1 Ariel Leve, ‘They Shoot Movies, Don’t They?’ (Sunday Times Magazine, 8 June 2003).
2 Interview, 31.10.03.
3 Interview, 16.10.03.
4 Interview, 24.04.05.
5 Interview, 10.11.03.
6 Nalini Ambady et al, ‘Surgeons’ Tone of Voice: a Clue to Malpractice History’, Surgery, 2002:132.
7 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982).
8 Richard M. Harris and David Rubinstein, ‘Paralanguage, Communication, and Cognition’, in Adam Kendon et al, Organization of Behaviour in Face-to-Face Interaction (The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1975).
9 Ernst G. Beier, The Secret Language of Psychotherapy pp.12, 13 (Chicago: Aldine, 1966).
1 John Laver, The Gift of Speech (Edinburgh University Press, 1991).
2 T.H. Pear, Voice and Personality (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931), a pioneering study in which radio listeners ascribed jobs to voices.
3 Sue Ellen Linville, ‘Acoustic Correlates of Perceived versus Actual Sexual Orientation in Men’s Speech’ (Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 50:35-48, 1998).
4 Laver, op cit.
5 Beth Schucker and David R. Jacobs, ‘Assessment of Behavioral Risk for Coronary Disease by Voice Characteristics’ (Psychosomatic Medicine, vol. 39, no. 4, July-August 1977). This study, however, was based on Ray Rosenman’s research about Type A and Type B behaviour, categories which have been much critiqued. See chapters 8 and 13 for criticism of some features of experimental voice studies.
6 www.courier-journal.com/index.html.
7 D.J. France et al, ‘Acoustical Properties of Speech as Indicators of Depression and Suicidal Risk’, Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 47(7), July 2000.
8 Grazyna Niedzielska et al, ‘Acoustic Evaluation of Voice in Individuals with Alcohol Addiction’ (Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 46:115–122, 1994).
9 J. Alexander Tanford et al, ‘Novel Scientific Evidence of Intoxication: Acoustic Analysis of Voice Recordings from the Exxon Valdez’ (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 82, no. 3 1991). Such techniques have never been used in a civil or criminal case but the analysts of the Exxon Valdez tapes argue that they should be admitted as valid evidence.
10 Jeffrey Whitmore and Stanley Fisher, ‘Speech During Sustained Operations’ (Speech Communication, 20, 55–70, 1996). Alison D. Bagnall et al, ‘Voice and Fatigue’, paper given at PEVOC 6, Royal Academy of Music, London, September 2005.
11 Kakuichi Shiomi and Shohzo Hirose, ‘Fatigue and Drowsiness Predictors for Pilots and Air Traffic Controllers’, paper given at the Annual ATCA Conference, Oct 22-26, 2000, Atlantic City, New Jersey.
12 Personal communication, Mark Lawson, 29.07.05.
13 G.P. Nerbonne, cited in Mark L. Knapp, Non-verbal Communication in Human Interaction (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972).
14 R. Murray Schafer, Keynote Address to the Chorus America Conference, Toronto, 8 June 2001.
15 Tom Paulin, ‘The Despotism of the Eye’, P.43, in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998–2001, eds. Larry Sider et al (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003).
16 Simon Capper, ‘Non-verbal Communication and the Second Language Learner: Some Pedagogical Considerations’ (www.langue/hyper.chimbu.ac.jp).
17 Personal communication, Bernard Kops, 15.10.02.
18 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London: Routledge, 1983).
19 Paul D. Erickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth (New York: New York University Press, 1985). Similarly a 1987 book on modern presidential communication, The Sound of Leadership by Roderick Hart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), contained nothing at all on the sound of presidents’ voices and how they use them.
20 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
21 Stephanie Martin, ‘An Exploration of Factors which Have an Impact on the Vocal Performance and Vocal Effectiveness of Newly Qualified Teachers and Lecturers’ (paper given at the Pan European Voice Conference, Graz, 31 August 2003) reviews the literature.
22 With the exception of Stephanie Martin and Lyn Darnley, The Teacher’s Voice (London: Whurr Publishers, 2nd edition, 2004).
23 Interview, 11.11.03. A teacher I interviewed uses her voice to try and control her pupils. ‘If the class is fidgeting I go louder and vary the tone. If I get cross with them I go quite high-pitched so it doesn’t sound so harsh. They do say that quiet teachers have quiet classes. The voice is such an important tool in teaching.’ (Interview, 7.03.04).
24 David Crystal, The English Tone of Voice (London: Edward Arnold, 1975).
25 Despite various attempts to isolate and catalogue them, like that by the French composer of electro-acoustic music Pierre Schaeffer, who tried to create a terminology of sound independent of its origins in the 1960s, by classifying sound objects into families or genres – see Pierre Schaeffer, Traite des objets musicaux (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966).
26 James Rush, The Philosophy of the Human Voice (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliott, 1833).
27 John Laver, The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
28 David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
29 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982).
30 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977).
31 Interview with Stephanie Martin, speech and language therapist, 3.11.03.
32 Ong, op cit.
33 Mladen Dolar, ‘The Object Voice’, p.11, in Renata Salecl and Slavoy Zizekl (eds.), Gaze and Voice as Love-objects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
34 Talking is always temporary – the life-cycle eventually silences us all, so there’s a poignancy about the voice: I speak therefore I’ll die. Orgasm has been called ‘une petite mort’, a little death. So too is the voice.
35 Richard Thorn, ‘The Anthropology of Sound’, paper given at ‘Hearing is Believing’ conference, University of Sunderland, 2 March 1996.
36 Brian Stross, ‘Speaking of Speaking: Tenejapa Tzeltal Metalinguistics’, in Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
37 Laura Martin, “Eskimo Words for Snow”: A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example’ (American Anthropologist, vol.88, no.2, 1986).
38 Interview, 30.10.03.
39 Interview, 16.03.04.
40 Interview, 31.10.03.
41 Interview, 14.11.03.
42 Interviews conducted in the UK, October-November 2003.
43 Michael Argyle, Bodily Communication (London: Routledge, 1975).
44 W.H. Thorpe, ‘Vocal Communication in Birds’, in R.A. Hinde, ed., Non-Verbal Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
45 Lea Leinonen et al, ‘Shared Means and Meanings in Vocal Expression of Man and Macaque’ (Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, vol.28: 2, 2003).
46 Argyle, op cit.
47 Uwe Jurgens, ‘On the Neurobiology of Vocal Communication’, in Hanus Papousek et al, eds., Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Comparative and Developmental Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See chapter 11 for an elaboration.
48 Jan G. Svec et al, ‘Vocal Dosimetry: Theoretical and Practical Issues’, in G. Schade et al, eds., Proceeding Papers for the Conference, Advances in Qualitative Laryngology, Voice and Speech Research (Stuttgart: IRB Verlag, 2003). This research therefore makes an interesting contribution to the heated topic of whether men or women talk more – see chapter 10.
49 We know because researchers have attached neck devices to people that measure the vibrations on their skin. See Jan G. Svec et al, ‘Measurement with Vocal Dosimeter: How Many Metres do the Vocal Folds Travel During a Day?’, paper given at the Pan European Voice Conference, Graz, Austria, 28.9.2003.
50 Erkki Vilkman, ‘The Role of Voice (quality) Therapy in Occupation Safety and Health Context’, paper given at the Pan European Voice Conference, Graz, Austria, 29.8.2003; Ingo Titze, ‘How Far Can the Vocal Folds Travel’, paper given at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 2002; Ingo R. Titze et al, ‘Populations in the US Workforce Who Rely on Voice as a Primary Tool of Trade: A Preliminary Report’, Journal of Voice, vol. 11, no. 3, 1997.
51 Bernadette Timmermans et al, ‘Vocal Hygiene in Radio Students and in Radio Professionals’, Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, vol. 28: 3, 2003.
52 Vilkman, op cit. But see chapter 17 for a discussion of how this is changing.
53 Stephanie Martin interview, op cit.
54 Leon Thurman and Graham Welch, eds, Bodymind and Voice: Foundations of Voice Education (Minnesota: The Voicecare Network, 1997).
55 Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, Embodied Voices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
56 George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Pygmalion, p.5 (London: Penguin Books, 1951). Shaw did plenty of the despising himself, viz the prejudice pouring out of him later in the Preface – ‘An honest slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempts of phonetically untaught persons to imitate the plutocracy.’ (ibid., p.10).
1 Manuel Patricio Rodriguez Garcia, ‘Transactions of the Section of Laryngology, International Congress of Medicine’, London, 1881 in British Medical Journal, 17 February 2001.
2 Garcia wasn’t the first person to think about how the voice was produced. Aristotle, Galen and Leonardo had all puzzled over the larynx. But his serendipitous idea 150 years ago began literally to illuminate the dark tunnel in which air turns into voice. Garcia was interested in singing and not medicine: his contraption was later refined for clinical use by the addition of artificial light and the redesign of the laryngeal mirror. However much the story of Garcia’s invention seems pure Archimedes – the inspired ideation of an idling great man – in reality it arrived at the same moment as a whole array of other attempts to see into the human body, to turn the inside out. In 1851 the first binaural stethoscope was commercially marketed, followed by the ophthalmoscope (making visible the eye), the gastroscope (stomach – after an assistant of Adolf Kussmaul persuaded a sword-swallower to swallow half a metre of pipe plus lamp and lens. What became of him has not been recorded), the otoscope (ear drum), and in 1895 the X-ray.
3 Joseph C. Stemple, ‘Voice Research: So What? A Clearer View of Voice Production, 25 Years of Progress: the Speaking Voice’, Journal of Voice, vol. 7, no. 4, 1993. Some of the research on the voice, it has to be said, is so desiccated as to make one forget that what is under scrutiny is the vital subject of vocal exchange.
4 Alfred Tomatis, The Ear and Language, p.59 (Ontario: Moulin Publishing, 1996).
5 ibid., p.60.
6 William J.M. Levelt, Speaking: from Intention to Articulation (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1989).
7 Robert Thayer Sataloff, ‘Vocal Health’ (www.voicefoundation.org).
8 Alexander Graham Bell, Lectures upon the Mechanism of Speech (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1906).
9 Thanks to John Rubin for drawing my attention to this function of the larynx.
10 Aristotle, De Anima (London: Routledge, 1993).
11 Harry Hollien, The Acoustics of Crime (New York: Plenum Press, 1990).
12 W.A. Aikin, The Voice (London: Longmans, Green, and Co, 1951).
13 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, p.164 (London: Penguin Books, 1994).
14 Hollien, op cit.
15 Peter B. Denes and Elliot N. Pinson, The Speech Chain (W.H. Freeman, 1993).
16 Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998).
17 Denes and Pinson, op cit.
18 Leon Thurman and Graham Welch (eds.), ‘Bodymind and Voice: Foundations of Voice Education. (Minnesota: The Voicecare Network, 1997). While the vocal tract changes shape and even length during speech, its basic dimensions are physiologically determined, particular to each individual (no two vocal tracts are exactly the same size and shape) and beyond their control.
19 Margaret C.L. Greene, Disorders of the Voice (Austin, Texas, PRO-ED, 1986).
20 Thurman and Welch, op cit. The subglottic vocal tract, i.e. that which lies below the folds, also plays a resonant role – think of the chesty sound of a baritone with the diaphragm providing important support. If we don’t get proper support from the chest, we rely excessively on the neck and throat muscles to do a job they weren’t designed for, resulting in vocal strain or hoarseness (dysphonia). Clothes, too affect the voice. The high military collars worn by British regimental officers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped create the ‘stiff upper-lip’ voice. Similarly, people anxious about ruining their hair, or broadcasters wearing tight clothes that mustn’t betray a wrinkle, suffer similarly from constricted neck muscles that strangulate their voices (Patsy Rodenburg, The Right to Speak, London: Methuen, 1992).
21 Aikin, op cit.
22 V.C. Tartter, ‘Happy Talk: Perceptual and Acoustic Effects of Smiling on Speech’, Perception and Psychophysics, vol 27(1), 1980.
23 John Laver and Peter Trudgill, ‘Phonetic and Linguistic Markers in Speech’ in Klaus R. Scherer and Howard Giles, eds., Social Markers in Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
24 Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species (London: Penguin Books, 1998).
25 Aikin, op cit. Children born without any sound-perception are unable to produce any sound at all.
26 Stemple, op cit.
27 Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (Thomson Learning, 1955).
28 D.B. Fry, The Physics of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). These comments, of course, are based on the Western tonal system.
29 Sapir, op cit. We’ve swapped labial freedom, he suggested, for precision in speaking our mother tongue.
30 Ingo Titze, ‘The Human Voice at the Intersection of Art and Science’, paper given at PEVOC 2003, 28.8.03, Graz, Austria.
31 Fry, op cit.
32 Alfred A. Tomatis, The Conscious Ear (New York: Station Hill Press, 1991).
33 Tomatis 1996, op cit, p.55.
34 Titze, op cit.
35 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (USA: Destiny Books, 1994).
36 Diana Van Lancker, ‘Speech Behaviour as a Communication Process’, in John K. Darby, Speech Evaluation in Psychiatry (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1981).
37 It also helps us locate a sound since, as Darwin pointed out, we’ve lost the ability (retained by many animals) to move our ears towards a sound. Thankfully we’re binaural creatures, with two ears that work together to provide this information. By comparing the relative intensity or loudness heard in each of them, along with the different arrival time of the signal in each ear, we can identify the source and direction of a voice or other sound. And once heard, we can hang on to a particular sound despite the existence of loud and continuous random noise that almost overwhelms it. This is known as the cocktail-party phenomenon: it allows us to listen to several conversations simultaneously but only consciously tune into one of them. It’s also what enables us to pick out our own name from a buzz of conversation.
38 Schafer, op cit. Gradual, age-related loss of hearing acuity, called presbycusis, is usually assumed to be an inescapable consequence of ageing – wrinkles of the audio kind. Yet the Mabaan Africans of the Sudan suffer very little hearing loss due to presbycusis: at the age of 60 their hearing is as good if not better than the average 25-year-old North American. The presumed reason is their noise-free environment: the loudest sounds that the Mabaan (at least when they were studied back in 1962) heard were the sounds of their own voices, singing and shouting at tribal dances. Words aside, the unamplified human voice doesn’t easily cause injury.
39 Frequency range isn’t the same as fundamental frequency.
40 Named after the Italian anatomist, Alfonso Corti. In 1851, three years before Garcia first saw his vocal folds, Corti identified through his microscope a part of the cochlea that now bears his name.
41 Elise Hancock, ‘A Primer on Hearing’ (Johns Hopkins Magazine, September 1996).
42 Thinning hair cells are a major cause of hearing loss, and are permanent, for hair cells, like a woman’s eggs, are all present at birth: thereafter they can only be lost, and not gained.
43 Denes and Pinson, op cit.
44 ibid.
45 Murray Sachs, quoted in Hancock, op cit.
46 Pascal Belin et al, ‘Voice-selective Areas in Human Auditory Cortex’, Nature, vol. 403, 20 January 2000.
47 Frans Debruyne et al, ‘Speaking Fundamental Frequency in Monozygotic and Dizygotic Twins’, Journal of Voice, vol. 16, no. 4, 2002.
48 ibid.
49 Robert Thayer Sataloff, ‘Genetics of the Voice’, Journal of Voice, vol. 9, no. 1. See also Steven Gray et al, ‘Witnessing a Revolution in Voice Research: Genomics, Tissue Engineering, Biochips and What’s Next!’, Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, vol. 28: 1, 2003.
50 Tomatis 1996, op cit, p.51.
51 Patricia Liehr, ‘Uncovering a Hidden Language: The Effects of Listening and Talking on Blood Pressure and Heart Rate’, Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, vol. 6, no. 5 (October), 1992.
