I try and sound cool and really relaxed, even if I don’t feel it. With friends I am really relaxed, and not nearly as well spoken as in front of my parents. Then there’s my Valerie voice (she’s my grandmother). That’s very clear and polite. With my girlfriend, I make much less of an effort to enunciate.48
The process is intentional:
At work it’s a completely conscious decision … I think the tone of voice is incredibly powerful, persuasive, and important – it’s very easy to manipulate people using your voice. I do it a lot. I get my way through using my voice. My friends know that if anyone is going to blag anything it’s going to be me, especially from a woman. In New York there was a huge queue round eight blocks for a concert, and we got VIP tickets at the very front just from me being really nice and appreciative to the people at the door with my voice.
Another time three people in front of me asked and were turned away from photocopying in an office by the woman saying, ‘No, we don’t do photocopying here.’ I smiled a lot and my voice was low and calm and she photocopied the lot for me … I don’t feel in any way fake when I do it – I enjoy it. People are willing to accommodate you further just because you’re being nice with your voice. Maybe it’s for the wrong reasons but … it can make life so much easier.
I think there’s a big difference between trying to charm someone with your voice and having a smarmy voice – a smarmy voice instantly turns people off, it sounds fake and deliberately manipulative, whereas a charming voice makes you sound like a genuinely nice person … But guys respond far less to charming voices than women. You have to use a very polite voice with a man – make them realise that they’re superior if they are, use your voice to apologise for disturbing them …
Other people talk about their voice as a reflection of their feelings; I think I’ve got used to adapting my voice to the circumstances – I do it subconsciously but also consciously.49
In his groundbreaking 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the sociologist Erving Goffman argued that social life was like a theatrical performance in which the individual ‘guides and controls the impression … [others] form of him … by expressing himself in such a way as to give them the kind of impression that will lead them to act voluntarily in accordance with his own plan.’50 The young man quoted above is a striking example.
Goffman’s theory, radical and in many ways shocking when first published, is today not only unremarkable but might almost stand as a ‘to do’ list for self-improvers. Indeed, the failure to transform yourself now practically counts as a dereliction of occupational duty. Professional culture no longer has a concept of intrinsic self – it’s all appearance and mirage, refraction upon refraction, in which the voice plays a crucial role. The young lawyer, in what perhaps is a sign of changing gendered expectations, is also doing the kind of emotional housekeeping more usually associated with women.
Either way, the voice is now seen as a critical component in professional success. Voice-training companies call themselves the Winning Voice51 or the Voice of Influence (‘success is just as much about how you sound as about how you look'). Books targeted at business executives bear titles like The Leader’s Voice,52 or promise to teach you to use your voice to deliver a sales pitch that’s guaranteed to sell.53 According to Presenting to Win,54 63 per cent of company directors believe that presentation skills are more important for career success than intelligence or financial aptitude. Staff these days are expected to do whatever’s required in order to create a good impression, whether this means accent reduction (big in the United States55), or a ‘voice lift'. Flab, it seems, affects not just the stomach but the voice too. Once you’ve been Botoxed, tummy-tucked and had liposuction, you don’t want an ageing voice to let you down: $15,000 will buy you rejuvenating vocal implants or a bulking up or tightening of the vocal folds – cosmetic or vanity surgery for the voice.56
According to the New York Times, a sonorous voice has now been added to the checklist of perfection. Fifteen years ago, one American speech pathologist observed, he rarely saw people whose only problem was dislike of the sound of their voice: today they constitute one-third of his clients. Having a voice coach is now no more remarkable than having a personal trainer.57
No longer is there any stigma attached to changing the voice (Princess Diana’s voice coach openly advertises the changes he brought to her public-speaking style). Indeed it’s a requirement for call-centre staff. ‘Remember voice intonation is also very important, as tone, pace and clarity convey your attitude to the customer. You must never sound bored on a call. Your telephone manner should convey the impression that you have been waiting for that individual call all day. To assist in this try putting a smile on your face when receiving a call.’58 This kind of managerial appropriation of private feelings has been dubbed ‘emotional labour’. A study of airline attendants quotes a stewardess describing a colleague who ‘put on a fake voice. On the plane she raised her voice about four octaves and put a lot of sugar and spice into it [gives a falsetto imitation of “More coffee for you, sir?”]. I watched the passengers wince. What the passengers want is real people.’59
Ironically, all the emphasis on changing the voice to produce the perfect presentation, or sway a judge, or sell more products, has left listeners with a problem in judging what’s authentic, so necessitating the creation of yet another set of primers and guides – this lot explaining how to decode other people’s voices and distinguish the genuine voice from the phoney one. Books with titles like Never Be Lied to Again,60 I Know What You’re Thinking,61 and Reading People,62 that require us to interpret other people’s vocal clues and hear between the lines, to become in effect oneperson spectrographs, are the direct result of all the vocal makeovers encouraged by their predecessors. It can’t be accidental that the field of deception studies has grown so much – there must be more deception around to study.
