The voice is a remarkable instrument, but also a remarkably unacknowledged one. This book was born out a sense of frustration that its brilliance and importance in human society had not been sufficiently recognised. While language and body language have been analysed and extolled, the voice has languished – at least beyond the academic world – largely unhymned. We’ve lost a sense of its primacy.
Worse, the pessimists, the nostalgics, and the technophobes have together tried to convince us that voice is no longer a central part of human culture, displaced by the text and downgraded by the image. The eye, they insist, has prevailed over the ear.
As this book I hope has demonstrated, they’re wrong. Our vocal skills haven’t atrophied. On the contrary, they’ve proved fabulously resilient: every corner of our lives is animated by talk. Babies possess an astonishing prenatal sensitivity to the voice, one which they exercise within hours of birth. The voice acts as a crucial connective tissue between baby and carer: mothers can contain their babies’ fears with it, and infants use it to help them acquire language. Through exposure to their parents’ voices children learn to speak expressively.
Adults, too, in managing their personal, professional, and social lives, make use of sublime voice-reading talents. Voice is turning into such an important occupational tool, with so much emphasis placed on improving it, that Aristotle and the other classical analysts of rhetoric would feel quite at home.
Inscribed in our voice are both our deepest feelings about ourselves and shifting ideas of what it is to be male or female. The voice is a distinctive human feature, and yet a constantly evolving one. While the invention of the telephone, phonograph, and radio helped change the relationship between body and voice, they also enlarged the voice’s orbit, so that its reach was no longer limited by the body’s own transportability. We may use our voice in quite different ways from people in oral societies, yet it’s held its own, with all sorts of fantastical new uses for it being devised. The voice, I’m certain, has become a more and not less important medium of human communication over the past century, only we lack a shared public language in which to articulate it. Even though the sonic is clearly booming, paradoxically, we’ve failed to voice the voice’s own talents.
I’ve wanted to celebrate here the many different, creative ways in which people and their cultures make infinitely complex sequences of meanings out of invisible puffs of air, an ability that grows partly from nurture but also from the mere fact of being born human.
Volume, pace and pitch summon whole worlds. Intonation is a language in itself. The American philosopher and wit, Sidney Morgenbesser, was in the audience at a lecture given by the Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin at Columbia University in the 1950s. When Austin explained that many languages employ the double negative to denote a positive (‘He is not unlike his sister’), but none employed a double positive to make a negative, Morgenbesser waved his arm dismissively, and retorted: ‘Yeah, yeah.’1
With the blast and blare of cinemas, restaurants, concerts, computer games and TV commercials, we live in loud times. A recent study by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds suggested that birds that live near motorways can’t hear each other, leading to difficulties in learning songs and communicating with potential mates. Another study found that 5-year-old children who attended nursery developed more voice problems than those who didn’t because of the high noise levels and unsympathetic acoustic environment.2 What’s the effect on humans when our voices are submerged by the din?3 And how can we create an acoustic space in which this suggestive but perpetually elusive instrument, the human voice, can flourish?
To attune properly to the voice we must develop a keener sensitivity, a ‘deep listening’.4 To start a real conversation about this most vital talent, we need to hear with fresh ears.