52 Denes and Pinson, op cit.
53 Tomatis 1991 and 1996, op cit. In response, he developed an Electronic Ear that enhanced certain frequencies, which, he maintained, allowed the ear to sing with greater facility, and the voice to respond accordingly. When they wore headphones and had their own voices filtered in this way, all his patients – even those who weren’t singers – reported greater well-being and incomparably better singing. By re-educating his patients’ ears, Tomatis claimed, his machine could even help people to learn to speak foreign languages more effectively because they now heard them differently. Listening problems, he argued, were also at the root of many learning disabilities. Maverick though he then seemed, today a network of 250 Tomatis Centres around the world treat children (and adults) with communication disorders, attention-deficit problems, motor skills difficulties, and even autism. His method attracted recent media attention when the French actor Gerald Depardieu described how Tomatis had helped him learn how to complete his sentences and develop his thoughts (Paul Chutkow, Depardieu (New York: Knopf, 1994).
1 David Abercrombie, Problems and Principles (London: Longmans, 1956).
2 Kenneth Pike, The Intonation of American English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1945); Rulon Wells, ‘The Pitch Components of English’, Language, 21, 1943.
3 George L. Trager, ‘Paralanguage: A First Approximation’, reprinted in Dell Hymes, Language in Culture and Society (New York: Harper-Row, 1964).
4 Morner, Fransesson, and Fant, cited in Harry Hollien, ‘On vocal registers’, Journal of Phonetics, 2, 1974.
5 Philip Lieberman, ‘Linguistic and Paralinguistic Interchange’, in Adam Kendon et al, eds., Organisation of Behaviour in Face-to-Face Interaction (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1975). Moroever, as Lieberman points out, what might be paralinguistic in one language may have a linguistic function in another.
6 Bentley’s conviction was posthumously overturned by the Court of Appeal in 1998.
7 There are also fashions in the way we stress. The writer Michael Frayn once wrote a comic newspaper column on modern mis-stressing, arguing that flying today wasn’t a high-stress occupation but a wrong-stress one, because of the capricious emphases used by cabin crews in announcements. These often seem to suggest a Churchillian resolve. The plane, they tell us, will be landing shortly in Cincinnati. We are requested to make sure we have all our belongings with us. (Michael Frayn, Speak After the Beep, London: Methuen, 1997).
8 David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). The idea that, unlike English speakers, Mandarin speakers use intonation to distinguish between completely different meanings of words has been challenged as language-specific bias by a Western linguist working in Beijing. From an Aboriginal point of view, it’s equally bizarre that changing ‘bed’ into ‘bet’ completely alters its meaning (Edward McDonald, Linguist List, 2 July, 2003).
9 See David Crystal, The English Tone of Voice (London: Edward Arnold, 1975), and J. Lyons, ‘Human Language’, in R.A. Hinde, ed., Non-Verbal Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972)
10 Some have even used paralanguage to undermine the power of writing, which they claim is a meagre system compared with the many different meanings that can be communicated by stress, pitch, pause, tempo, etc. (Eleanor J. Gibson and Harry Levin, The Psychology of Reading, Boston: The MIT Press, 1975.) This takes us back to the zero sum idea (and playground game: which would you rather be – deaf or blind?) that we must somehow choose between sound and vision, that by praising one, we inevitably devalue the other. Personally, I value both.
11 Crystal, 1975, op cit.
12 David Crystal, Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Here I use the word pitch to refer to both.
13 In 1919 the psychologist Carl Seashore set out to prove that musical ability was inborn, and that we arrive in the world with a good ear or a tin one. He gave listeners fifty pairs of tones, and asked them to say whether the second was higher or lower than the first. Seashore’s Measures of Musical Talent discovered that there was a 200-fold difference in listeners’ ability to distinguish the minimum frequency between two successive tones (Carl Seashore, The Psychology of Musical Talent, Boston: Silver, Burdett & Company, 1919).
14 Maria Schubiger, quoted in Crystal, 1969, op cit.
15 Alan Beck, Radio Acting (London: A&C Black, 1997).
16 D.B. Fry, The Physics of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
17 Jacqueline Martin, quote in Beck, op cit.
18 Richard Luchsonger and Godfrey Arnold, Voice-Speech-Language (California: Wadsworth, 1965).
19 When we sing, by contrast, we hold pitch steady – or try to – for the length of a note (Fry, op cit).
20 Atkinson, cited in Robert F. Coleman and Ira W. Markham, ‘Normal Variations in Habitual Pitch’, Journal of Voice, vol. 5, no. 2.
21 Coleman and Markham, ibid.
22 Kathryn L. Garrett and E. Charles Healey, ‘An Acoustic Analysis of Fluctuations in the Voices of Normal Adult Speakers Across Three Times of Day’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 82, no. 1 July 1987.
23 See M.C.L. Greene and Lesley Mathieson, The Voice and Its Disorders (England: Whurr Publishers, 1989).
24 Interview with Jon Snow, 3.3.04.
25 Interview with Rory Bremner, 30.3.04.
26 Beck, op cit.
27 Daniel Boone, Is Your Voice Telling on You? (San Diego: Singular, 1997).
28 Snow, op cit.
29 Interview with Dan Rather, 18.7.03.
30 Demonstrating, perhaps, how news reporting has been redefined as a branch of the leisure industry.
31 Newsweek quoted in Mark L. Knapp, Non-verbal Communication in Human Interaction, pp.147-8 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).
32 E. Sapir, ‘Speech as a Personality Trait’, p.76, in John Laver and Sandy Hutcheson, eds., Communication in Face-to-Face Interaction (England: Penguin Books, 1972).
33 ibid, p.77.
34 John J. Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
35 Aron W. Siegman, ‘The Telltale Voice: Nonverbal Messages of Verbal Communication’, p.425, in Aron W. Siegman and Stanley Feldstein, Nonverbal Behaviour and Communication (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987).
36 Crystal, 1969, op cit.
37 Richard M. Harris and David Rubinstein, ‘Paralanguage, Communication, and Cognition’, in Adam Kendon et al, eds., Organization of Behaviour in Face-to-Face Interaction (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1975).
38 E.T. Hall, ‘A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behaviour’ in Laver and Hutcheson, op cit.
39 Interview, 23.10.03.
40 Interview, 31.10.03.
41 Donna Jo Napoli Linguistics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). In fact there’s no such thing as a decibel: decibels always express a ratio, yet the second sound with which a first is being compared invariably gets erased (Fry, op cit).
42 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977).
43 As the British Conservative leader Iain Duncan-Smith and Labour leader Neil Kinnock both found to their cost.
44 Interview with Stephanie Martin, 3.11.03.
45 Diana Van Lancker and Jody Kreiman, ‘Familiar Voice Recognition: Patterns and Parameters. Part 2: Recognition of Rate-altered Voices’, Journal of Phonetics, 13, 1985.
46 Alan Cruttenden, Intonation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
47 Edward D. Miller, Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003). See chapter 14 for a discussion of how Roosevelt used his voice.
48 Cruttenden, op cit.
49 Peter Roach, ‘Some Languages are Spoken More Quickly than Others’ in Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, eds, Language Myths (London: Penguin Books, 1998).
50 William Apple et al, ‘Effects of Pitch and Speech Rate on Personal Attributes’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 37, no. 5, 1979.
51 Stanley Feldstein et al, ‘Gender and Speech Rate in the Perception of Competence and Social Attractiveness’, Journal of Social Psychology, 141(6), 2001. See also John Laver and Peter Trudgill, ‘Phonetic and Linguistic Markers in Speech’, in Klaus R. Scherer and Howard Giles, eds., Social Markers in Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
52 Norman Miller et al, ‘Speed of Speech and Persuasion’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 34, no. 4, 1978. This study pre-dated Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Did his ambling, folksy pace do anything to sever the association of speed with persuasiveness?
53 Feldstein et al, op cit.
54 Robert G. Harper, ed., Nonverbal Communication: The State of the Art (New York: John Wiley, 1978).
55 Interview, 31.10.03.
56 Roach, op cit.
57 Rather, op cit.
58 Aaron Barnhart, ‘Speeded-up Frasier gives KSMO Extra Ad-time’, Kansas City Star, 7.2.99.
59 Rather, op cit. American TV reporters, argues Jon Snow, so hurtle through their commentary that they omit certain structural elements of the language, getting the pictures to do the work of the verbs (Snow, op cit).
60 Beck, op cit.
61 London: Guinness World Records 2001.
62 Miller, op cit.
63 Rocco Dal Vera, ‘The Voice in Heightened Affective States’, in Rocco Dal Vera, ed., The Voice in Violence, p.64 (Cincinnati: Voice and Speech Trainers Association, 2001).
64 Copy, cited in Siegman and Feldstein, op cit.
65 Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Personality Markers in Speech’, in Klaus R. Scherer and Howard Giles, eds., Social Markers in Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
66 Interview, 17.5.03.
67 Interview, 21.3.04.
68 Interview 16.6.04.
69 Interview, 16.19.04.
70 Interview, 23.11.04.
71 Hillel Halkin, p.vi Sholom Aleichem: Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories (New York: Schocken Books, 1987).
72 ibid.
73 Quintillian, Institutio Oratorio, Book XI chapter 3 (Loeb Classical Library, 1920).
74 Diana Van Lancker, ‘Speech Behaviour as a Communication Process’, in John K. Derby, ed., Speech Evaluation in Psychiatry (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1981).
75 Crystal, 1975, op cit. Just to confuse matters further, Crystal, 1969, op cit, made a distinction between timbre and voice quality.
76 Greene and Mathieson, op cit.
77 Van Lancker, op cit.
78 Alfred Lang, ‘Timbre Constancy in Space: Hearing and Missing Spatially Induced Sound Variations’ (Bern: Psychologisches Institut, 1988).
1 Erich D. Jarvis et al, ‘Behaviourally Driven Gene Expression Reveals Song Nuclei in Hummingbird Brain’, Nature, 406, 10 August 2000.
2 Michael Argyle, Bodily Communication (London: Routledge, 1990).
3 Allison J. Doupe and Patricia K. Kuhl, ‘Birdsong and Human Speech: Common Themes and Mechanisms’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, vol. 22, 1999.
4 W.H. Thorpe, ‘Vocal Communication in Birds’ in R.A. Hinde, ed., Non-Verbal Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
5 ibid. Contrast this with the Misgurnus fish that makes a noise by gulping air bubbles and expelling them forcibly through its anus (R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997)).
6 Thorpe, op cit.
7 Gibson, quoted in ibid.
8 This has been demonstrated by cross-fostering experiments, taking birds from the wild as eggs or nestlings of one species and exposing them to the songs of other species, which they then proceed to learn.
9 California Academy of Sciences, www.calacademy.org.
10 Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes, Part 1 Prologue (London: Penguin Books, 1973).
11 Jarvis, op cit. These claims haven’t gone uncontested. Some critics are sceptical about what they see as extravagant extrapolation: they suggest that to treat songbirds like some kind of surrogate human is misleading – human speech is infinitely more complex than birdsong (The Osgood File, CBS Radio, 12.12.03).
12 Jarvis is now considering transgenic experiments to see if the insertion into non-learning species of those genes associated with vocal learning could convert a non-learner into a learner (Dennis Meredith, ‘Singing in the Brain’, Duke Magazine, vol. 88, no. 1 Nov-Dec 2001). Already in The Descent of Man Darwin had noted that some species of birds that don’t naturally sing ‘can without much difficulty be taught to do so – thus a house sparrow has learnt the song of a linnet’. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (UK: Prometheus Books, 1991).
13 Argyle, op cit. Darwin argued that the human speaking voice originated in music: ‘I have been led to infer that the progenitors of man probably uttered musical tones, before they had acquired the power of articulate speech; and that consequently, when the voice is used under any strong emotion, it tends to assume, through the principle of association, a musical character’ (Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, UK: Fontana Press, 1999). From here, he believed, it developed a sexual function: ‘Although the sounds emitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong case can be made out that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected in relation to the propagation of the species: the chief and, in some cases, exclusive purpose appears to be either to call or claim the opposite sex’ (Darwin, 1991, op cit).
14 Schafer, op cit.
15 Lea Leinonen, ‘Shared Means and Meanings in Vocal Expression of Man and Macaque’, Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, vol. 28: 2, 2003. This Finnish researcher has found that human adults and children over the age of nine are able correctly to categorise macaque vocalisations into angry, frightened, dominant, pleading, or content, and that human and monkey pleadings come out at a similar pitch and volume.
16 John J. Ohala, ‘Cross-Language Use of Pitch: An Ethological View’, Phonetica, 40, 1983.
17 Dwight Bolinger, ‘Intonation Across Languages’, in Joseph H. Greenberg, ed., Universals of Human Language (California: Stanford University Press, 1978).
18 Interestingly, in Japanese, giving up or admitting defeat is conveyed by the phrase ‘ne wo ageru’. This means ‘to raise one’s sound or tone’ – and they don’t mean volume (Norman D. Cook, Tone of Voice and Mind, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002).
19 Ohala, op cit.
20 It’s found support from music psychologists who contend that ascending pitch contours, both in speech and music, invariably convey a feeling of tension and uncertainty, whereas descending contours suggest resolution (S.Brown cited in Cook, op cit). Cook argues that there are further musical parallels, in that ‘a decrease in pitch resolves towards a major mode, and an increase in pitch resolves toward a minor code’, p.125. And see chapter 10 for another intriguing possible example of the frequency code.
21 ibid.
22 M.C.L. Greene and Lesley Matheson, The Voice and Its Disorders (England: Whurr Publishers, 1989).
23 Edmund S. Crelin, ‘The Skulls of Our Ancestors: Implications Regarding Speech, Language, and Conceptual Thought Evolution’, Journal of Voice, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989.
24 Philip Lieberman, Eve Spoke (London: Picador, 1998).
25 ibid.
26 ibid.
27 B. Arensburg et al, ‘A Reappraisal of the Anatomical Basis for Speech in Middle Palaeolithic Hominids’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 83, 1980.
28 Baruch Arensburg and Anne-Marie Tillier, ‘Speech and the Neanderthals’, Endeavour, vol. 15, no. 1, 1991. Red and fallow deer, it transpires, also have descended larynxes but can’t talk – proof, say some, that a low-lying larynx isn’t unique to humans, and isn’t necessarily tied to speech production but rather to the fact that it allows a creature to make low-frequency sounds that exaggerate their size. In other words the descended larynx is a useful component in the arsenal of intimidation, through which a deer (or person) can generate the deeper sound of a much larger animal (W. Tecumseh Fitch and David Reby, ‘The Descended Larynx Is Not Uniquely Human’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, B, vol. 268, 2001).
29 Richard F. Kay et al, ‘The Hypoglossal Canal and the Origin of Human Vocal Behaviour, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, vol. 95, issue 9, 28 April 1998.
30 David DeGusta et al, ‘Hypoglossal Canal Size and Hominid Speech’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, Anthropology, vol. 96, February 1999. The hypoglossal canal, they allege, isn’t related to the size of the hypoglossal nerve or tongue function and so isn’t a reliable indication of speech and can’t be used to date its origins.
31 Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species (London: Penguin Books, 1998), a thrilling exploration of the evolution of speech.
32 A.G. Clark et al, ‘Inferring Nonneural Evolution From Human-chimp-mouse Orthologous Gene Trios’, Science, 302, 2003. One of them makes a protein that plays a vital role in the membrane in the inner ear. (This, to put it in perspective, out of some 30–35,000 genes in the human genome.)
33 ibid.
34 Nicholas Wade, ‘Comparing Genomes Shows Split Between Chimps and People’, New York Times, 12.12.03.
35 Pierre Paul Broca, ‘Loss of Speech, Chronic Softening and Partial Destruction of the Anterior Left Lobe of the Brain’, Bulletin de la Societe Anthropologique, 2, 235–8, 1861, translated by Christopher D. Green, Classics in the History of Psychology (www.psychclassics.yorku.ca).
