5 Changes to the vocal folds (and the resulting vocal differences) are secondary sex characteristics, physical features that develop during puberty, influenced by hormones. These characteristics distinguish the sexes from each other but are not directly concerned with sexual reproduction, the province of the primary sex organs.
6 In Western culture: among the Mohave Indians, the breaking of the male adolescent’s voice isn’t considered a sign of puberty (George Devereux, ‘Mohave Voice and Speech Mannerisms’, in Dell Hymes, Language in Culture and Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
7 Deso A. Weiss, ‘The Pubertal Change of the Human Voice’, Folia Phoniatrica, vol. 2, 1950.
8 Richard Luchsinger and Godfrey E. Arnold, Voice – Speech – Language (California: Wadsworth, 1965).
9 Margaret Mead, cited in Cheris Kramarae, ‘Women’s Speech: Separate But Unequal?’, in Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance (Massachusetts: Newbury House, 1975).
10 Birdwhistell, cited in Nancy M. Henley, ‘Power, Sex, and Nonverbal Communication’, in Thorne and Henley, op cit.
11 Henley, in ibid.
12 Joan Swann, Girls, Boys and Language, p.21 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
13 David Graddol and Joan Swann, Gender Voices, p.22 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
14 ‘Suite Stuff’, March 2000, www.tgni.com. But this is often exaggerated by some transsexuals who, to pass as a woman, fall back on a falsetto (Paul J. Daniel, ‘Voice Change Surgery in the Transsexual’, Head and Neck Surgery, May-June 1982). The falsetto is a common male way of caricaturing women: the actress Meryl Streep has questioned why Dustin Hoffman chose such a squeaky high voice for the character of Dorothy in Tootsie (Hollywood Greats, BBCI 8.3.04). It’s harder for male-to-female transsexuals to acquire a feminine-sounding voice than the other way round because the injection of male hormones thickens the vocal folds, so automatically lowering the pitch, but female hormones, interestingly, don’t raise the pitch. Male-to-female transsexuals sometimes resort to surgery to stretch the vocal folds, but if over-stretched, these produce a Minnie Mouse voice. Over the past few years, however, speech therapists have begun using a non-surgical approach known as voice-feminisation therapy. While some of the techniques are based on altering language and on outrageous caricatures -like getting male-to-female transsexuals to use words like ‘cute’, seeking confirmation from the listener (‘It’s a nice day, isn’t it?’), or using hyperbole (‘That was absolutely the most fantastic, awe-inspiring, and beautiful movie I have ever seen’) – others are mainly paralinguistic, like varying their rates of speech (Moya L. Andrews and Charles P. Schmidt, ‘Gender Presentations: Perceptual and Acoustical Analyses of Voice’, Journal of Voice, vol. 11, no. 3, 1997).
15 Delack and Lowlow, cited in Carole T. Ferrand and Ronald L. Bloom, ‘Gender Differences in Children’s Intonational Patterns’, Journal of Voice, vol. 10, no. 3.
16 Weinberg and Bennett, op cit. Already, by age 8 too, children have begun to adopt the gendered pronunciation of their same-sex parent – see Elizabeth A. Strand, ‘Uncovering the Role of Gender Stereotypes in Speech Perception’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, vol. 18, no. 1, March 1999.
17 Jacqueline Sachs et al, ‘Anatomical and Cultural Determinants of Male and Female Speech’, in Roger W. Shuy and Ralph W. Fasold, eds., Language Attitudes: Current Trends and Prospects (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1973).
18 Jean Berko Gleason and Esther Blank Greif, ‘Men’s Speech to Young Children’, in Barrie Thorne et al, eds., Language, Gender, and Society (Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 1983).
19 Lieberman, cited in Philip M. Smith, ‘Sex Markers in Speech’, in Klaus R. Scherer and Howard Giles, eds., Social Markers in Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