Some people change their voices for a living. And yet impressionists, while they obviously develop terrific control of the muscles of the throat, tongue, and lips, rarely deliver a voice that is really similar to that which they’re imitating, only a stereotyped version, a vocal cartoon. They identify the main characteristics of someone’s voice, dialect, and phonetic habits, and then exaggerate some aspects while discarding others.63 When a professor of acoustics recorded the impressionist Rory Bremner impersonating someone, Bremner and his victim sounded almost indistinguishable, but when the acoustics of the two tapes were compared, the higher frequencies were actually quite different. Bremner, though, had been able to make his lower frequencies – site of most of the message-sending function of the voice – convincing enough for the listener to have been seduced into thinking he was someone else.64 Bremner himself is aware of the differences.
You latch on to a distinctive vocal quality and stretch it and exaggerate it until it becomes ridiculous, and then it starts to be funny. To begin with, your impression is quite accurate but then, as your character starts to develop, it isn’t so accurate. After a while, people associate a person’s voice more with the caricature than with the original. If you make Ken Livingstone sound whiney, after a while all people hear is that whine.65
As Bremner remarks, ‘inimitable’ is usually a misnomer: it’s those people with the most distinctive qualities in their voice that are easy to imitate. If a speaker isn’t distinctive or well known enough, then it doesn’t matter how accurately an impressionist can mimic them: you have to first recognise a voice in order to be able to recognise it being imitated. So being the butt of an impression is flattering: it suggests that you’re famous enough, and your voice unique enough, to be recognised.
But mimicry can easily metamorphose from flattery into subversion. Between them, Rory Bremner and cartoonist Steve Bell comprehensively ridiculed British Prime Minister John Major. Bell drew a grey man who tucked his shirt into his underpants (and eventually wore his underpants over his trousers), while Bremner created an image of a lower-middle-class nerd who said ‘wunt’ instead of ‘want’ – a man perplexed that, despite his obvious ineffectiveness, he was ‘still here’. Once these characterisations had become established, whenever you heard Major speak you heard Rory Bremner’s John Major, in the same way that now Tony Blair has become Bremner’s Tony Blair, laboured sincerity and all. Thus, once a satirical impression has taken hold, do politicians undermine themselves simply by speaking.
Indeed a good impressionist ends up virtually obliterating the person on whom their impression is based. There’s the true story of the company that wanted to use the voice of TV chat-show host Russell Harty in an advertisement. For the pilot, the advertising agency brought in impressionist Chris Barrie, one of the Spitting Image regulars, to do Harty’s voice. The company was happy with the result, and the agency went on to produce the actual advertisement, using the real Russell Harty. But when the company heard the finished product, they protested that the voice didn’t sound anything like him. They’d got so used to the caricature that the real Harty sounded like an imperfect copy.66
Despite the pressures to transform ourselves vocally, our voice, as we have seen in chapter 8, is so intricately bound up with our sense of self that changing it can seem impossible – like changing a limb. As one voice specialist put it, although most people don’t know their own voices, they ‘must have a very concrete relation to it because patients violently resist any change of their vocal functioning brought about by therapeutic intervention’.67 A 43-year-old doctor sought treatment because he thought his voice sounded too high, but when a recording of his post-treatment voice was played back to him, ‘he became red in the face, and declared that he felt as ashamed of his new (deep and male-sounding) voice as if he had been exposing himself. Therefore he refused to be treated any further.’68
People often express their reluctance to change their voice with the words, ‘But this voice is not me.’ This expression ‘implies a basic identification of their personality with their former voice, and they resist any change of voice as they would oppose a change of their personality’.69
That was written fifty years ago. In today’s flexi-voice culture, might resistance be less? Not necessarily, because the issues being touched upon are so deep. ‘The patient’s Gestalt of him or herself … may be inflexible … the person may be asked to change a basic vocal attribute … clinicians must address a client’s self-concept of what is normal with as much fervour as for the relatively simple task of manipulating vocal pitch.’70
Of course vocal change is possible. Techniques to help control nerves, breathe more deeply, loosen the jaw, neck and spine, get the arms swinging, become more sensitive to rhythm, develop more vocal variety, and speak from deeper in the body can be taught.71 Others work more from the inside, seeing how speaking is connected with speaking out and speaking up, trying to help people ‘find a voice that accommodates their expressive needs … and doesn’t only speak in one part of their range … a monotone … [which means] you’ve squashed your expression of yourself but it’s also not very interesting to other people to listen to because … you’re deadening yourself.’72 Still others conduct a kind of psychotherapy through the voice.73
Yet some of the most interesting vocal change takes place almost as a by-product of psychological development. A 38-year-old woman described the process:
I remember in my first job being challenged about always wearing pale-pastel clothes, always pink. Other members of staff said, ‘Where’s the non-pink part of you?’ I think one’s voice is part of one’s body, appearance, manner, and relating to the world, so I think my voice fitted my pastel image in those days – it was calm and gentle, I hadn’t got in touch with my own aggression and strength and sense of self and I think my voice reflected that. The more I’ve been able to relate to the outer world with a real self, the more my voice has developed and strengthened.74
So what of the tension between the ‘natural’ and ‘winning’ voice? Both are ideologies, ways of imagining nature and vanquishing it, of triumphing over personal or social limitations. The voice may be a sensitive barometer of feeling and self, but it’s always a social self, for we’re born and die in the social world (and so the voice is also a subtle gauge of a culture’s values at any one time). Even if an optimum pitch exists, most of us exist in a vocal continuum and what counts as a more or less authentic sound varies according to the occasion and company. No amount of voice coaching will change that.