36 Paul Broca, ‘Remarks on the Seat of the Faculty of Articulated Language, Following an Observation of Aphemia (Loss of Speech)’, Bulletin de la Societe Anatomique, 6, 1861, translated by Christopher D. Green, ‘Classics in the History of Psychology’ (www.psychclassics.yorku.ca)
37 Tan’s brain is still on display in the Museum of Pathological Anatomy, the Musee Dupuytren, in Paris.
38 Of course it wasn’t quite so simple. Just as Manuel Garcia’s invention of the laryngoscope rested on many former and simultaneous inventions, so Broca’s work didn’t take place in a vacuum. In fact he was responding to a challenge made just a fortnight earlier. At a public meeting at the Anthropological Society on 4 April Ernest Aubertin had declared that he’d renounce his belief in cerebral localisation if just one case of speech loss could be produced without a frontal lesion. An inspired Broca provided evidence in support of Aubertin.
39 Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (USA: Oxford University Press, 1990).
40 It doesn’t do to mock Victorian gullibility, though: some aspects of phrenology anticipated our understanding of cerebral hemispheres, and some of the wild modern assertions made about hemispheres, as we’ll see, rest on no firmer foundation than did the phrenologists’. See, for instance, John van Wyhe, ‘The History of Phrenology on the Web’ (http://pages.britishlibrary.net/phrenology/, 2002). And despite the acclaim, Broca’s method has not been without its critics. Tan’s brain was so decayed that pinpointing the exact origin of spoken language had something of the flavour of blind man’s bluff.
41 Until the arrival of functional magnetic resonance imaging – the brain scanner – in the next century any other method of investigation was too invasive.
42 In Wernicke’s aphasia, people, after an accident or stroke, speak fluent, grammatical, but meaningless babble, sometimes called a ‘word salad’. On one occasion a patient with damage in Wernicke’s area who heard the sentence ‘It’s raining outside?’ spoken in the intonation appropriate to ‘How are you today?’ replied ‘Fine’ (Rhawm Joseph et al, Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, Clinical Neuroscience, USA: Lippincott, Williams, and Wilkins, 1996).
43 Deacon, op cit.
44 See Sophie K. Scott et al, ‘Identification of a Pathway for Intelligible Speech in the Left Temporal Lobe’, Brain, 2000, 123, and Matthew H. Davis and Ingrid S. Johnsrude, ‘Hierarchical Processing in Spoken Language Comprehension’, Journal of Neuroscience, 15 April 2003. Before speech can become intelligible, we have to process its phonetic and acoustic elements. This takes place in the superior left temporal lobe, the bottom part of the left hemisphere just above the ear, inside the temple. It’s here that the auditory signals first arrive in the cerebral cortex after their journey from the cochlear (see chapter 2).
45 Cook, op cit, makes the point that, if one hemisphere is surgically removed at a young age, the remaining hemisphere alone is capable of almost the full range of language tasks. Hemisphere specialisation is a developmental process.
46 Marc Pell, ‘Surveying Emotional Prosody in the Brain’, in B. Bel and I. Marlien, Proceedings of Speech Prosody, 2002 Conference (Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage, 2002).
47 Safer and Leventhal, cited by Don M. Tucker, ‘Neural Control of Emotional Communication’, in Peter David Blanck et al, eds., Nonverbal Communication in the Clinical Context (USA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986).
48 Sandra Weintraub et al, ‘Disturbances in Prosody: A Right-Hemisphere Contribution to Language’, Archives of Neurology, vol. 38, December 1981.
49 Jorg J. Schmitt et al, ‘Hemispheric Asymmetry in the Recognition of Emotional Attitude Conveyed by Facial Expression, Prosody and Propositional Speech’, Cortex, 33, 1977. So do psychopaths. When thirty-nine psychopaths incarcerated in a high-security prison were compared with non-psychopaths, they had particular difficulty recognising a fearful voice (R. James Blair, ‘Turning a Deaf Ear to Fear: Impaired Recognition of Vocal Affect in Psychopathic Individuals’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 1, 2002).
50 Ellen Winner et al, ‘Distinguishing Lies from Jokes: Theory of Mind Deficits and Discourse Interpretation in Right Hemisphere Brain-Damaged Patients’, Brain and Language, 62, 1998.
51 Joseph, op cit.
52 Diana Roupas Van Lancker et al, ‘Phonagnosia: a Dissociation Between Familiar and Unfamiliar Voices’, Cortex, 24, 1988.
53 Elliott D. Ross, ‘How the Brain Integrates Affective and Propositional Language into a Unified Behavioural Function’, Archives of Neurology, vol. 38, December 1981.
54 Cook, op cit.
55 Guy Vingerhoets et al, ‘Cerebral Hemodynamics During Discrimination of Prosodic and Semantic Emotion in Speech Studied by Transcranial Doppler Ultrasonography’, Neuropsychology, vol. 17(1), January 2003. See also Ralph Adolphs et al, ‘Neural Systems for Recognition of Emotional Prosody: A 3-D Lesion Study’, Emotion, vol. 2, no. 1, 2002.
56 Patrick J. Gannon et al, ‘Asymmetry of Chimpanzee Planum Temporale: Humanlike Pattern of Wernicke’s Brain Language Area Homolog’, Science, 279, 9 January, 1998.
57 People with Parkinson’s disease, for instance, experience difficulties in understanding other people’s tone of voice and using their own expressively because of damage to the basal ganglia, a subcortical part of the brain that doesn’t lie in either hemisphere (Pell, op cit). Prosody can also be impaired when the corpus callosum is damaged. You can’t simply extrapolate from brain damage to brain function – deterioration of a function isn’t just the reverse of its development. Data from schools for simultaneous translators, of the kind hired by the United Nations, suggests that, under pressure, both hemispheres can to some extent become language hemispheres. The problem for these interpreters is to keep the two languages from getting in each other’s way. Before training, most students of simultaneous translation begin with a left-hemisphere (right ear) preference for both languages. By the time they’ve finished, some have developed a separate ear (and therefore hemisphere) for each language. (Deacon, op cit). There’s also a theory that stutterers process language differently: brain scans seem to show in them a shift from the left hemisphere to the right. And see also J.S. Morris et al, ‘Saying it with Feeling: Neural Responses to Emotional Vocalizations’, Neuropsychologia, 37, 1999.
58 Tracy L. Luks et al, ‘Hemispheric Involvement in the Perception of Syntactic Prosody is Dynamically Dependent on Task Demands’, Brain and Language, 65, 1998. Yet still we get plied with news stories implying that the right hemisphere goes off duty while the left attends to language, like the recent BBC news report claiming that, while English people only needed to use the left side of their brain to understand English, Mandarin Chinese speakers used both sides of their brain because of the higher intonational demands of the language (‘Chinese “takes more brainpower” ’, BBC News, 30.6.03).
59 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).
60 S.K. Scott et al, ‘Impaired Auditory Recognition of Fear and Anger after Bilateral Amygdala Lesions’, Nature, 385, 16 January 1997.
61 This has been challenged: recognition of fear in the voice is impaired not by damage to the amygdala, say some researchers, but by damage to the basal ganglia (A.K. Anderson and E.A. Phelps, ‘Intact Recognition of Vocal Expressions of Fear Following Bilateral Lesions of the Human Amygdala’, Neuroreport, 9 (16), 16 November 1998.
62 R. Adolphs and D. Tranel, ‘Intact Recognition of Emotional Prosody Following Amygdala Damage’, Neuropsychologia, 37, October 1999. The amygdala may be crucial for detecting fear in the voice, but not for perceiving disgust (M.L. Phillips et al, ‘Neural Responses to Facial and Vocal Expressions of Fear and Disgust’, Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, Biological Science, 265, 7 October 1998). More recent work seems to suggest that the amygdala binds together the emotional information that we receive from the face and the voice, so that when we see both a fearful face and a frightened voice, the twin signals of danger combine in the amygdala. This allows us to feel fear instinctively, without the data ever having to pass through the conscious, cortical part of the brain. With a scary (non-facial) picture and a fearful voice, however, the cortex needs to be activated in order to process the information before fear can be registered (Beatrice de Gelder et al, ‘Fear recognition in the voice is modulated by unconsciously recognised facial expressions but not by unconsciously recognized affective pictures’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 99 (6), 19 March, 2002.
63 Just as various parts of the brain confer in the process of voice-reading, so too no one discipline can single-handedly explain how emotion gets encoded in the speaker’s voice and decoded by the listener. Over the past decade there’s been a fascinating convergence between psychoanalysis and neurobiology. The burgeoning fields of psychobiology and neuropsychology are adding to our understanding of the neurological dimensions of psychological development – some have even argued that the unconscious is located in the right hemisphere (Allan N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self, New York: W.W. Norton, 2003). We no longer need to think of the mind and the brain as providing alternative, mutually incompatible explanations of how human beings feel and behave – or indeed speak. When neuroscience and psychoanalysis treat each other as equal and mutually enriching partners, the resultant insights can be exciting. It’s less fertile, in my view, when science is seen as providing ‘hard’ proof and corroboration for the ‘soft’ discipline of psychoanalysis. A neuropsychological account of how the human voice is shaped by the emotions would be a thrilling affair.
64 Pamela Davis, ‘Emotional Influences in Singing’, paper given at the Fourth International Congress of Voice Teachers, London, 1997. Intriguingly, attempts to understand the reasons that tinnitus is so vexatious – why its ringing tones are so much more distressing than, say, the sound of a fridge – have also helped explain the close connection between the auditory system and those parts of the brain that control emotions and alert us to danger. After all we’re only aware of a small proportion of incoming sounds – our brain filters out the majority of the unwanted ones. According to the neurophysiological theory of tinnitus, it’s less the loudness and pitch associated with the condition that are so troublesome, but rather that when the autonomic nervous system hears the characteristic tinnital whistle, it responds as it does to danger and fear, causing the sufferer to perceive the tinnitus as threatening. By changing the neural pathways and retraining the brain to reclassify tinnitus as less significant, Pawel Jastreboff has helped habituate tinnitus sufferers to their condition, muting its discordant, piercing effects. (See, for example, www.tinnitus-pjj.com. Thanks to John Rubin for drawing my attention to this work.) If the meaning of sounds can be deliberately altered so that the brain responds to them in a new fashion, then enhancing and developing our receptiveness to vocal cues must be a footling task in comparison.
1 Denis Vasse, L’ombilic et la voix: deux enfants en analyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974). Even better than the umbilicus, in fact, because when that’s ruptured, the voice still remains, and contact with the mother then ‘becomes mediated by the voice’ (Vasse quoted by Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p.61 New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
2 Guy Rosolato, ‘La voix: entre corps et langage’, Revue francaise de psychanalyse, 37, no. 1, 1974.
3 Didier Anzieu, ‘The Sound Image of the Self’, International Review of Psycho-analysis, 1979: 6. Kaja Silverman describes the maternal voice as ‘the acoustic mirror in which the child first hears itself’ (Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
4 Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998).
5 ‘One can hear and be heard in the dark, in blindness and through walls’ (Anzieu, op cit).
6 90 per cent of the mother’s utterances suggesting a change in her engagement with her child were accompanied by a significant change in voice quality, whereas only 57 per cent were reflected in changes in facial expression (Marwick unpublished study, cited in Colwyn Trevarthen, ‘Emotions in Infancy: Regulators of Contact and Relationships with Persons’, in Klaus R. Scherer and Paul Ekman, eds., Approaches to Emotion, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1984).
7 Otto Isakower, ‘On the Exceptional Position of the Auditory Sphere’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20, 1939.
8 Irinia Ziabreva et al, ‘Separation-Induced Receptor Changes in the Hippocampus and Amygdala of Octogon degus: Influence of Maternal Vocalizations’, Journal of Neuroscience, 23(12), 15 June 2003. Of course a human baby isn’t a South American rodent, but it’s interesting nevertheless that the limbic region in which maternal vocalizations can alter the activity patterns in the rodent pup are the same area that’s activated when a human mother responds to her baby’s cries. There’s clearly a psychological link for a human between having the experience of being soothed by the mother’s voice, and later developing the ability to soothe an infant, but might there be a neurological one too?
9 8.3.96, www.drgreene.com.
10 Hilary Whitney, ‘My husband says that Stephen points and smiles when he hears my voice’, Guardian, 30.5.01. A similar scheme involving fathers is in operation in another British prison.
11 Edward D Murphy, ‘A tough time inspires a toy’, www.maintoday.com, 30.8.02.
12 ‘Mother’s Voice is Music to a Sick Child’s Ears’, 29.1.02, www.cosmiverse.com.
13 This position was slowly challenged, although by somewhat dubious scientific methods: in a 1925 experiment a car horn was honked a few feet from the abdomen of a woman in late pregnancy, while a hand on her stomach confirmed – eureka! – that in response 25-30 per cent of the time the foetus moved (B.S. Kisilevsky and J.A. Low, ‘Human Foetal Behaviour: 100 Years of Study’, Developmental Review 18, 1998).
14 It’s even been claimed that, by the third trimester, the foetus moves in rhythm to the mother’s voice. Bernard Auriol, in ‘Les eaux primordiales: La vie sonore du fœtus’ (www.cabinet.auriol/free.fr), along with writers on other websites, quotes Dr Henry Truby, a professor from the University of Miami, as making this claim, although I haven’t been able to track down any study on which it’s based.
15 William P. Fifer and Chris M. Moon, ‘The Effects of Fetal Experience with Sound’, in Jean-Pierre Lecanuet et al, eds., Fetal Development: A Psychobiological Perspective (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995).
16 With a five beat-per-minute increase in heart rate in foetuses exposed to their mother’s voice compared to a four beat-per-minute decrease in heart rate in those exposed to a female stranger’s voice (Barbara S. Kisilevsky et al, ‘Effects of Experience on Fetal Voice Recognition’, Psychological Science, vol. 14, no. 3, May 2003).
17 ibid. Unborn babies can also discriminate between their mother speaking and a recording of her voice (P.G. Hepper et al, ‘Newborn and Fetal Response to Maternal Voice’, Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, vol.11, 1993).
18 At 36-39 weeks’ gestation their heart rate changes when a woman starts reading the same sentence after a man (or vice versa). (J.P. Lecanuet et al, ‘Prenatal Discrimination of a Male and Female Voice Uttering the Same Sentence’, Early Development and Parenting, vol. 2(4), 1993). We know that foetuses can discriminate between syllables, because one study found them detecting the differences between the speech sounds ‘ba’ and ‘bi’ at 27 gestational weeks of age, and at different frequencies at 35 weeks (S. Shahidullah and P.G. Hepper, ‘Frequency Discrimination By the Fetus’, Early Human Development, 36(1), January 1994. See also Jean-Pierre Lecanuet et al, ‘Human Fetal Auditory Perception’, in Jean-Pierre Lecanuet et al, eds., Fetal Development: A Psychobiological Perspective, (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995). In another study the brains of premature infants detected when a repeated vowel was replaced by another, supporting the view that the human foetus learns to discriminate sounds while still in the womb. This study claims to constitute the ‘ontologically earliest discriminative response of the human brain ever recorded’ (M.Cheour-Luhtanen et al, ‘The Ontogenetically Earliest Discriminative Response of the Human Brain’, Psychophysiology, 33 (4), July 1996.
19 W.P. Fifer and C.M. Moon, ‘The Role of the Mother’s Voice in the Organization of Brain Function in the Newborn’, Acta Paediatric Supplement 397, 1994.
20 Sherri L. Smith et al, ‘Intelligibility of Sentences Recorded from the Uterus of a Pregnant Ewe and from the Fetal Inner Ear’, Audiology and Neuro-Otology, 8, 2003. The chief acoustic properties of the mother’s voice remain the same inside the womb and outside (Benedicte De Boysson-Bardies, How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years (Massachusetis: MIT Press, 1999).