20 Elaine Slosberg Andersen, Speaking with Style: the Sociolinguistic Skills of Children (London: Routledge, 1990).
21 Ferrand and Bloom, op cit.
22 Crystal, cited in ibid.
23 See Gill Branston, ‘… Viewer, I Listened to Him … Voices, Masculinity, in the Line of Fire’, in Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, eds., Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies, and Women (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995) for a discussion of Eastwood’s voice. And yet some of the supposed difference between boys’ and girls’ voices is illusory. When asked to identify the sex of singers in a cathedral choir, listeners were able to identify the gender of choristers correctly only 53 per cent of the time (David Howard et al, ‘Can Listeners Tell the Difference Between Boys and Girls Singing the Top Line in Cathedral Music?’, in C. Stevens et al, eds., Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, Adelaide: Casual Publications, 2002). Part of the difficulty of coolly appraising the similarities and differences between men and women’s voices is because most of what we know about speech production comes from studies of male speakers: what’s taken as normal, the vocal template, is based on male voices (Ingo R. Titze, ‘Physiologic and Acoustic Differences Between Male and Female Voices’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, April 85(4)1989), and female voices, as a result, have been seen as deviant or abnormal – at least until the explosion of interest in the subject on the part of women in the 1970s. See Caroline Henton, in ‘The Abnormality of Male Speech’, in George Wolf, ed, New Departures in Linguistics, New York: Garland Publishing, 1992 for a robust challenge to the dominant view.
24 Sachs et al, op cit.
25 ibid, p.75. See also Bernd Weinberg and Suzanne Bennett, ‘Speaker Sex Recognition of 5 – and 6-year-old Children’s Voices’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 50, no. 4 (pt 2), 1971.
26 Berachot 24a.
27 Subsequent orthodox commentaries have conducted heated debates over whether this also applied to a woman’s speaking voice and not just her singing one, if it covered a man’s wife as well as strange women, and whether listening to women singing on radio and television was proscribed too. Despite the insistence of some modern female commentators that men’s voices might possess a similar power to induce sinful thoughts in women, the Talmud’s dictates that women shouldn’t sing in the presence of men have prevented women from participating in orthodox synagogue choirs for centuries.
28 I Corinthians 14: 34–35. Like the rabbis’ proscriptions, this too had the effect of excluding women from participating in ecclesiastical services. So both Judaism and Christianity grafted ideas of shame and indecency on to women’s voices, articulating beliefs about the connection between the voice and sexuality.
29 Aristotle, Politics, part XIII (Oxford: OUP, 1998).
30 Sophocles, Ajax, p.293 (Oxford: OUP, 1999).
31 T. Wilson, ‘The Arte of Rhetorique’, 1553, quoted in Caroline Henton, ‘The Abnormality of Male Speech’, p.29, in George Wolf, ed., New Departures in Linguistics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992), although it’s as well to remember, as one linguist has pointed out, that ‘the fact that social science has neglected women makes women of the past and other cultures seem silent, when in fact the silence is that of current Western scholarship’ (Susan Gal, quoted in Deborah Cameron, ed., The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader, p.4, London: Routledge, 1998).
32 Described by Ovid in gruesome detail: ‘The severed tongue along the ground/lay quivering … jerking and twitching’ (Metamorphosis, Book 3, London: Penguin, 1970).
33 ibid.
34 Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
35 Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
36 George Webbe, quoted in ibid, p.151. In seventeenth-century colonial America, the ducking stool was used to submerge women characterised as a ‘scold’, ‘nag’, or just plain ‘unquiet’: they then had to choose between silence and drowning.
37 ibid.
38 Quoted in Henton, 1992, op cit, p.30.
39 ibid.
40 John C. Steinberg, 1927, quoted in Anne McKay, ‘Speaking Up: Voice Amplification and Women’s Struggle for Public Expression’, in Cheris Kramarae, Technology and Women’s Voices, p.203 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), reprinted in Caroline Mitchell, ed., Women and Radio: Airing Differences (London: Routledge, 2000).
41 ‘Filing Steel’, Daily Express, 19.09.28, quoted in Cheris Kramarae, ‘Resistance to Women’s Public Speaking’, in Senta Tromel-Plotz, ed., Gewalt durch Sprache (Frankfurt: Fisher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984). The concept of ‘listener’ had clearly yet to take root – here they’re still ‘listeners-in’, with that phrase’s palpable sense of eavesdropping. Add to that the sound-image of ‘groans’, and yet again we encounter the female voice’s apparent sexual suggestiveness, and the almost shameful impact of transposing into the public realm a voice that obviously belongs in private (in the bedroom).