21 Anthony DeCasper quoted in ‘Sounds Inside the Womb Revealed’, Guardian, 5.2.04. This research is based on a pregnant ewe: other researchers insist that a human foetus isn’t the same as a sheep, with the species receptive to different frequencies. Rossella Lorenzi ‘Can unborn babies hear oohs and aahs?’, Discovery News, Australian Broadcasting Corporation Online, 20.2.04.
22 D Querleu et al, ‘Intra-amniotic Transmission of the Human Voice’, Revue Francaise de Gynecologie et Obstetrique’, 83, January 1988.
23 Petitjean, cited in Leon Thurman and Graham Welch, ‘Bodymind and Voice: Foundations of Voice Education’ (The Voice Care Network, 1997).
24 William G. Niederland, ‘Early Auditory Experiences, Beating Fantasies, and Primal Scene’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1958.
25 ibid.
26 See Athena Vouloumanos and Janet F. Werker, ‘Tuned to the Signal: the Privileged Status of Speech for Young Infants’, Developmental Science, 7:3, 2004.
27 Querleu and Renard, cited in Melanie J. Spence and Anthony J. DeCasper, ‘Prenatal Experience with Low-Frequency Maternal-Voice Sounds Influence Neonatal Perception of Maternal Voice Samples’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 10, 1987; and D. Querleu et al, ‘Reaction of a Newborn Infant Less Than Two Hours After Birth to the Maternal Voice’, Journal de gynecologie, obstetrique, et biologie de la reproduction 13(2), 1984.
28 Anthony J. DeCasper and William P.Fifer, ‘Of Human Bonding: Newborns Prefer Their Mothers’ Voices’, Science, vol. 208, 6 June 1980. Although DeCasper and Fifer are pioneering researchers in the field and have come up with a series of fascinating results, their 1980 study warrants a word of caution. To begin with, it’s based on a very small sample – in the first instance 10 neonates, 16 when the experiment was repeated. And then, its very title, ‘Of Human Bonding’, and premise both rest on assertions about mother-infant bonding that were formulated by two paediatricians whose research has since been dismissed by most of the scientific community as nothing more than ‘scientific fiction’ (see Diane E. Eyer, Mother-Infant Bonding: A Scientific Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). DeCasper and Fifer considered their finding that newborns prefer their mother’s voice as confirmation of the (now discredited) theory that the period shortly after birth is uniquely important for mother-infant bonding. The newborns’ preference, they suggested, may even be an integral aspect of that bonding. Like many other sociologists I believe that you can find neonates’ vocal preferences tantalising and touching without accepting the whole bonding hypothesis.
A 1988 study found that, while the heart rate of infants under 24 hours old decelerated when they heard their mother’s voice, that of older infants speeded up. Elizabeth M. Ockleford et al (‘Responses of Neonates to Parents’ and Others’ Voices’, Early Human Development, 18, 1988) hypothesised that, beyond a few hours after birth, babies respond defensively to the sudden termination of their mother’s voice.
29 To conduct a study like this you need an awake baby who’s calm and slightly hungry. (How else do you get it to suck of its own accord?) A flexible arm or a research assistant holds a dummy in the baby’s mouth. Attached to it is a pressure transducer: this detects and measures the rate and intensity of the baby’s sucking, in response to a stimulus (until the baby has got used to it and so the effect has worn off), and sends the information to a computer. When a baby resumes sucking or sucks harder after a change of stimulus, this shows that the baby has noticed the difference. (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycho-linguistiques Infant Lab, Paris, www.ehess.fr/centres/lscp.babylab). (There are other ways of measuring a baby’s auditory capabilities, but they tend to treat the infant more like one of Pavlov’s dogs.)
30 John Bowlby, Attachment (London: Penguin Books, 1984). In one of the earliest experiments, conducted in 1927, a three-week-old baby, when he heard a human voice, began to suck and gurgle with pleasure, and wore an expression that suggested pleasure. When the voice stopped the baby started to cry and show other signs of displeasure. Was this because he had already come to associate the female voice with food, as the researchers thought, or (as the psychoanalyst John Bowlby argued) because he wanted to hear his mother? The sounds arising from the preparation of a bottle of milk didn’t evoke a similarly pleasurable response. (Hetzer and Tudor-Hart study, cited in ibid).
31 Wolff, cited in Anne Fernald, ‘Meaningful Melodies in Mothers’ Speech to Infants’, in Hanus Papousek et al, Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Comparative and Developmental Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Hearing its mother immediately after birth (along with recognising her smell) causes the baby to look at her, which then teaches it to recognise her face. The mother’s voice, therefore, helps launch the sighted infant’s visual abilities (Colwyn Trevarthen, ‘Intrinsive Motives for Companionship in Understanding: their Origin, Development, and Significance for Infant Mental Health’, Infant Mental Health Journal, vol. 22(1–2), 2001).
32 Wolff, cited in Bowlby op cit.
33 Bowlby put it this way: ‘On the one hand, her infant’s interest in her voice is likely to lead a mother to talk to him more; on the other, the very fact that his attention to her has the effect of increasing the mother’s vocalisations … is likely to lead the baby to pay even more attention to the sounds she makes. In this mutually reinforcing way the vocal and auditory interaction between the pair increases.’ (Bowlby in ibid, p.274).
34 Spence and DeCasper, op cit; Fifer and Moon 1995, op cit.
35 Piontelli cited in Suzanne Maiello, ‘The Sound-object: A Hypothesis about Prenatal Auditory Experience and Memory’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, vol. 21, no. 1, 1995.
36 Caroline Floccia et al, ‘Unfamiliar Voice Discrimination for Short Stimuli in Newborns’, Developmental Science, 3:3, 2000.
37 See review of research in ibid.
38 Jacques Mehler and Josiane Bertoncini, ‘Infants’ Perception of Speech and other Acoustic Stimuli’, in John Morton and John C. Marshall, eds., Psycholinguistics 2: Structures and Processes (London: Paul Elek, 1979). If, on the other hand, the word order and therefore cadences are reversed, the baby shows no marked preference for the mother’s voice over that of a stranger.
39 Caron et al, cited in John Wilding et al, ‘Sound Familiar?’, Psychologist, vol. 13, no. 11, November 2000.
40 Anzieu, op cit. In fact they have a pretty sophisticated understanding of how sight and sound cohere. In one experiment 6-12-week-old infants became distressed when watching a video of their mothers in which the speech and visual content were discrepant, suggesting that they analyse voice characteristics from a very young age, and can skilfully combine voice and face (Murray and Trevarthen, cited in Wilding et al, op cit). At 2 months they look longer at filmed images of faces where the vowel shape being made by someone’s lips matches the vowel sound coming from their mouth than images where they don’t synchronise (Michelle L. Patterson and Janet F. Werker, ‘Two-month-old Infants Match Phonetic Information in Lips and Voice’, Developmental Science 6:2, 2003).
41 Christopher W. Robinson and Vladimir M. Sloutsky, ‘Auditory Dominance and Its Change in the Course of Development’, Child Development, vol.75, no.5, September/October 2004.
42 Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Amanda C. Napolitano, ‘Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words? Preferences for Auditory Modality in Young Children’, Child Development, vol. 74, no. 3, May/June 2003. It’s also been argued, though, that four-year-olds attend more to the content of speech than to its paralinguistic features, where the two are discrepant, while adults focus on paralanguage (J. Bruce Morton and Sandra E. Trehub, ‘Children’s Understanding of Emotion in Speech’, Child Development, vol. 72, no. 3, May/June 2001). Younger children have also been found to be less skilled at interpreting the emotional meaning of prosody than older ones and adults (Christiane Baltaxe, ‘Vocal Communication of Affect and Its Perception in Three to Four-Year-Old Children’, Perceptual and Motor Skills, 72, 1991), though in this study three- and four-year-olds were able to perceive emotions expressed through intonation. No psychological study that I’ve come across, however, seems to build in the modifying factor of the children’s home environment, which presumably is hugely influential in shaping small children’s interpretive abilities. Children raised in homes where emotions are more easily expressed and decoding skills encouraged and valued must surely develop these abilities younger and more fully.
43 Diane Mastropieri and Gerald Turkewitz, ‘Prenatal Experience and Neonatal Responsiveness to Vocal Expressions of Emotion’, Developmental Psychology, 35 (3), November 1999.
44 ibid.
45 Charles Darwin, ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant’, Mind, 2, 1877.
46 Baltaxe, op cit.
47 Anzieu, op cit.
48 J.T. Manning et al, ‘Ear Asymmetry and Left-Side Cradling’, Evolution and Human Behaviour, 18, 1997.
49 We know this because, in an important experiment, babies didn’t suck extra hard to activate the tape recording of their father reading Dr Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street – and this shouldn’t be read as some precocious judgement on Dr Seuss (Anthony J. DeCasper and Phyllis A. Prescott, ‘Human Newborns’ Perception of Male Voices: Preference, Discrimination, and Reinforcing Value’, Developmental Psychobiology, 17(5), 1984).
50 Cynthia D. Ward and Robin Panneton Cooper, ‘A Lack of Evidence in 4-Month-Old Human Infants for Paternal Voice Preference’, Developmental Psychobiology, 35, 1999 – a paper whose very title seems to betray a desire to find support for the father. In fact the results of the experiments it describes demonstrate the opposite: that four-month-old babies don’t prefer their father’s voice.
51 DeCasper and Prescott, op cit. Perhaps this is also because the father’s voice, usually a lower frequency than the mother’s, is unlikely to have been as audible in the uterus as a woman’s voice. Other theories are that babies prefer the harmonic tones in their mother’s voice (Masashi Kamo and Yoh Iwasa, ‘Evolution of Preference for Consonances as a By-product’, Evolutionary Ecology Research, 2, 2000), and that postnatally too they remain more sensitive to women’s higher frequency ranges (Jacqueline Sachs, ‘The Adaptive Significance of Linguistic Input to Prelinguistic Infants’, in Catherine E. Snow and Charles A. Ferguson, Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
52 Cited in Paul Fraisse, ‘Rhythm and Tempo’, in Diana Deutsch, ed., The Psychology of Music (London: Academic Press, 1982). Peter Auer et al, quoting the French poet and linguist Henri Meschonnic: ‘qu’on ait pu etre si longtemps indifferent a la voix, à ne voir que des structures, des schemas, des arbres, toute une spatialisation muette du langage’ (‘that one could have been indifferent to the voice for so long, seeing only structures, schemas, trees, a whole mute spatialisation of language’), even regard our long indifference to the voice as a consequence of the neglect of rhythm, in Language in Time: the Rhythm and Tempo of Spoken Interaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
53 Alvarez, cited in Maiello, 2003.
54 Suzanne Maiello, ‘The Sound-object: a Hypothesis about Prenatal Auditory Experience and Memory’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, vol. 21, no. 1, 1995.
55 Salk, cited in Suzanne Maiello, ‘The Rhythmical Dimension of the Mother-infant – Transcultural Considerations’, Journal of Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 15(2), 2003.
56 Papousek, cited in ibid.
57 Fraisse, op cit, and Michael P. Lynch et al, ‘Phrasing in Prelinguistic Vocalizations’, Developmental Psychobiology, 28(1), 1995.
58 Lenneberg, cited in Joseph Jaffe et al, ‘Rhythms of Dialogue in Infancy’ Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, vol. 66, no.2, serial no. 265, April 2001. Elsewhere Joseph Jaffe and Stanley Feldstein suggest that the average, uninterrupted vocalisation in conversation lasts 1.64 seconds, spanning about five words, forming a syntactic and rhythmic unit before a juncture, with a slight slowing of stress and intonation change (Rhythms of Dialogue, New York: Academic Press, 1970).
59 Fraisse, op cit; Lynch et al, op cit. Newborns suck rhythmically, at intervals from 600 to 1,200 milliseconds.
60 Frederick Erickson, ‘Timing and Context in Everyday Discourse: Implications for the Study of Referential and Social Meaning’, Sociolinguistic Working Paper no.67, (Austin, Texas: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, 1980).
61 Lewcowicz, cited in Daniel N. Stern, ‘Putting Time Back Into Our Considerations of Infant Experience: A Microdiachronic View’, Infant Mental Health Journal, vol. 21(1–2), 2000.
62 Colwyn Trevarthen and Stephen Malloch, ‘Musicality and Music Before Three: Human Vitality and Invention Shared with Pride’, Zero to Three, vol. 23, no. 1, September 2002. Music theory is throwing up interesting deliberations on this theme – see, for example, Carolyn Drake and Daisy Bertrand, ‘The Quest for Universals in Temporal Processing in Music’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, part 930, 2001.
63 Gro E. Hallan Tonsberg and Tonhild Strand Hauge, ‘The Musical Nature of Human Interaction’, Voice: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 2003, www.voices/no/mainissues.
64 Keiko Ejiri ‘Relationship between Rhythmic Behaviour and Canonical Babbling in Infant Vocal Development’, Phonetica, vol. 55, no. 4, 1998. See also K. Ejiri and N. Masataka, ‘Co-occurrences of Preverbal Vocal Behaviour and Motor Activity in Early Infancy’, Developmental Science, vol.4, no.1, March 2001.
65 Stephen N. Malloch et al, ‘Measuring the Human Voice: Analysing Pitch, Timing, Loudness and Voice Quality in Mother–Infant Communication’, paper presented at the International Syposium of Musical Acoustics, Edinburgh, August 1997 (reprinted in Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics, vol. 19, part 5).
66 Bullowa, cited in Jaffe et al, op cit.
67 William S. Condon and Louis W. Sander, ‘Neonate Movement Is Synchronised with Adult Speech: Interactional Participation and Language Acquisition’, Science, New Series, vol. 183, no. 4120, 11 Jan 1974. Since the infant wasn’t looking at the adult, the role of eye contact could be ruled out, and since the synchronisation occurred whether the adult speaker was present or their voice came out of a tape recorder, it couldn’t be the case that the speaker was coordinating with the baby rather than the other way round.
68 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (London: Karnac Books, 1998).
69 Colwyn Trevarthen and Kenneth J. Aitken, ‘Infant Intersubjectivity: Research, Theory, and Clinical Applications’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. 42: no. 1, 2001.
70 William Condon, quoted in Carole Douglis, ‘The Beat Goes On: Social Rhythms Underlie All our Speech and Actions’, Psychology Today, November 1987, p.40.
71 Cynthia L. Crown et al, ‘The Cross-Modal Coordination of Interpersonal Timing: Six-Week-Old-Infants’ Gaze with Adults’ Vocal Behaviour’, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, vol. 31, no. 1, January 2002.
72 Miriam K. Rosenthal, ‘Vocal Dialogues in the Neonatal Period’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 18, no. 1, 1982.
73 Sachiyo Kajikawa et al, ‘Rhythms of Turn-taking in Japanese Mother-child Dialogue’, paper given at Linguistics and Phonetics 2002 conference, Meikai University, Japan.
74 Mechthild Papousek, ‘Early Ontogeny of Vocal Communication in Parent–infant Interactions’, in Hanus Papousek et al, eds., Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Comparative and Developmental Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
75 Beatrice Beebe et al, ‘Systems Models in Development and Psychoanalysis: The Case of Vocal Rhythm, Coordination, and Attachment’, Infant Mental Health Journal, vol. 21 1–2, 2000, pp.105–6.
76 ibid.
77 Mary Catherine Bateson, ‘Mother-Infant Exchanges: the Epigenesis of Conversation Interaction, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 263, 1975.
78 Philippe Rochat, ‘Dialogical Nature of Cognition’, in Jaffe et al, op cit.
79 Daniel N. Stern, The First Relationship: Infant and Mother (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002).