42 Weekly Dispatch, 19.09.26, quoted in ibid.
43 Evening Standard, 2.10.03, quoted in ibid.
44 Sunday Dispatch, 22.07.45, quoted in ibid.
45 Southern Daily Echo, 9.11.28, quoted in ibid.
46 Radio Broadcast magazine, 1924, quoted in McKay, p.200, op cit.
47 John Wallace, Radio Broadcast magazine, 1926, quoted in ibid, McKay, p.202.
48 News Chronicle, 29.07.33, quoted in Kramarae, 1988, op cit.
49 ibid. While we can chuckle with enlightened hindsight at the absurdity of the reporting, there’s a more serious aspect to the newspaper coverage. Situating Borrett in a domestic context, in relation to her husband and son, freed her from accusations of having a ‘sexy voice’, which had so impeded aspiring female announcers before her.
50 Daily Express, 17.10.33, quoted in Kramarae, 1988, op cit. When the BBC did eventually account for Borrett’s dismissal, it blamed – yet again – not its own prejudices but those of other women, ‘tens of thousands’ of whom apparently ‘sent in complaints, based mainly on the fact that she is a married woman, wife of a pensioned naval officer’. These presumably counted for more than the complaints of children that men’s voices were ‘too deep’ or ‘too rough’, or the information that 7–9-year-old listeners preferred women’s voices because they were clearer, brighter, and enunciated better than men (Daily Express, 7.03.34, quoted in ibid).
51 ‘Radio Announcer: The “sweetheart of the AEF” joining NBC’, Newsweek, 12.01.35, quoted in McKay, op cit.
52 The Evening News reported that ‘the old prejudice against women announcers has disappeared since the war, and listeners, as well as the BBC, have decided that announcing – as distinct from news reading – is a job that women can handle with ability and charm’ (Evening News, 24.01.42, quoted in Kramarae, 1988, op cit).
53 Sunday Dispatch, 22.07.45, in ibid.
54 ‘Women’s Employment at the BBC’, October 1945, quoted in ibid.
55 Daily Telegraph, 11.11.58, quoted in ibid.
56 Mileva Ross, ‘Radio’, in Josephine King and Mary Stott, Is This Your Life?: Images of Women in the Media, p.18 (London: Virago, 1977).
57 Anne Karpf, ‘Foreword’ to Caroline Mitchell, ed., Women and Radio: Airing Differences (London: Routledge, 2000).
58 Rosalind Gill, ‘Justifying Injustice: Broadcasters’ Accounts of Inequality in Radio’, in Mitchell, op cit, p.141.
59 ibid, p.146.
60 Marylou Pausewang Gelfer and Shannon Ryan Young, ‘Comparisons of Intensity Measures and their Stability in Male and Female Speakers’, Journal of Voice, vol. 11, no. 2, 1997, although this study asked men and women to read at a level ‘as if’ they were speaking to someone only a few feet away, rather than measuring actual conversational levels.
61 Philip M. Smith, op cit.
62 As the American women’s rights leader, Susan B. Anthony, put it in 1848, ‘Taught that a low [soft] voice is an excellent thing in woman, she has been trained to a subjugation of the vocal organs, and thus lost the benefit of loud tones and their well-known invigoration of the system.’ Quoted in Nancy M. Henley, Body Politics, p.76 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).
63 Kirsty Neumann, ‘Surgical Techniques in Male-to-female Transsexuals’, paper given at PEVOC5, Graz, Austria, August 2003.
64 Michael Frayn, ‘The Long and the Short of It’, in Speak After the Beep, p.35 (London: Methuen, 1997). For a discussion of the trivialisation of women’s telephone talk as gossip or chatter, see Lana F. Rakow, Gender on the Line: Women, the Telephone and Community Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
65 Only two out of fifty-six studies appearing between 1951 and 1991 found that women talked more than men (Deborah James and Janice Drakich, ‘Understanding Gender Differences in Amount of Talk: A Critical Review of Research’, in Deborah Tannen, ed., Gender and Conversational Interaction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Joan Swann, ‘Talk Control: an Illustration from the Classroom of Problems in Analysing Male Dominance of Conversation’, in Jennifer Coates and Deborah Cameron, eds., Women in Their Speech Communities (London: Longman, 1988), and 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).
66 And where equal numbers of men and women were present, men asked two-thirds of the questions (Janet Holmes, ‘Women Talk Too Much’, in Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, Language Myths, London: Penguin Books, 1998).
67 Sadker and Sadker, cited in Swann, op cit.
68 Marjorie Swacker, ‘The Sex of the Speaker as a Sociolinguistic Variable’, in Thorne and Henley, op cit.
69 See Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West, ‘Sex Roles, Interruptions and Silences in Conversations’, in Thorne and Henley, op cit. Fathers, in two studies, interrupted their children more than mothers did, and both fathers and mothers interrupted their daughters more than their sons (Greif, cited in Jean Berko Gleason and Esther Blank Greif, ‘Men’s Speech to Young Children’, and West and Zimmerman cited in Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, ‘Small Insults: A Study of Interruptions in Cross-Sex Conversations Between Unacquainted Persons’, both in Thorne et al, op cit).
70 Carol W. Kennedy and Carl Camden, ‘Interruptions and Nonverbal Gender Differences’, Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, Winter, 8(2) 1983, speculate that women smiled more ‘when they obtained the [speaking] turn’ because they were pleased at getting the chance to speak, because they were uneasy with the conversational spotlight being beamed at them or, in their view most likely, to soften the blow of turn-taking – ‘as an expression of apology, or as an act of submission’ (p.105). This would seem to suggest that for women the very act of speaking is somehow equated with aggression, and needs to be actively countervailed – sometimes, as we’ll see in the next chapter, by a little-girl voice. Yet despite this, interrupting doesn’t seem to be the prerogative of either gender, and its meaning, in any case, differs according to context. ‘Simultaneous talk’ (as it’s been called) might be a way of supporting a speaker, of signalling rapport and solidarity, rather than an expression of disrespect. Deborah James and Sandra Clarke, ‘Women, Men, and Interruptions: A Critical Review’, in Tannen 1993, op cit. Neither Geoffrey W. Beattie, ‘Interruption in Conversational Interaction, and its Relation to the Sex and Status of the Interactants’, Linguistics, 19, 1981 nor Kristin J. Anderson, ‘Meta-analyses of Gender Effects on Conversational Interruption: Who, What, When, Where, and How’, Sex Roles, August 1998, found evidence of gender differences either. On the other hand measuring interruptions doesn’t take account of the amount of time a speaker may be holding the floor. To illuminate this phenomenon, you need to study not just interruptions but also uninterruptibility.
71 Ann Cutler, cited in Jay Ingram, Talk, Talk, Talk (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992).
72 Dale Spender, Man Made Language, p.42 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
73 ibid, p.24. But there are also other possible reasons. Perhaps women talk more than men in certain settings – in ‘private’ as opposed to ‘public’ situations? (Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand, London: Virago, 1991). And indeed when, out of the forty years of research the sixteen studies dealing with informal talk were isolated, it was found that women were talking as much or more than the men (James and Drakich, op cit).
74 Sally McConnell-Ginet, ‘Intonation in a Man’s World’, in Thorne et al, op cit. Women’s greater expressiveness was seen as an expression of vocal versatility and simultaneously of relative powerlessness, which required them to use it as a device to hold the listener’s attention. Some early feminist writing had a tendency to treat men’s voices as socially constructed, but women’s as an expression of superior skill – redirecting the prejudice against women’s voices into prejudice against men’s.
75 Ruth M. Brend, ‘Male-Female Intonation Patterns in American English’, in Thorne and Henley, Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, op cit.
76 Robin Lakoff, ‘Language and Woman’s Place’, in Deborah Cameron, The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1998); Carole Edelsky, ‘Question Intonation and Sex Roles’, Language in Society, 8, 1979.
77 Brend, op cit, p.86.
78 Philip M. Smith, op cit.
79 Except when responding to a female interviewer, and even here, there were many different meanings that could be attributed to such intonation besides politeness. (Edelsky, op cit).
80 On the contrary, because of the way it was calculated, one linguist argued, this had been over-emphasised (Caroline G. Henton, ‘Fact and Fiction in the Description of Female and Male Pitch’, Language and Communication, vol. 9, no. 4, 1989).
81 Nicola Daly and Paul Warren, ‘Pitching it Differently in New Zealand English: Speaker Sex and Intonation Patterns’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5 /1, 2001.
82 Patsy Rodenburg, ‘Powerspeak: Women and Their Voices in the Workplace’, in Frankie Armstrong and Jenny Pearson, eds., Well-Tuned Women (London: The Women’s Press, 2000).
83 Kristin Linklater, ‘Overtones, Undertones and the Fundamental Pitch of the Female Voice’, in Armstrong and Pearson, op cit.
84 Carol Gilligan, ‘Remembering Iphigenia: Voice, Resonance, and the Talking Cure’, in Edward R. Shapiro, ed., The Inner World in the Outer World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
85 Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992).