80 Jaffe et al, op cit. Interestingly, there was more vocal coordination between strangers and infants in a lab than between confident mothers and their secure babies at home, suggesting that you need more predictability in timing with someone you don’t know, in an unfamiliar setting.
81 Beebe et al, op cit.
82 Maya Gratier, ‘Expressive Timing and Interactional Synchrony Between Mothers and Infants: Cultural Similarities, Cultural Differences, and the Immigration Experience’, Cognitive Development, 18, 2003. It’s even been argued that mothers able to synchronise with their 3-month-old babies, and whose babies at 9 months are also able to synchronise with them, are more likely to produce children who, at 2 years of age, are able to exercise self-control and self-regulation (Ruth Feldman et al, ‘Mother-Infant Affect Synchrony as an Antecedent of the Emergence of Self-Control’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 35, no. 5, 1999).
83 Jaffe et al, op cit.
84 Crown et al, op cit.
85 Erickson and Shultz, quoted in Auer et al, p.21. Auer et al argue that both parties to an interaction collaborate to produce the rhythm of their conversation, but language and culture also help shape them. They compare the contrasting rhythms of ending a phone conversation in German and Italian.
86 Stern et al, 1985, cited in Christine Kitamura and Denis Burnham, ‘Pitch and Communicative Intent in Mother’s Speech: Adjustments for Age and Sex in the First Year’, Infancy, 4(1), 2003.
87 Rosenthal, op cit.
88 Hanus Papousek and Marc H. Bornstein, ‘Didactic Interactions: Intuitive Parental Support of Vocal and Verbal Development in Human Infants’, in Hanous Papousek et al, Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Comparative and Developmental Approaches’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
89 Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 1998, op cit.
90 Stern 2002, op cit, p.106.
91 Stern 2002, op cit, p.14.
92 Maiello 2003, op cit, p.85.
93 Gratier, op cit.
94 Suzanne Maiello, ‘Prenatal Trauma and Autism’, Journal of Child Psychotherapy, vol. 27, no. 2, 2001. Maiello speculates that autistic babies are unable to filter out the sounds of a depressed or mentally disturbed mother. At some psycho-auditory level they cut out, thereby damaging the prenatal ‘sound object’ through which the foetus introjects the maternal voice, and which is the precursor of the postnatal maternal object.
95 Feldman et al, op cit.
96 Adena J. Zlochower and Jeffrey F. Cohn, ‘Vocal Timing in Face-to-Face Interaction of Clinically Depressed and Non-depressed Mothers and Their 4-Month-Old Infants’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 19, 1996.
97 Trevarthen and Malloch, op cit.
98 Peter S. Kaplan et al, ‘Child-Directed Speech Produced By Mothers with Symptoms of Depression Fails to Promote Associative Learning in 4-Month-Old Infants’, Child Development, vol. 70, no. 3, May/June 1999.
99 Nadja Reissland et al, ‘The Pitch of Maternal Voice: a Comparison of Mothers Suffering from Depressed Mood and Non-depressed Mothers Reading Books to Their Infants’, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44:2, 2003.
100 Betty Hart and Todd Risley, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, p.77 (Baltimore, Maryland: Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 1995).
101 ibid. Hart and Risley are careful not to stigmatise welfare parents, acknowledging their resilience and persistence in the face of repeated defeats and humiliations. They argue that professional families prepare their children to participate in a culture concerned with symbols and analytic problem-solving, while welfare families school their children in obedience, politeness, and conformity as the keys to survival. Their findings have a class gradient, and seem to be suggesting that class-mediated social disadvantage penetrates even into the voice, through which a sense of competence and confidence can be transmitted down the generations. Though Hart and Riseley’s study was painstaking and sensitive, research like this can end up simply endorsing middle-class parenting styles and indicting working-class ones, a criticism some levelled at Basil Bernstein’s work.
102 ibid, pp. 102–3.
103 Francis Spufford, ‘Pillow Talk’, Guardian, 13.3.02.
104 Interview, 31.10.03.
105 See Amanda Craig, ‘Listen with Mother’, Guardian, 9.6.04, on how losing her voice temporarily through thyroid cancer affected her. In another case a 17-year-old was hit by a train while riding his bike, sending him into a minimally conscious state. He was played a tape of his mother reading a story, followed, after a brief pause, by a tape of an age-matched voice reading the same story. Magnetic resonance imaging showed that the mother’s voice strongly activated the amygdala, one of the organs responsible for emotional processing (T. Bekinschtein et al, ‘Emotion Processing in the Minimally Conscious State’, Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 75, 2004).
106 Interview, 17.11.03.
107 Interview 31.10.03.
108 Martin H. Teicher, ‘Wounds That Time Won’t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse’, Cerebrum, vol. 2, no. 4, Fall 2000.
109 Anne Karpf, ‘Loud But Not Proud’, Guardian, 21.03.01.
110 Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (London: HarperCollins, 1990).
111 Title of a new report in The Times, by Glen Owen, 9.1.03.
112 This advice, quoted in Amelia Hill, ‘Science Tells How to Bring up Baby’, Observer, 7.11.04, purports to come from ‘The Definitive 21st Century Child-rearing Book’ by Professor Margot Sunderland, ‘a leading expert in the development of children’s brains’, and ‘Director of Education and Training at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London’, a private organisation that she herself founded. I can find no details of Sunderland’s qualifications, nor of her book, and yet one of her claims in this article – that ignoring a crying child can cause serious damage to its brain – was widely disseminated in its wake.
113 Anzieu, op cit, p.32.
114 Susan Milmoe et al, ‘The Mother’s Voice: Postdictor of Aspects of Her Baby’s Behaviour’, Proceedings of 76th Conference of the American Psychological Association, 1968.
115 For a stimulating discussion of maternal ambivalence see Rozsika Parker: Torn in Two: the Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (London: Virago, 1995).
116 Chion, op cit, p.62. ‘In the beginning, in the uterine darkness’, laments the French writer Michel Chion, ‘was the Voice, the Mother’s voice. For the child once born, the mother is more an olfactory and vocal continuum than an image. Her voice originates in all points of space, while her form enters and leaves the visual field. We can imagine the voice of the Mother weaving around the child a network of connections it’s tempting to call the umbilical web. A rather horrifying expression, to be sure, in its evocation of spiders.’ (ibid, p.61).
117 This entrapping maternal voice resembles the Freudian concept of the vagina dentata (vagina with teeth), ever ready to castrate the approaching man.
118 Kaja Silverman, op cit.
119 Maiello 1995, op cit, p.27. ‘If so, the child’s listening ear would no longer be completely fused in the primary sonic one-ness. There might already be some distance and differentiation between the voice and the ear, the germ of distinction between a listening “me” and a speaking “not-me”.’ Maiello goes on to make a delightful, but perhaps far-fetched, connection between the fact that, from the fifth month of interuterine life, the foetus is able to put its thumb in its mouth and suck it, and the fact that this ability appears at the time when its hearing capacity is fully developed. She conjectures that, feeling an emptiness following the silence of the mother’s voice, the foetus attempts literally to fill the gap by putting its thumb into its mouth. Of course the foetus doesn’t know that voices come from mouths – perhaps it plugs the only gap available for it to fill by itself. I’m grateful to Gianna Williams for drawing my attention to Suzanne Maiello’s work.
120 Interview 25.5.03.
1 In fact it’s often called ‘musical speech’ because the exaggerated prosody gives it a sing-song quality. Laurel J. Trainor et al, ‘Is Infant-Directed Speech Prosody A Result of the Vocal Expansion of Emotion?’, Psychological Science, vol. 11, no. 3, May 2000.
2 Charles A. Ferguson, ‘Baby Talk in Six Languages’, American Anthropologist, New Series, vol. 66, no. 6, part 2: ‘The Ethnography of Communication’, December 1964. Ferguson focused largely on the lexical and syntactic aspects of baby talk, which lie beyond the scope of this book.
3 Sally-Anne Ogle and J.A. Maidment, ‘Laryngographic Analysis of Child-directed Speech’, European Journal of Disorders of Communication, 28, 1993.
4 Olga K. Garnica, ‘Some Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features of Speech to Young Children’, in Catherine E. Snow and Charles A. Ferguson, Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Baby talk or motherese is now considered a ‘register’ – a special code or style of speaking – in the linguistic repertoire of adult speakers of any language (Bella M. DePaulo and Lerita M. Coleman, ‘Evidence for the Specialness of the “Baby Talk” Register’, Language and Speech, vol.24, part 3, 1981). The British may be famously reluctant to learn other tongues, yet even the most determined monoglot successfully speaks many different variants of their own language, as the situation demands, because we’re all skilled code-switchers. Code-switching affects vocabulary and grammar, but can also be heard in tone of voice and inflection. Vocal registers or codes are a way of signalling our understanding of the social context, and acknowledging the person to whom we’re speaking. Some of the features of baby talk, like elevated pitch, for instance, can be found in infant-directed singing too (Tali Shenfield and Sandra E. Trehub, ‘Infants’ Reponse to Maternal Singing’, paper given at the scientific conference of ISIS, the International Study on Infant Studies, Brighton, 17.7.00).
5 See A.S. Holzrichter, ‘Motherese in American Sign Language’, MA Thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1995.
6 Indeed non-parents with experience of infants exaggerate their pitch even more than parents or inexperienced non-parents. Those who see themselves as particularly ‘good’ with babies might be trying to prove it by doing everything they can to attract the child’s attention: the flamboyant use of motherese is probably designed to display their own skill (Joseph L. Jacobson et al, ‘Paralinguistic Features of Adult Speech to Infants and Small Children’, Child Development, 54, 1983).
7 Catherine E. Snow, ‘Mothers’ Speech Research: from Input to Interaction’, in Snow and Ferguson, op cit.
8 Jacqueline Sachs, ‘The Adaptive Significance of Linguistic Input to Prelinguistic Infants’, in Snow and Ferguson, op cit.
9 K. Niwano and K. Sugai ‘Maternal Accommodation in Infant-directed Speech During Mothers’ and Twin-infants’ Vocal Interactions’, Psychological Reports, 92(2), April 2003.
10 Patricia K. Kuhl et al, ‘Cross-Language Analysis of Phonetic Units in Language Addressed to Infants’, Science, New Series, vol. 277, no. 5326, 1.8.97.
11 Anne Fernald, ‘Meaningful Melodies in Mothers’ Speech to Infants’, in Hanus Papousek et al, eds., Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Comparative and Developmental Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also Anne Fernald and Patricia Kuhl, ‘Acoustic Determinants of Infant Preference for Motherese Speech’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 10, 1978.
12 Stratton and Connolly, cited in ibid; Sachs, op cit. A high-pitched voice is much more effective in eliciting a smile from a baby than a low-pitched one (Wolff, cited by Fernald 1992, op cit).
13 Fernald 1992.
14 Roger Brown, Introduction, in Snow and Ferguson, op cit.
15 ibid.
16 Joanne Siu-Yiu Tang and John A. Maidment, ‘Prosodic Apects of Child-Directed Speech in Cantonese’, in Valerie Hazan et al, eds., ‘Speech, Hearing, and Language: Work in Progress 1996, vol. 9,’ University College, London: Department of Phonetics and Linguistics.
17 Schafer, cited by Sachs, op cit.
18 Kuhl et al, 1997, op cit.
19 Tang and Maidment, op cit.
20 Naomi S. Baron, ‘The Uses of Baby Talk’, in Pigeon-Birds and Rhyming Words: The Role of Parents in Language Learning (Washington, DC: ERIC Clearinghouse on Language and Linguistics, 1989).
21 Kuhl et al, 1997, op cit.
22 C. Kitamura et al, ‘Universality and Specificity in Infant-directed Speech: Pitch Modifications as a Function of Infant Age and Sex in a Tonal and Non-tonal Language’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 24, 2002.
23 Christine Kitamura and Denis Burnham, ‘Pitch and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech: Adjustments for Age and Sex in the First Year’, Infancy, 4:1, 2003. At this age babies can tell the difference between approving and comforting infant-directed speech, but a 4-month-old can’t – see Melanie J. Spence and David S. Moore, ‘Categorization of Infant-Directed Speech: Development from Four to Six Months’, Developmental Psychobiology, 42, 2003.
24 Lacerda et al, cited by Kitamura and Burnham.
25 Kitamura and Burnham, op cit. By now fascinating differences in the way mothers speak to boys and girls begin to emerge – see chapter 10.
26 Garnica, op cit.
27 Patrick Craven, ‘Motherese, Affect, and the Mother-Infant Dyad: Shedding the Chomskian Notion of Early Development’, MSc dissertation, University of Edinburgh Centre for Cognitive Science, 1998. It’s even been argued that, since (put crudely) listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, couldn’t the musical qualities of motherese do the same? See Craven for a discussion.
28 Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, p.40 (London: Penguin Books, 1995).
29 ibid, p.279.
30 David Miall, ‘The Poetics of Baby Talk’, Human Nature, vol. 14, no. 4, 2003.
31 Dean Falk, ‘Prelinguistic Evolution in Early Hominins: Whence Motherese?’, Behavioural and Brain Science, 27:6, 2004.
32 Fernald, cited by Kitamura and Burnham, op cit.
33 Trainor et al, op cit.
34 Leher Singh et al, ‘Infants’ Listening Preferences: Baby Talk or Happy Talk’, Infancy, vol. 3, no. 3, 2002.
35 Ben G. Blount and Elise J. Padgug, ‘Prosodic, Paralinguistic, and Interactional Features in Parent-Child Speech: English and Spanish’, Journal of Child Language, 4, 1976; Anne Fernald et al, ‘A Cross-Language Study of Prosodic Modifications in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Speech to Preverbal Infants’, Journal of Child Language, 16, 1989.
36 Linnda (sic) R. Caporael, ‘The Paralanguage of Care-giving: Baby Talk to the Institutionally Aged’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 40, no. 5, 1981.
37 Brown, op cit.
38 Di Anne L. Grieser and Patricia Kuhl, ‘Maternal Speech to Infants in a Tonal Language: Support for Universal Prosodic features in Motherese’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 24, no. 1 1988.
39 Mechthild Papousek, ‘Early Ontogeny of Vocal Communication in Parent-Infant Interactions’, in Hanus Papousek et al, eds., Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Comparative and Developmental Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
40 Clifton Pye, ‘Quiche Mayan Speech to children’, Journal of Child Language, 13, 1986. In Papua New Guinea, for instance, little or no speech is addressed to infants until they begin to speak. Samoan rules also restrict parents’ speech to young children, who are supposed to be seen and not heard (Elinor Ochs, ‘Talking to Children in Western Samoa’, Language in Society, vol. 11 1982). Kaluli parents don’t think that their children are talking to them until they can say the words ‘mother’ and ‘breast’ (Schieffelin, cited in Pye, op cit). Mohave parents believe that newborns and even foetuses can understand and respond to rational verbal admonitions (George Devereux, ‘Mohave Voice and Speech Mannerisms’, in Dell Hymes, Language in Culture and Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
41 Paul Ekman, cited in Fernald 1992, op cit; C.Kitamura et al, 2002, op cit.
42 Robert W. Mitchell, ‘Americans’ Talk to Dogs: Similarities and Differences with Talk to Infants’, Research on Language and Social Interaction, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001.
43 Levin and Hunter, cited in Bella M. DePaulo and Lerita M. Coleman, ‘Verbal and Nonverbal Communication of Warmth to Children, Foreigners, and Retarded Adults’, Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, 11 (2), 1987.
44 K. Hirsh-Pasek and R. Treiman, ‘Doggerel: motherese in a new context’, Journal of Child Language, 9(1), 1982.
45 Robert W. Mitchell, ‘Controlling the Dog, Pretending to Have a Conversation, or Just Being Friendly: Influences of Sex and Familiarity on Americans’ Talk to Dogs During Play’, Interaction Studies, 5:1 2004.