86 Henton, 1992, op cit, p.56.
87 The description, she suggested, should have read instead ‘the Bengali initial “n” is sometimes pronounced as “l” in pretentious speech, particularly that of status-conscious men’ (Ann Bodine on Chatterji in ‘Sex Differentiation in Language’ in Thorne and Henley, op cit, p.141).
88 ibid, p.302.
89 Tannen, op cit.
90 John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
91 Aki Uchida, ‘When “Difference” Is “Dominance”: A Critique of the “Anti-Power-Based” Cultural Approach to Sex Differences’, in Cameron, 1998, op cit.
92 In Yana, a now extinct language of Northern California studied by the linguist Edward Sapir, men talking to men ‘speak fully and deliberately’, whereas when women are involved, either as speakers or listeners, ‘a clipped style of utterance in used’ (Sapir, quoted in D. Crystal, ‘Prosodic and Paralinguistic Correlates of Social Categories’, p.189, in Edwin Ardener, ed., Social Anthropology and Language, London: Tavistock,, 1971). Interestingly one of my British interviewers volunteered the opposite observation of the men she heard, claiming that they used a wider pitch range in talking to women, but reverted to more of a monotone in conversation with men.
93 Joann M. Montepare and Cynthia Vega, ‘Women’s Vocal Reactions to Intimate and Casual Male Friends’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 14, no. 1 March 1988.
94 Markel et al, cited in Siegman, op cit.
95 Hall and Braunwald, cited in Montepare and Vega, op cit.
96 Woods, cited in Jo Verhoeven, ‘The Communicative Setting and Markers in Speech’, in Jo Verhoeven, ed., ‘Phonetic Work in Progress’, University of Antwerp, 2002.
97 Sarah Gracie, ‘Body of Evidence’, Guardian, 12.03.98.
98 Lieberman cited in Graddol and Swann, Gender Voices, op cit.
99 See studies cited by 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.
100 ibid. If stereotypes are the reason, then why does it take until their baby is 3 months old for these to appear? Perhaps only at this stage, when they’re no longer quite so exhausted, do most mothers move beyond seeing their infant as a baby, whose vulnerability is more important than its sex, and begin to treat it as a miniature version of its gender.
101 Barrie Thorne et al, ‘Language, Gender and Society: Opening a Second Decade of Research’, in Thorne et al, op cit.
102 Gall et al, cited in Thorne et al, op cit. It’s even been argued that men stutter more than women because fluency is more highly valued in men than in women, putting too much pressure on men to speak without hesitating.
103 Philip M. Smith, op cit, on Edwards. We don’t only hear other people differently, depending on their gender, but also ourselves. The majority of women in a famous Norwich study described themselves as using Received Pronunciation (RP – the upper-middle-class accent, aka Oxford accent or BBC English) when in fact they didn’t, while with men it was the other way round: as many as half of them said that they spoke in a more lower-class accent than they actually did. For the men there seemed to be positive connotations to working-class speech (perhaps there’s something feminising in the very idea of ‘refined’ speech, and an entrenched belief that masculinity should sound rougher), while the women aspired to more middle-class ways of speaking that bring overt prestige (Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics, London: Penguin Books, 2000). There’s been much debate about whether women are conservative forces in linguistic change, or innovators. See W. Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, (Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics’, 1966) and Sociolinguistic Patterns (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).
104 David W. Addington, ‘The Relationship of Selected Vocal Characteristics to Personality Perception’, Speech Monographs, vol. 35, 1968. Equally compelling evidence came two years later in a landmark study which, although it wasn’t specifically about speech but about health, came to an even more shocking conclusion. Seventy-nine clinically trained psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers were asked to rate the characteristics of a healthy man, a healthy woman, and a healthy adult, irrespective of sex. These mental-health professionals suggested that healthy women differed from healthy men by being more submissive, less adventurous, less objective, more emotional, more excitable in minor crises, and disliking maths and science (just like the Barbies!). ‘This constellation seems a most unusual way of describing any mature, healthy individual’ (Inge K. Broverman et al, ‘Sex-role Stereotypes and Clinical Judgments of Mental Health’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, vol. 34, no. 1, p.5, 1970). The study also found that the clinicians’ idea of a healthy, mature man didn’t differ from that of a healthy adult – both were assertive, decisive, and relatively independent – but that of a healthy, mature woman did. In other words, it was impossible for a woman to be considered both a healthy female and a healthy adult. A healthy adult would be a deviant female, a healthy female a deviant adult – women had to choose. The stereotyped characteristics attributed to healthy women match pretty closely those associated with women’s voices.
105 Carol Ann Valentine and Banisa Saint Damian, ‘Gender and Culture as Determinants of the “Ideal Voice’”, Semiotica, 71–3/4, 1988. In Mexico, however, it’s the female voice that’s closer to the cultural ideal.
106 Dr Clifford Nass quoted by Anne Eisenberg, ‘Mars and Venus, On the Net: Gender Stereotypes Prevail’, New York Times, 12.10.00.
107 Dilray S. Sokhi et al, ‘Male and Female Voices Activate Distinct Regions in the Male Brain’, NeuroImage, 27, 2005.
108 Stephen McGinty, ‘Can’t Hear you, Love … Blame My Brain’, Scotsman, 6.8.05.
110 Adorno in 1928, quoted in Barbara Engh, ‘Adorno and the Sirens: Tele-phonographic Bodies’, in Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, eds., Embodied Voices, p.129 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
111 To the extent that they’ve become identified with bodily fluids (Janet Beizer, ‘Rewriting Ophelia: Fluidity, Madness and Voice in Louise Colet’s “La servante” ‘, in Dunn and Jones, op cit).
112 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
113 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
114 One of the DJs Rosalind Gill, op cit, interviewed indicted women DJs of this very crime. See Nicki Thorogood, ‘Mouthrules and the Construction of Sexual Indentities’, Sexualities, vol. 3(2), 2000 for an interesting discussion of the conventions and practices about mouths that we follow in creating our sexual and gender identities. And for one on telephone sex lines, see Kira Hall, ‘Lip Service on the Fantasy Lines’, in Cameron, 1998, op cit. There’s an extraordinary similarity – almost shocking when you perceive it for the first time – between human vocal anatomy and the female genitalia. The right and left vocal folds, when viewed from above, form a V with a striking resemblance to the vagina and cervix. As one voice teacher memorably put it, ‘Both men and women have tiny vaginas in their throats’ (Kristin Linklater, ‘Vox Eroticus’, American Theatre, April 2003).
115 The headscarf, by contrast, although it also signals their religious identity, leaves the mouth uncovered.
116 Laver and Trudgill, cited in Verhoeven, op cit.
117 Seppo K. Tuomi and James E. Fisher, ‘Characteristics of Simulated Sexy Voice’, Folia Phoniatrica, 31, 1979.
118 Branston, op cit.
119 C.G. Henton and R.A.W. Bladon, ‘Breathiness in Normal Female Speech: Inefficiency Versus Desirability’, Language and Communication, vol. 5, no. 3, 1985. See also Dennis H. Klatt and Laura C. Klatt, ‘Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Voice Quality Variations among Female and Male Talkers’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, February 87(2), 1990.
120 Pamela Jean Trittin and Andres de Santos y Lleo, ‘Voice Quality Analysis of Male and Female Spanish Speakers’, Speech Communication, vol.16(4), 1995.
121 Moya A. Pattie, ‘Voice Changes in Women Treated for Endometriosis and Related Conditions: The Need for Comprehensive Vocal Assessment’, Journal of Voice, vol. 12, no. 3, 1998.
122 Maureen B. Higgins and John H. Saxman, ‘Variations in Vocal Frequency Perturbation Across the Menstrual Cycle’, Journal of Voice, vol. 3, no. 3, 1989.
123 Jean Abitbol et al, ‘Sex Hormones and the Female Voice’, Journal of Voice, vol. 13, no. 3, 1999. These same doctors have posed the question, ‘Does voice have a gender?’, and answered it in the affirmative, by referring not to gender but sex.
124 Allen Hirson and Sam Roe, ‘Stability of Voice and Periodic Fluctuations in Voice Quality Through the Menstrual Cycle’, Voice, 2, 1993.
125 Sung Won Chae et al, ‘Clinical Analysis of Voice Change as a Parameter of Premenstrual Syndrome’, Journal of Voice, vol. 15, no. 2, 2001. See also the leading exponent of this theory, Jean Abitbol et al, ‘Does a Hormonal Vocal Cycle Exist in Women? Study of Vocal Premenstrual Syndrome in Voice Performers by Videostroboscopy-Glottography and Cytology on 38 Women’, Journal of Voice, vol. 3, no. 2, 1989.