46 Charles A. Ferguson, ‘Baby Talk as a Simplified Register’, in Snow and Ferguson, op cit.
47 Denis Burnham et al, ‘What’s New, Pussycat? On Talking to Babies and Animals’, Science, vol. 296, issue 5572, May 2002.
48 Baron, op cit.
49 Elaine Slosberg Andersen, Speaking with Style: The Sociolinguistic Skills of Children, (London: Routledge, 1992). Although foreigner talk gets us speaking louder rather than softer (as if being more audible somehow equalled being more comprehensible).
50 DePaulo and Coleman, 1981, op cit.
51 Caporael, op cit.
52 Brown, op cit.
53 Ferguson, 1977, op cit.
54 Caporael, op cit. See also DePaulo and Coleman, 1987, op cit, and Ellen Bouchard Ryan et al, ‘Evaluative Perceptions of Patronizing Speech Addressed to Elders’, Psychology and Ageing, vol. 6, no. 3, 1991. This last study, however, exemplifies many of the research flaws enumerated in chapters 8 and 13, in that paralinguistic speech traits were ‘inferred’ from written dialogue sequences.
55 See, for example, Jacobson et al, op cit, who did find both higher pitch and wider pitch range, but adjusted the differences by dividing men and women’s average variability by their mean fundamental frequency, and Mechthild Papouselk et al, ‘Infant Responses to Prototypical Melodic Contours in Parental Speech’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 13, 1990.
56 Fernald et al 1989, op cit. Perhaps mothers and fathers do different things with their babies – the father more inclined to horse-play, the mother more involved in containing and rhythmic care-taking. Had the fathers been recorded doing what they more usually do, would they have sounded different?
57 Malcolm Slaney and Gerald McRoberts, ‘BabyEars: A Recognition System for Affective Vocalizations’, Speech Communication, vol. 39, issues 3–4, February 2003.
58 Alison Gopnik et al, How Babies Think, p.128 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999).
59 Andrew Marlatt, ‘Is there a “wooka-boo” lurking in every man?’, www.baby-center.com.
60 Amye Warren-Leubecker and John Neil Bohannon 111 ‘Intonation Patterns in Child-directed Speech: Mother-Father Differences’, Child Development, 55, 1984.
61 ibid.
1 It requires the coordination of respiratory, laryngeal, and supralaryngeal (throat, mouth and nose) movements (Barry M. Lester and C.F. Zachariah Boukydis, ‘No Language But a Cry’, in Hanus Papousek et al, eds., Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Comparative and Developmental Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
2 A subsequent international search uncovered reports of 131 cases between 1546 and 1941, almost all associated with obstetrical procedures (David B. Chamberlain, ‘Babies Remember Pain’, Journal of Perinatal and Prenatal Psychology, 3(4), 1989).
3 Although they can’t actually be heard by others until released from the watery amniotic environment, their sounds penetrate the air (Pamela Davis, ‘Emotional Influences on Singing’, paper given at the First International Conference on the Physiology and Acoustics of Singing, Groningen, The Netherlands, October 305, 2002).
4 Paul J. Moses, The Voice of Neurosis, p. 16 (New York: Grune and Stratton).
5 ibid.
6 Richard Luchsinger and Godfrey E. Arnold, Voice-Speech-Language (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1965).
7 Ostwald et al, cited in Joanne Loewy, ‘Integrating Music, Language, and Voice in Music Therapy’, in ‘Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy’, vol. 4, no. 1, 1 March, 2004, www.voices.no.mainissues.
8 P.H. Wolff, ‘The Natural History of Crying and Other Vocalizations in Early Infancy’, in B.M. Foss, ed., Determinants of Infant Behaviour, vol. 4 (London: Methuen, 1969).
9 These conditions may get translated into different sounds via the vagus nerve, which produces changes both to the heart rate and vocal intonation that are associated with different emotional states. Stress causes a decrease in vagal tone, which can affect the sound of their cry (Rebecca M. Wood and Gwen E. Gustafson, ‘Infant Crying and Adults’ Anticipated Caregiving Responses: Acoustic and Contextual Influences’, Child Development, vol. 72, no. 5, September/October 2001).
10 K. Michelsson et al, ‘Cry Score – an Aid in Infant Diagnosis’, Folia Phoniatrica, 36, 1984; Dror Lederman, ‘Automatic Classification of Infants’ Cry’, M.Sc thesis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, October 2002. One genetic disorder, cri du chat syndrome, has been named after the sound made by infants and children suffering from it.
11 ibid.
12 Joseph Soltis, ‘The Signal Functions of Early Infant Crying’, in Behavioural Brain and Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
13 Corwin et al, cited in Lederman, op cit.
14 Lester and Boukydis, op cit.
15 Katarina Michelsson et al, ‘Cry Characteristics of 172 Healthy 1 – 7-Day-Old Infants’, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 54, 2002.
16 ibid.
17 Janice Chapman, ‘What Is Primal Scream?’, paper given at the First International Conference of the Physiology and Acoustics of Singing, Groningen, October 305, 2002.
18 More upset than when they’re exposed to equally loud non-human sounds (Marco Dondi et al, ‘Can Newborns Discriminate Between their Own Cry and the Cry of another Newborn Infant?’ Developmental Psychology, vol. 35(2), March 1999). A 1971 study found that newborns cried more when they heard another newborn crying than they did when they heard white noise, a 5-month-old crying, or a synthetic cry (M.L.Simner, ‘Newborn’s Response to the Cry of Another Infant’, Developmental Psychology, 5, 1971. See also Abraham Sagi and Martin L. Hoffman, ‘Empathetic Distress in the Newborn’, Developmental Psychology, 12: 2, 1976).
19 G.B. Martin and R.D. Clarke, ‘Distress Crying in Neonates: Species and Peer Specificity’, Developmental Psychology, 18, 1982.
20 Patsy Rodenburg, The Right to Speak, p.28 (London: Methuen, 1992).
21 Harry Hollien, Forensic Voice Identification (San Diego: Academic Press, 2002).
22 Lester and Boukydis, op cit.
23 See for instance Gwene E. Gustafson et al, ‘Acoustic Correlates of Individuality in the Cries of Infants’, Developmental Psychobiology, vol. 17:3.
24 Hollien, op cit.
25 Wood and Gustafson, op cit.
26 Ostwald, cited in Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998).
27 Rodenburg in ‘I’d Know that Voice Anywhere’, BBC Radio 4, 14.6.03.
28 Natasha Dobie, ‘Communicating Voice’, Newsletter of the British Voice Association, vol.3, issue 3, March 2003.
29 Dobie, op cit.
30 Rodenburg 1992, op cit.
31 Luchsinger and Arnold, op cit.
32 Juliet Miller, ‘The crashed Voice – a Potential for Change: a Psychotherapeutic view’, Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, 28, 2003.
33 See also Katarina Michelsson et al, 2002, op cit.
34 Reuters, 29 April 2001.
35 C. Hunger, ‘Search Your Voice and Find Your Life Stories …’, Onktruid (The Netherlands), 2000.
36 Charles Darwin, ‘A Biological Sketch of an Infant’, p.294, Mind, 1877.
37 Moses, op cit, p.17.
38 Philip Sanford Zeskind and Victoria Collins, ‘Pitch of Infant Crying and Caregiver Responses in a Natural Setting’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 10, 1987.
39 Annette Karmiloff-Smith, cited in Naomi Stadlen, What Mothers Do (London: Judy Piatkus, 2004).
40 Lester and Boukydis, op cit.
41 Benedicte de Boysson-Bardies et al, How Language Comes to Children: From Birth to Two Years (Boston: The MIT Press, 1999).
42 Lester and Boukydis, op cit.
43 Patricia K. Kuhl and Andrew N. Meltzoff, ‘Evolution, Nativism and Learning in the Development of Language and Speech’, in M. Gopnik, ed., The Inheritance and Innateness of Grammars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
44 Colwyn Trevarthen, ‘Learning about Ourselves from Children: Why a Growing Human Brain Needs Interesting Companions’, Research and Clinical Centre for Child Development, Annual Report 2002–2003 (No. 26), Graduate School of Education, Hokkaido University. See also M.C. Bateson, ‘Mother-Infant Exchanges: The Epigenesis of Conversational Interaction’, in D.R. Rieber, ed., Developmental Psycholinguistics and Communication Disorders: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 263 (New York: New York Academy of Science, 1975).
45 Lenneberg et al, cited in Danny Steinberg, Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind, and World (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1982).
46 Kuhl and Meltzoff 1997, op cit.
47 Trevarthen, op cit.
48 Wolff, op cit.
49 J.A.M. Martin, Voice, Speech, and Language in the Child: Development and Disorder (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1981).
50 M.A.K. Halliday, Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language (London: Edward Arnold, 1975).
51 Allison J. Doupe and Patricia K. Kuhl, ‘Birdsong and Human Speech: Common Themes and Mechanisms’, Annual Review of Neuroscience, 22, 1999.
52 In order to acquire the remarkable skill of learning to speak, hearing ourselves is as important as hearing other people (ibid). See also J.L. Locke, The Child’s Path to Spoken Language (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993).
53 Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species (London: Penguin Books, 1997).
54 Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1997, op cit.
55 Koopmans van Beinum and Van der Stelt, cited in de Boysson-Bardies et al, op cit.
56 ibid.
57 Judee K. Burgoon et al, Nonverbal Communication: The Unspoken Dialogue (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996).
58 Rodenburg, 1992, op cit.
59 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 1 (London: Pelican, 1984).
60 Webster et al, cited in Jacqueline Sachs, ‘The Adaptive Significance of Linguistic Output to Prelinguistic Infants’, in Catherine E. Snow and Charles A. Ferguson, Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
61 Lieberman, cited in ibid.
62 Weisberg, cited in Bowlby, op cit.
63 Kuhl and Meltzoff, op cit.
64 Roman Jakobson, Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1972; originally published 1941).
65 D. Kimbrough Oller and Rebecca E. Eilers, ‘Development of Vocal Signalling in Human Infants: Towards a Methodology for Cross-species Vocalization Comparisons’, in Hanus Papousek et al, op cit.
66 Siobhan Holowka and Laura Ann Petitto, ‘Left Hemisphere Specialization for Babies While Babbling’, Science, vol. 297, 30.08.02.
67 Kuhl and Meltzoff, op cit.
68 Laura Ann Petitto and Paula F. Marentette, ‘Babbling in the Manual Mode: Evidence for the Ontogeny of Language’, Science, vol. 251, 22.03.91.
69 Although young songbirds also ‘try out’ elements and phrases from their later songs – see Doupe and Kuhl, op cit.
70 Roman Jakobson, ‘Why “Mama” and “Papa”?’ in Bernard Kaplan and Seymour Wapner, eds, Perspectives in Psychological Theory (New York: International Universities Press, 1960, reprinted in 1962). Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, Vol. 1: Phonological Studies, pp.542–3 (The Hague: Mouton, 1962).
71 Kuhl and Meltzoff, op cit.
72 Delack, cited by Jacqueline Sachs, op cit.
73 ibid.
74 Patricia K. Kuhl and Andrew N. Meltzoff, ‘Infant Vocalizations in Response to Speech: Vocal Imitation and Developmental Change’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100 (4), Pt 1 October 1996. See also Vincent J. van Heuven and Ludmilla Menert, ‘Why Stress Position Bias?’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 100(4), Pt.1, October 1996.
75 Xin Chen et al, ‘Auditory-oral Matching Behaviour in Newborns’, Developmental Science, 7:1 2004.
76 Peter D. Eimas et al, ‘Speech Perception in Infants’, Science, New Series, vol. 171 no. 3968, 22.01.71.
77 Kuhl and Meltzoff 1997, op cit.
78 Derek M. Houston and Peter W. Jusczyk, ‘The Role of Talker-Specific Information in Word Segmentation by Infants’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 26, no. 5, 2000. This experiment found that 32-week-old babies could recognise familiar words spoken by different speakers of the same sex, but not of the opposite sex. The acoustic differences in the voices of men and women were too great, it seems, to be ignored by the infants, and stopped them recognising that the same word was being spoken. When they were three months older, however, they could recognise a familiar word no matter what the sex of the speaker.
79 Jusczyk et al, cited in Derek M. Houston and Peter W. Jusczyk, ‘Infants’ Long-Term Memory for the Sound Patterns of Words and Voices’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance’, vol. 29(6), December 2003. Another experiment found that when 7½ -month-olds heard words repeated a day later by the same voice, they were more likely to recognise the word.
80 Paul Iverson et al, ‘A Perceptual Interference Account of Acquisition Difficulties for Non-native Phonemes’, Cognition, 87, 2003. Naoyuki Takagi found that even with training, adult monolingual Japanese listeners sometimes misidentified them. (‘The Limits of Training Japanese Listeners to Identify English /r/ and /l/: Eight Case Studies’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 111(6) June 2002.
81 Janet F. Werker and Renée N. Desjardins, ‘Listening to Speech in the First Year of Life: Experimental Influences on Phoneme Perception’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol.4, no.3, June 1995. See also Janet F. Werker and Chris E. Lalonde, ‘Cross-Language Speech Perception: Initial Capabilities and Developmental Change’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 24, no. 5, 1988 and Janet F. Werker and Richard C. Tees, ‘Speech Perception as a Window for Understanding Plasticity and Commitment in Language Systems of the Brain’, Developmental Psychobiology, 46, 2005.
82 Patricia K. Kuhl et al, ‘Linguistic Experience Alters Phonetic Perception in Infants by 6 Months of Age’, Science, New Series, vol. 255, no. 5044, 31.01.92. This ‘perceptual magnet’, which shrinks the distance between some sounds and enlarges that between others, isn’t the result of language-learning but, on the contrary, prepares us for it.
83 William Kessen et al, ‘The Imitation of Pitch in Infants’, Infant Behaviour and Development, vol. 2, no. 1 January 1979.
84 Jenny R. Saffran and Gregory J. Griepentrog, ‘Absolute Pitch in Auditory Learning: Evidence for Developmental Reorganization’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 37(1), January 2001; Diane Deutsch et al, ‘Tone Language Speakers Possess Absolute Pitch’, paper presented at the 138th Meeting Lay Language Papers, Acoustical Society of America, Columbus, Ohio, 4.11.99.
85 William Kessen et al, ‘The Imitation of Pitch in Infants’, Infant Behaviour and Development, vol. 2, no. 1, Jan. 1979, p.99.
86 Erik D. Thiessen and Jenny R. Saffran, ‘When Cues Collide: Use of Stress and Statistical Cues to Word Boundaries by 7–9-month-old Infants’, Developmental Psychology, vol. 39(4) July 2003.
87 Alessandra Sansavini ‘Neonatal Perception of the Rhythmical Nature of Speech: The Role of Stress Patterns’, Early Development and Parenting, vol. 6(1) 1997.
88 Diane Mastropieri and Gerald Turkewitz, ‘Prenatal Experience and Neonatal Responsiveness to Vocal Expressions of Emotion’, Developmental Psychobiology, 35, 1999.
89 Thierry Nazzi et al, ‘Language Discrimination by Newborns: Towards an Understanding of the Role of Rhythm’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 24, no. 3, 1998. (See also Thierry Nazzi et al, ‘Language Discrimination by English-Learning 5-Month-olds: Effects of Rhythm and Familiarity’, Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 2000; Franck Ramus, ‘Perception of Linguistic Rhythm by Newborn Infants’, 2000, www.cogprints.org; and Alessandra Sansavini ‘Neonatal Perception of the Rhythmical Nature of Speech: The Role of Stress Patterns’, Early Development and Parenting, vol.6(1) 1997. We know this partly because of changes in their sucking-rates but also because, when you filter out the prosody, they can no longer accomplish this feat, so it was obviously the prosody of the language that guided them (G. Dehaerne-Lambertz and D. Houston, ‘Language Discrimination Response Latencies in 2-month-old Infants’, Language and Speech, 41, 1, 1998).