126 Lacina, cited in ibid.
127 Abitbol et al, 1999, op cit.
128 Graddol and Swann op cit, p.18.
129 Irma M. Verdonck-de-Leuw and Hans F. Mahieu, ‘Vocal Ageing and the Impact on Daily Life: a Longitudinal Study’, Journal of Voice, vol. 18, no. 2, 2004.
130 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7.
131 Alison Russell et al, ‘Speaking Fundamental Frequency Changes Over Time in Women: A Longitudinal Study’, Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, vol. 38, February 1995.
132 Henton, 1992, op cit.
133 Abitbol et al, 1999, op cit, p.440. For another example of value judgements posing as objectivity, see Leo Van Gelder, ‘Psychosomatic Aspects of Endocrine Disorders of the Voice’, Journal of Communication Disorders, 7, p.260, 1974, where he talks of voice virilisation symptoms, brought about by anabolic steroids and the use of the pill, in women ‘characterized by “nervous” psychomotor habits and energetic drive, sometimes found in business women, actresses, journalists and women in other emancipated professions’.
134 Ofer Amir et al, ‘The Effect of Oral Contraceptives on Voice: Preliminary Observations’, Journal of Voice, vol. 16, no. 2, 2002.
1 137.6 Hz, as compared with 118.9 Hz (Majewski et al, cited in David Graddol and Joan Swann, Gender Voices, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
2 128 Hz, as compared with 161 Hz (Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Personality Markers in Speech’, in Klaus R. Scherer and Howard Giles, eds., Social Markers in Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
3 Carol Ann Valentine and Banisa Saint Damian, ‘Gender and Culture as Determinants of the ‘Ideal Voice’, Semiotica, 71–3/4, 1988.
4 Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), argues that they drew on the tradition of talky, uppity women that can be traced back to Shakespearean heroines like Beatrice and Rosalind, as well as those in Restoration drama and George Bernard Shaw’s plays. Zadie Smith has remarked that Hepburn’s Bryn Mawr tang, with its peculiar, long English vowels, gave ‘the sense that one is being spoken to from a pinnacle of high-Yankee condescension’ (Zadie Smith, ‘The Divine Ms H’, Guardian, 1.7.03).
5 The dialogue in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday ran at 240 words per minute, compared with an average of 100–150 (McCarthy, cited in DiBattista).
6 Gill Branston, ‘… Viewer, I Listened to Him … Voices, Masculinity, In the Line of Fire’, in Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim, eds., Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies, and Women (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995).
7 DiBattista, op cit.
8 ibid.
9 Interview with Stephanie Martin, 3.11.03.
10 American women’s voices averaged 214 Hz, Swedish women’s 196 Hz, Dutch women’s 191 Hz (Renee van Bezooijen, ‘Sociocultural Aspects of Pitch Differences between Japanese and Dutch Women’, Language and Speech, 38(3, 1995)). The pitch levels refer to women between the ages of 20 and 30.
11 In comparison, the pitch of English or American men and women is much less differentiated (Leo Loveday, ‘Pitch, Politeness and Sexual Role: An Exploratory Investigation into the Pitch Correlates of English and Japanese Politeness Formulae’, Language and Speech, vol. 24, part 1 1981).
12 Van Bezooijen, op cit, has argued that too much emphasis has been placed on femininity as expressed in the Japanese woman’s voice, and not enough on how the Japanese man’s voice has to establish his masculinity.
13 Hideko Yamazawa and Harry Hollien, ‘Speaking Fundamental Frequency Patterns of Japanese Women’, Phonetica, 49, 1992.
14 Ohara, cited in van Bezooijen, op cit. For a parallel description of voice and gender in China, see Marjorie K.M. Chan, ‘Gender Difference in the Chinese Language: A preliminary Report’, Proceedings of the 9th North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (Los Angeles: GSIL Publications, University of Southern California, vol.2, 1992).
15 Van Bezooijen, op cit.
16 Smith, cited in ibid.
17 Fairchild, cited in Graddol and Swann, Gender Voices, op cit.
18 J.J. Ohala, ‘Cross-language Use of Pitch: an Ethological View’, Phonetica, 40, 1983.
19 Matthew Gordon and Jeffrey Heath, ‘Sex, Sound Symbolism, and Sociolinguistics’, Current Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 4, August-October, 1998.
20 Caroline Henton, ‘The Abnormality of Male Speech’, in George Wolf, ed., New Departures in Linguistics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992).