90 Christine Moon et al, ‘Two-day-olds Prefer their Native Language’, Infant Behaviour and Development, 16, 1993.
91 Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1997, op cit, p.2.
92 Patricia K. Kuhl, ‘A New View of Language Acquisition’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 97, no. 22, 24.10.00.
93 Kuhl and Meltzoff, 1997, op cit, p.3.
94 ibid, p.1.
95 Janet F. Werker and Richard C. Tees, ‘Influences on Infant Speech Processing: Towards A New Synthesis’, Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 1999.
96 As the laryngologist Paul Moses put it, in 1954, ‘Voice production is autoerotic activity before it is communication. The infant derives pleasure from phonation as an oral activity, and secondarily he learns to derive pleasure from hearing himself.’ (Paul Moses, The Voice of Neurosis, p.18, p.109, New York: Grune & Stratton, 1954).
97 J.A.M. Martin, Voice, Speech, and Language in the Child: Development and Disorder (Vienna: Springer-Verlag, 1981).
1 Deso A. Weiss, ‘The Psychological Relations to One’s Own Voice’, Folia Phoniatrica, vol. 7, no. 4, 1955, p.209.
2 Susan Lee Bady, ‘The Voice as a Curative Factor in Psychotherapy’, Psychoanalytic Review, 72(3), Fall 1985, p.481.
3 ibid, p.486.
4 Interview, 30.5.03.
5 Although Dieter Maurer and Theodor Landis challenge this in ‘Role of Bone Conduction in the Self-Perception of Speech’, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 42, 1990.
6 Patsy Rodenburg, The Right to Speak (London: Methuen, 1992).
7 Philip S. Holzman and Clyde Rousey, ‘The Voice as Precept’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 4, no. 1, 1966, pp. 84–85. A German voice teacher told me that she gets students to listen to recordings of other voices alongside her own: the context makes the experience less agonising, and they don’t compare what they sound like to what they thought they did, only to how others do. In this way they become slightly distanced from their own voice and develop ways of listening to and describing voices in general (personal communication, Evamarie Haupt, 1.09.05). A speech and language therapist suggested, ‘If you hate your voice, you can spend six years in therapy, or you can realise that it’s just a muscle setting and do exercises every morning so that eventually you get used to using it in a different way’ (personal communication, Christine Shewell, 1.09.05).
8 Interview, 21.11.03.
9 Morris W. Brody, ‘Neurotic Manifestations of the Voice’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 12, 1943.
10 Interview, 7.12.03.
11 Interview, 5.11.03.
12 Interview, 1.6.04.
13 Interview, 11.11.03.
14 Interview, 11.11.03.
15 Interview, 10.6.03.
16 Interview, 25.05.03.
17 Paul J. Moses, The Voice of Neurosis, p.60 (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1954).
18 Interview, 16.07.03.
19 ibid.
20 Interview, 23.10.03.
21 Interview, 21.3.04.
22 Interview, 6.11.03.
23 Interview, 5.11.03.
24 Interview, 7.05.05.
25 Interview, 10.10.03.
26 Erika Friedmann et al, ‘The Effects of Normal and Rapid Speech on Blood Pressure’, Psychosomatic Medicine, vol. 44, no. 6, December 1982. This paper is misnamed: it studied reading rather than speech, which confirms my point that it’s the sound of one’s own voice rather than purely the interactive aspects of speech that excite us physiologically.
27 Interview, 25.5.03.
28 ibid.
29 Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, p.246 (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1993).
30 Michael Frayn, Speak After the Beep, p.142–3 (London: Methuen, 1997).
31 Moses, op cit.
32 Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, p.28, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953).
33 ibid, p.30.
34 ibid.
35 Modern critics have contended that it was Freud’s own voice that was hysterical (albeit metaphorically), that he was blind to his own identification with Herr K. (Claire Kahane, ‘Introduction: Part 2’ in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism (London: Virago, 1985). Freud, it’s been argued, appropriated Dora’s story, becoming the third male complicit in the implicit deal through which, Dora felt, her father had bartered her to Herr K. in return for his wife. The mute Dora became, at least for a while, an emblem of the silenced female, victim of male predatory sexual power – woman gagged. See, for example, Toril Moi ‘Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud’s Dora’, in ibid; Claire Kahane, ‘Freud and the Passions of the Voice’ in John O’Neil (ed.), Freud and the Passions (The Pennsylvania State University, 1996); and Claire Kahane, Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915 (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
36 ‘A dispute, in the course of which she suppressed a rejoinder, caused a spasm of the glottis, and this was repeated on every similar occasion.’ (Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, ‘Studies on Hysteria’, p.40, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955).
37 ibid, p.35.
38 ibid, p.30.
39 Of course hysteria has a different meaning as a psychological term to the colloquial one of exaggerated emotions. As a diagnostic category it refers to physical symptoms without an organic cause – what today we might call ‘somatic’. And yet from its very route – the Greek for uterus – hysteria had an ideological meaning: thought to derive from disturbance of the uterus, it made femininity itself seem inherently pathological.
40 Margaret C.L. Greene, Disorders of Voice (Texas: Pro-Ed, 1986).
41 J. Nemec, cited in Robert J. Toohill, ‘The Psychosomatic Aspects of Children with Vocal Nodules’, Archives of Otolaryngology, vol. 101, October 1975. Another study describes children with vocal nodules as hyperactive, nervous, tense, or emotionally disturbed (Toohill, op cit). See also Aronson, cited in Caitriona McHugh-Munier et al, ‘Coping Strategies, Personality, and Voice Quality in Patients with Vocal Fold Nodules and Polyps’, Journal of Voice, vol. 11 no. 4, 1997.
42 ‘Common forms of psychogenic voice disorder arise mostly in women who have personalities that are no more than mildly neurotic, who are suffering from protracted anxiety associated with particular life stresses or events, who tend to have taken on above-average responsibilities, who are frequently caught up in family and interpersonal relationship difficulties, who are commonly having difficulties in assertiveness and the expression of emotions or negative feelings and who, consequently, feel powerless about making personal change. (Peter Butcher, ‘Psychological Processes in Psychogenic Voice Disorder’, European Journal of Disorders of Communication, 30, 1995).
43 Interview, 5.11.03.
44 Valerie Sinason, ‘When children are dumbstruck’, Guardian, 29.5.93.
45 Richard Barber, ‘Full power’, Saga, June 2003. A woman who’d been raped remembered ‘episodes, spread over several years, when I couldn’t, for the life of me, speak intelligibly …) For about a year after the assault, I rarely, if ever, spoke in smoothly flowing sentences’ (Susan Brison, ‘After I Was Raped’, Guardian, 6.2.02).
46 ‘It’s as if the psyche relaxes (and here we could replace psyche with voice): the voice relaxes once it is felt that the crucial psychological issues are finally being dealt with.’ (Juliet Miller, ‘The Crashed Voice – a Potential for Change: a Psychotherapeutic View’, Logopedics, Phoniatrics, Vocology, 28, 2003). The voice teacher Patsy Rodenburg suggests that psychic trauma that has shut down the voice can be released in voice workshops through what she calls delayed ‘vocal shock’. Working with the deepest breath, students of the voice find themselves unblocking painful memories of grief, rage, and even sexual abuse (Patsy Rodenburg, The Right To Speak, London: Methuen, 1992).
47 John Diamond, The Times, 24.10.98.
48 John Diamond, The Times, 15.5.99.
49 John Diamond, The Times, 3.10.98. Touchingly his small daughter alone was able to negotiate the only conversations possible with his post-surgical voice. ‘She accepts without second thought the fact that once I spoke like that and now I speak like this, and when she can’t understand me … she’ll say, “What?” and manage to maintain the appropriate remorse or fear or truculence all the way through her incomprehension and my repetition, which is some trick.’ (John Diamond, The Times, 18.10.97).
50 John Diamond, The Times, 20.9.97.
51 ibid. The playwright Peter Tinniswood also articulated his feelings after he, too, was left voiceless by treatment for oral cancer. Rescued eventually by an electronic voicebox, which forced him to slow down his naturally rapid speech, he found that his brain now worked faster than his voice. Tinniswood put the experience to dramatic use by writing a play, The Voice Boxer, about the grief, sense of loss, and rage of a man who wakes up after a laryngectomy only to find that his voice has developed a life of its own and is now travelling the world. (Peter Tinniswood, ‘Speaking as a Dalek’, Guardian, 8.2.00).
52 Sheila Johnston, ‘What a piece of work’, Independent, 18.4.91.
53 Interview, 31.5.04.
54 Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework, p.81 (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998).
55 Rodenburg, op cit, p.226.
56 ibid.
57 Interview with Andrea Haring, 28.5.03.
58 Interview, 12.4.04.
59 Rodenburg, op cit, pp.168–9.
60 Interview with Andrea Haring, and Elena McGee, 28.05.03.
61 Interview, 7.12.03.
62 Interview, 30.05.03.
63 Interview, 30.05.03.
1 John Carvel, ‘Minister of Sound’, Guardian, 25.5.00.
2 Of the same kind that set the first ever British radio play, Richard Hughes’s ‘Danger’ (1924), down a coal mine.
3 Blunkett has described his reliance on his voice-reading skills. ‘[I] try to imagine the pleasantness of the visual aspects of the person and their voice … Not seeing voices makes you a fairer judge … Voices that are sharp and harsh reflect – but not exclusively – harsh and sharp personalities; voices that are pleasant and easy often reflect that personality … But you do get it wrong and I’ve certainly got it wrong in a big way once in my life’ (Daily Mail, 06.09.05).
4 As the neurologist Henry Head called it in his treatise on aphasia, Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech (Cambridge University Press, 1926).
5 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, pp.76–7 (London: Picador, 1986).
6 ibid. In 2000 a quartet of researchers tried to test out Sacks’s hypothesis to discover if aphasics were significantly better at detecting lies than people without language impairment. While ordinary people are usually no better than chance at detecting deceit from a person’s voice, the researchers found that aphasics were more accurate in sniffing out lies. But the study also found that the aphasics only did better when they got clues from the liars’ facial behaviour or from face and voice combined, and not when the cues were from the voice alone (Nancy L. Etcoff et al, ‘Lie Detection and Language Comprehension’, Nature, vol. 405, May 2000). This suggests that the relationship between face and voice is a complex and mutually reinforcing one and, as I’ll be arguing, that statements about the voice’s superior ability to reveal all are often wildly exaggerated.
7 Antoinette L. Bouhuys and Wilhemina E.H. Mulder-Hajonides Van Der Meulen, ‘Speech Timing Measures of the Severity, Psychomotor Retardation, and Agitation in Endogenously Depressed Patients’, Journal of Communication Disorders, 17, 1984.
8 Tom Johnstone and Klaus R. Scherer, ‘The Effects of Emotions on Voice Quality’, unpublished research report, Geneva Studies in Emotion and Communication, 13(3), 1999 www.unige.ch/fapse/emotions.
9 Caitriona McHugh-Munier et al, ‘Coping Strategies, Personality, and Voice Quality in Patients with Vocal Fold Nodules and Polyps’, Journal of Voice, vol.11, no.4, 1997.
10 Paul J. Moses, The Voice of Neurosis (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1954).
11 Lindsley, cited in Carl E. Williams and Kenneth N. Stevens, ‘Emotions and Speech: Some Acoustical Correlates’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 52, no. 4, Part 2, 1972.
12 Williams and Stevens, ibid.
13 Moses, op cit, on William Faulkner’s research.
14 Moses, op cit.
15 Moses, op cit. Microtremors in our vocal muscles when we speak might also be an expression of our psychological state. Voice specialists have been arguing for some time about the effects that stress has on these microtremors. It’s been variously suggested that they get induced, modified, or even suppressed by emotional tension – a subject of particular interest to those developing lie detectors (Elvira Mendoza and Gloria Carballo, ‘Vocal Tremor and Psychological Stress’, Journal of Voice, vol. 13.no. 1).
16 Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Expression of Emotion in Voice and Music’, Journal of Voice, vol. 9, no. 3, 1995. In dangerous situations the autonomous nervous system, by influencing the secretion of mucus and salivation, gives us a dry mouth and, by changing subglottal pressure, affects our breathing pattern, leading to a higher-pitched voice (Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Vocal Affect Expression: a Review and a Model for Future Research’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 99, no. 2, 1986).
17 John Rubin, ‘I’d Know That Voice Anywhere’, BBC Radio 4, 14.06.03.
18 Ross Buck, ‘The Neuropsychology of Communication: Spontaneous and Symbolic Aspects’, Journal of Pragmatics, 22, 1994.
19 This kind of research gained impetus from the popularity of radio, then at its most salient culturally.
20 Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Personality Inference from Voice Quality: the Loud Voice of Extroversion’, European Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 8, 1978. Originally coined by Jung, the concepts of extroversion and introversion gained currency in the 1960s through the work of Hans Eysenck. Though Eysenck posited a continuum of these traits, extroversion was essentially seen as the opposite of introversion. Yet, reading the definition of these terms (see, for example, H.J. Eysenck and S.B.G. Eysenck, Manual of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (London: University of London Press, 1964), I can’t be alone in finding myself located simultaneously at opposite ends of the spectrum.
21 Moses, op cit.
22 ibid, pp. 83, 1.
23 ibid.
24 Bruce L. Brown and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, ‘Towards a Social Psychology of Voice Variations’, in Howard Giles and Robert N. St Clair, Recent Advances in Language, Communication and Social Psychology (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985).
25 As recently as 2000 one pair of researchers was arguing that people who suffered from dysphonia (difficulty producing sounds) were neurotic introverts, and that ‘personality may act as a persistent risk factor for voice pathology’ (Nelson Roy et al, ‘Personality and Voice Disorders: A Superfactor Trait Analysis’, Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, vol. 43, June 2000, p.764). Of course this begs the whole question of what personality is, or whether indeed there is any such thing – see Aron W. Siegman, ‘The Telltale Voice: Nonverbal Messages of Verbal Communication’, in Aron W. Siegman and Stanley Feldstein, eds., Nonverbal Behaviour and Communication (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987). For a discussion of some problems surrounding personality testing, see Brown and Bradshaw, op cit.
26 Before him the musicologist Friedrich Marpurg had tried to link specific acoustic patterns with particular emotional states. Sorrow, for example, was characterised by a ‘slow melody and dissonance’, and envy – he suggested – by ‘growling and annoying tones’. (L.M. Lovett and B. Richardson, ‘Talk: Rate, Tone and Loudness – How They Change in Depression’, paper given to the Autumn Quarterly Meeting, Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1992.)
27 ibid. Difficulties with speech, argued the American psychiatrist Adolph Meyer in 1904, were one of the most striking features of severe depression (John F. Greden and Bernard J. Carroll, ‘Decrease in Speech Pause Times with Treatment of Endogenous Depression’, Biological Psychiatry, vol. 15, no. 4, 1980).
28 Kraepelin, quoted in John F. Greden et al, ‘Speech Pause Time: A Marker of Psychomotor Retardation Among Endogenous Depressives’, Biological Psychiatry, vol. 16, no. 9, 1981, p.852.
29 Murray Alpert, ‘Encoding of Feelings in Voice’, in P.I. Clayton and J.E. Barrett, Treatment of Depression: Old Controversies and New Approaches (New York: Raven Press, 1983).
30 William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (London: Vintage, 2001). The voice can also help distinguish between types of depression, since not all produce the same kind of acoustic change – schizophrenia, depression, and mania all sound different. (Julian Leff and Evelyn Abberton, ‘Voice Pitch Measurements in Schizophrenia and Depression’, Psychological Medicine, 11 1981.) See also Newman and Mather cited in John K. Darby, ‘Speech and Voice Studies in Psychiatric Populations’ in Speech Evaluation in Psychiatry, ed. John K Darby (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1981). Schizophrenics’ voices have been studied almost obsessively, for a very long time. Almost a century ago ‘flatness of affect’, i.e. speaking in a monotone, was identified as perhaps the most crucial symptom of schizophrenia (Kraepelin, cited in Nancy C. Andreasen et al, ‘Acoustic Analysis: An Objective Measure of Affective Flattening’, Archives of General Psychiatry, vol. 38, March 1981). The schizophrenic’s voice becomes as immobile as their face. They also repeat senseless rhythmic sentences over and over again for months and even years, perhaps in a regression to infantile patterns ‘in which words, language, communication have lost meaning, but rhythm has not’ (Moses, op cit, p56).
31 John K. Darby and Alice Sherk, ‘Speech Studies in Psychiatric Populations’, in Harry and Patricia Hollien, eds., Current Issues in the Phonetic Sciences, vol. 9, pt 2 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1979).
32 Kraepelin’s idea that a depressed person speaks with elongated pauses has been confirmed in research many times over. (E. Szabadi and C.M. Bradshaw, ‘Speech Pause Time: Behavioural Correlate of Mood’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 140:2, February 1983). Describing the change in his voice when he became depressed, William Styron said, ‘My speech, emulating my way of walking, had slowed to the vocal equivalent of a shuffle’ (William Styron, ‘A Journey Through Madness’, Independent on Sunday, 24 February 1991).
33 Klos et al cited in Lovett and Richardson, op cit. Forensic psychiatrists also use Speech-pause time to help to evaluate the psychological state of an accused person and decide if they’re competent to stand trial (Bernard L. Diamond, ‘The Relevance of Voice in Forensic Psychiatric Evaluations’, in John K. Darby, 1981 op cit). What makes it a particularly useful method is that the person being tested doesn’t even need to be present (audio recordings of them can be used), let alone attached to electrodes, nor do they need to be discussing something personal or highly charged – any banal subject will do (Alpert, op cit.)
34 Greden and Carroll, op cit. See also Greden op cit; H.H. Stassen et al, ‘The speech Analysis Approach to Determining Onset of Improvement under Antidepressants’, European Neuropsychopharmacology, 8, 1998; and G.M.A. Hoffmann et al, ‘Speech Pause Time as a Method for the Evaluation of Psychomotor Retardation in Depressive Illness’, British Journal of Psychiatry, 146, 1985. There are examples of a patient’s pause time decreasing by more than 50 per cent within several days of starting treatment. See also Ostwald cited in John K. Darby and Harry Hollien, ‘Vocal and Speech Patterns of Depressed Patients’, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 29, 1977. Antidepressants also affect the voice – not just the speed of speaking, its volume, and variety, but also its pitch (Stassen, op cit).
35 David F. Salisbury, ‘Researchers Measure Distinct Characteristics in Speech of Individuals at High Risk of Suicide’, ‘Exploration’ (online research journal of Vanderbilt University), 23.10.00.
36 D.J. France et al, ‘Acoustical Properties of Speech as Indications of Depression and Suicidal Risk, Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 47 (7) July 2000.
37 Although it’s also characterised by a larger pitch range (Johnstone and Scherer, 1999, op cit) as well as slow tempo and regular rhythm.
38 Tom Johnstone and Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Vocal Communication of Emotion’, in Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, Handbook of Emotions, 2ndedition (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000).
39 Klaus R. Scherer and Harvey London, ‘The Voice of Confidence’, Journal of Research in Personality, 7, 1973.
40 Rainer Banse and Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Acoustic Profiles in Vocal Emotion Expression’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 70, no. 3, 1996.
41 For the various studies that produced these findings, see Iain R. Murray and John L. Arnott, ‘Toward the Simulation of Emotion in Synthetic Speech: A Review of the Literature on Human Vocal Emotion’, Journal of the Acoustic Society of America, 93 (2), February 1993.
42 Johnstone and Scherer, 2000, op cit.
43 Allan and Barbara Pease, Why Men Lie and Women Cry (London: Orion, 2003).
44 Carl E. Williams and Kenneth N. Stevens, ‘Vocal Correlates of Emotional States’, in John K. Darby, ed., Speech Evaluation in Psychiatry (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1981).
45 William Hargreaves et al, ‘Voice Quality in Depression’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 70, no. 3, 1965. See also Newman and Mather in Lovett and Richardson, op cit.
46 Judith Whelan, ‘Voice Key to Suicide Intention, Study Finds’, Sydney Morning Herald, 18.8.00.
47 Younger depressed patients speak faster after treatment, but older people slow down (Ostwald, cited in Darby and Hollien, op cit).
48 Mark L. Knapp, Non-verbal Communication in Human Interaction (New York: Rinehart & Winston, 1972).
49 Kenton L. Burns and Ernst G. Beier, ‘Significance of Vocal and Visual Channels In the Decoding of Emotional Meaning’, Journal of Communication, vol. 23, March 1973. This particular study ended with a sentence – ‘How do acted mood expressions compare with genuine mood expressions?’ – that one can’t help feeling the researchers should have asked before they ever started. Klaus R. Scherer, the leading researcher in this field, has been frank about some of the limitations of this work. See, for instance, his ‘Expression of Emotion in Voice and Music’, Journal of Voice, vol. 9, no. 3, and ‘Vocal Affect Expression: a Review and a Model for Future Research’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 99, no. 2, 1986.
50 Williams and Stevens, 1981 op cit.
51 Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Speech and Emotional States’, in Darby, op cit. The presence of several simultaneous emotions in the voice, not to mention background noise, is regarded as ‘interference’ (see for instance Williams and Steven, 1991, op cit).
52 Scherer, 1986, op cit.
53 Except for accommodation theory, examined in chapter 17.
54 Johnstone and Scherer 2000, op cit, p.228. Perhaps what this kind of research on the voice, emotions and personality reveals more than anything is the stereotypes that attach to different kinds of voices, rather than anything significant about real emotional states (Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework, London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998). Although the voice affects how we feel about people, it may not invariably be an accurate reflection of how they feel or who they are.
55 Pollack, cited in Murray and Arnott, op cit.
56 Interview, 21.11.03.
57 Interview, 7.12.03.
58 ibid.
59 Interview 26.5.03.
60 Interview 7.5.04.
61 Interview 5.6.04.
62 Interview 31.3.03.
63 Interview 12.7.03.
64 Bugenthal, quoted in Robert G. Harper et al, eds., Nonverbal Communication: The State of the Art, p.30 (New York: John Wiley, 1978).
65 Alexia Demertzis Rothman and Stephen Nowicki Jr., ‘A Measure of the Ability to Identify Emotions in Children’s Tone of Voice’, Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, 28(2), Summer 2004.
66 Erin B. McClure and Stephen Nowicki Jr., ‘Associations Between Social Anxiety and Nonverbal Processing Skill in Preadolescent Boys and Girls’, Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, 25 (1), Spring 2001. Of course this is a chicken-and-egg situation: does good voice-decoding decrease social anxiety, or does less social anxiety make for better voice-reading, or perhaps both? And these studies, once again, were based upon staged emotions – children told to sound happy, sad, angry, or fearful – rather than spontaneous expressions of feeling.
67 ibid.
68 Cadesky, cited in Rothman and Nowicki op cit.
69 Mitchell, cited in ibid. Again this begs questions about the causal nature of the relationship between the offence and the misreading – which caused what? And yet most of us have seen aggressive people misread mild comments as overt hostility often enough to appreciate how easy it is to project one’s own emotion into the voice of someone else.
70 See, for instance, Stephen Nowicki and Marshall P. Duke, Helping the Child Who Doesn’t Fit In (Peachtree Publishers, 1992), and Marshall P. Duke et al, Teaching Your Child the Language of Social Success (Bay Back Books, 1996). Some of these authors have certainly done significant work on children and adolescents with serious difficulties in voice-reading. They’ve suggested that such children’s low self-esteem, high anxiety and depression, along with unpopularity, may be related to non-verbal processing difficulties (Elizabeth B. Love et al, ‘The Emory Dyssemia Index: a Brief Screening for the Identification of Nonverbal Language Deficits in Elementary-School Children’, Journal of Psychology, no. 1 1994).
71 Stephen Nowicki Jr., and Marshall Duke, Will I Ever Fit In? The Breakthrough Program for Conquering Adult Dyssemia (Free Press, 2002).
72 Rocco Dal Vera, ‘The Voice in Heightened Affective States’, p.58, in Rocco Dal Vera, ed., The Voice in Violence (2001 Voice and Speech Trainers Association).
74 His claims have been challenged, as has his contention that he uses psychology rather than clever conjurors’ tricks. See, for example, Simon Singh, ‘Spectacular Nonsense or Silly Psycho-Babble’, Daily Telegraph, 5.6.03.
75 Aldert Vrij et al, ‘People’s Insight into Their Own Behaviour and Speech Content When Lying’, British Journal of Psychology, 92, 2001.
76 Luigi Anolli and Rita Ciceri ‘The Voice of Deception: Vocal Strategies of Naïve and Able Liars’, Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, 21 (4), Winter 1997.
77 Aldert Vrij, ‘Detecting the Liars’, Psychologist, vol. 14, no. 11 November 2001.
78 See Knapp, op cit and Judee K. Burgoon et al, Nonverbal Communication (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996). Burgoon et al suggest that these two may be linked: that a person who finds it difficult to identify fear in others may respond by expressing it more carefully themselves.
79 Michael Argyle, Bodily Communication (London: Routledge, 1975). Our ability to detect the emotional nuances in other people’s voices becomes more accurate with age, and is connected with our general social competence (Rothman and Nowicki op cit), but not our gender or IQ (Eric Benjamin Cadesky et al, ‘Beyond Words: How Do Children with ADHD and/or Conduct Problems Process Nonverbal Information About Affect?’, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 39 (9), September 2000).
80 Vrij, 2001, op cit, p.597.
81 Samantha Mann et al, ‘Detecting True Lies: Police Officers’ Ability to Detect Suspects’ Lies’, Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 89, no. 1, 2004. As Mann et al point out, many of these studies contain a fundamental flaw because they take place in laboratory settings where subjects have been asked to lie and therefore won’t be feeling the kind of anxiety that attends lying in real life. One piece of research evaluating the ability of 509 people – including police officers, judges and psychiatrists, as well as those from the CIA, FBI and drug-enforcement agencies – to detect liars found that only the secret service performed better than chance (Paul Ekman and Maureen O’Sullivan, ‘Who Can Catch A Liar’, American Psychologist, vol. 46, no. 9, September 1991).
82 Moses, op cit.
83 T.H. Pear, Voice and Personality, pp.34, 75 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931).
84 Interview 26.10.03.
85 Arthur Miller, Timebends, p.380 (London: Methuen, 1988). Thanks to Michael Ball for reminding me of this passage.
86 Interview 25.5.03.
87 Interview 7.10.03.
88 Interview 20.05.03.
89 Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998).
90 Susan Lee Bady, ‘The Voice as a Curative Factor in Psychoanalysis’, Psychoanalytic Review, 72(3), Fall 1985.
91 Morris W. Brody, ‘Neurotic Manifestations of the Voice’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. 12, 1943, p.377. The fascinating, complex relationship between inner and outer voices is beyond the scope of this book.
92 ‘Much attention may profitably be paid to the telltale aspects of intonation, rate of speech, difficulty in enunciation, and so on … Tonal variations in the voice … are frequently wonderfully dependable clues to shifts in the communication situation’ (Harry Stack Sullivan, The Psychiatric Interview, p.5, New York: Norton, 1954). Note that Sullivan was speaking about individual patients, as heard by their experienced practitioner. Attempts to identify the emotions in patients’ voices objectively and quantify their intensity have produced some pretty crude results – for example, Robert Roessler and Jerry W. Lester, ‘Voice Predicts Affect During Psychotherapy’, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 163, no. 3, 1976.
93 C. G. Jung, The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, pp.70–71 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).
94 Interview, 30.5.03. One psychotherapist noted in 1943, ‘Subtle changes in the timbre, the inflections or monotony, the rate of speech, pitch and intensity or deviations in the use or grouping of words, may all be expressions of underlying emotional conflict’ (Brody, op cit, p.371).
95 Laura N. Rice and Conrad J. Koke, ‘Vocal Style and the Process of Psychotherapy’, in John K. Darby, ed., Speech Evaluation in Psychotherapy (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1981). How discrete and clearly identifiable these categories are is another question. The Chicago work challenges the classic study of silence in psychotherapy, which treated disturbances, hesitations, and silences in the patient’s speech purely as expressions of anxiety and defences (George Mahl, ‘Disturbances and Silences in the Patient’s Speech in Psychotherapy’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 53, 1956). The meaning of pauses and hesitations, of course, depends on the individual patient, or indeed session: what might be a defence in one person at one time may herald a glorious insightful breakthrough in another.
96 ibid, p.162.
97 Brody, op cit.
98 Jungian analysts sit beside the couch, within the patient’s peripheral vision.
99 Interview, 30.5.03.
100 Bady, op cit, p.483.
101 James Gooch in Panel Report: ‘Bion’s Perspective on Psychoanalytic Method’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2002. Of course there’s no single therapeutic voice, whatever the caricatures of psychotherapy would have us believe. The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, for example, could be famously and facetiously sarcastic, according to his patients (James Gooch, ‘Bion’s Perspective on Psychoanalytic Technique’, paper given at the 42nd Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association, Nice, 26.07.01 www.psychoanalysis.org.uk), and different schools of therapy use different techniques and vocal styles.
102 Interview, 5.11.03.
103 Sharon Zalusky, ‘Telephone Analysis: Out of Sight, But Not Out of Mind’, www.psychomedia.it. Zalusky discusses the way that the telephone can intensify the transference and, as a place between fantasy and reality, can become a transitional object in itself.
104 Interview, 11.04.05. She also tapes the sessions, which has allowed her to listen to the sound of her own voice ‘and hear myself in a way I never have before’.
105 Sigmund Freud, ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, p.116 (London: Hogarth, 1958).
106 A 44-year-old woman remarked, ‘Someone who didn’t understand a word of English could come into one of my therapy sessions and understand what was going on purely on the basis of hearing my voice and my therapist’s. I often go off on some tangent – some subject that it’s easy for me speak about and doesn’t raise any strong feelings, my therapist calls it my “headtalk”, all from the top of my head, and she stops me when I get like that. When I touch some painful place I usually talk very little, as if I don’t want to distract myself by having to say something, and my voice goes small, there’s almost no gap between what I’m feeling and saying, the saying is the feeling. And when that happens, my therapist’s voice gets very gentle: it’s like she’s acknowledging in sound that I’m facing up to something difficult, like she’s trying to hold my hand with her voice, not to crash into this moment with myself when I’m crying or shocked or lead it off into some other direction or require me to have to react to her, to let me stay where I am, but also to remind me, just by using her voice, that she’s still there, and knows it’s painful, but also that it’s good that I’ve connected with it. And that’s all there, in the sound of our voices.’
107 Freud, op cit, p.115.
108 Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear, p.145 (New York: Farrar-Strauss and Company, 1949).
109 Peter Lewis, unpublished paper, 1987.
1 Although these change with age (Alan Cruttenden, Intonation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
2 Judee K. Burgoon et al, Nonverbal Communication (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996).
3 The larynx increases by 62 per cent between the ages of 10 to 16 for boys, and 34 per cent between the ages of 12 to 16 for girls (Kahane, cited in Ingo R. Titze, ‘Physiologic and Acoustic Differences Between Male and Female Voices’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 85(4), April 1989).
4 Paul J. Moses, The Voice of Neurosis (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1954).