21 The average pitch of the 1945 group was 229 Hz, while that of the 1993 cohort was 206 Hz (Cecilia Pemberton et al, ‘Have Women’s Voices Lowered Across Time? A Cross Sectional Study of Australian Women’s Voices’, Journal of Voice, vol. 12, no. 2, 1998).
22 ibid.
23 C.E. Linke, ‘A Study of Pitch Characteristics of Female Voices and their Relationship to Vocal Effectiveness’, Folia Phoniatricia, 25, p.184, 1973. The transformation of Margaret Thatcher’s voice is discussed in chapter 14.
24 Aera magazine, 15.6.98.
25 ‘Women Newscasters Lowering Pitch’, Daily Yomiuri 13.6.96.
26 The average pitch of Japanese announcers in 1995 was 216 Hz, compared with 230 Hz in 1991. Professor Kasuya professed himself worried that some announcers ‘misunderstand that the lower the voice, the better, and end up speaking in an unnaturally lower voice’. Concerned that ‘too low is not good, ’ he said, ‘I feel responsible if I have led the TV industry to worship lower voices’ (ibid).
27 ‘Women Newscasters Lowering Pitch’, Daily Yomiuri 13.6.96.
28 Ryann Connell, ‘Are Deep-throated Women More Likely to Get Ahead?’, Mainichi Daily News, 28.6.02.
29 Interview with Jon Snow, 3.03.04.
30 ‘Best and Worst Voices in America’, Center for Voice Disorders, Wake University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 2001.
31 Valentine and Damian, op cit.
32 Interview, 1.6.03.
33 Interview with Stephanie Martin, 3.11.03.
34 Hershey and Werner, cited in Philip M. Smith, ‘Sex Markers in Speech’, in Scherer and Giles, op cit.
35 Interview, 31.10.03.
36 Interview, 19.11.03.
37 Interview, 27.11.03.
38 Interview, 26.04.03.
39 Jack W. Sattel, ‘Men, Inexpressiveness, and Power’, p. 122, in Barrie Thorne et al, eds., Language, Gender, and Society (Boston: Heinle and Heinle, 1983).
40 72 per cent of British men own a mobile and spend over an hour a day talking on it, compared with 67 per cent of women, who use it for 55 minutes a day (Alan Travis, ‘Men Lead Mobile Phone Revolution’, Guardian, 11.11.02). American men also talk on their mobiles 35 per cent more than women (‘Men Talk More on Cellular Phones, Survey Shows’, International Communications Research press release, 14.06.01; Jay Wrolstad, ‘Is Wireless a Guy Thing?’, www.wirelessnesfactor.com).
41 Although whether women really do invariably possess superior communication skills to men needs questioning, as Deborah Cameron has done, in Good to Talk? (London: Sage, 2000).
42 Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, ‘Difference and Dominance: An Overview of Language, Gender, and Society’, in Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley, Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance (Massachusetts: Newbury House, 1975).
43 A singer told me, ‘In ‘60s popular music, so much of the black Motown sound was falsetto, and I marvelled at their willingness to do that. I’m a conservative white guy – I’d never sing that way.’ 31.5.03.
44 Austin cited in Thorne and Henley, op cit. It’s the same with clothes. As the comedian Eddie Izzard has pointed out, modern dress codes favour women, who are free to wear trousers, while men are mocked if they wear a dress.
45 Interview, 13.08.05. Men have to disidentify with their mother and identify with their father (see Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, University of California Press, 1979), and this happens on the vocal level too (Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
46 Interview, 16.5.03.
47 Interview with Charles Michel, 29.5.03. Of course there are cultural issues at work here too: black culture allows for far more variety of pitch in its males.
48 Amelia Hudson and Anthony Holbrook, ‘A Study of the Reading Fundamental Vocal Frequency of Young Black Adults’, Journal of Speaking and Hearing Research, 24, June 1981.
1 Dell Hymes, ‘Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life’, in John J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, Directions in Sociolinguistics (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972).
2 The Bella Coola in British Columbia value fluent speech and demand a flow of witty comments (ibid).
3 The Paliyans of south India communicate very little and have turned almost silent by the age of 40. To them verbal people are regarded as offensive and even abnormal (Gardner, cited in Dell Hymes, Foundations in Sociolinguistics, London: Tavistock, 1977).
4 Bronislaw Malinowski ‘Coral Gardens and Their Magic’, vol. 2, The Language of Magic and Gardening (London: Routledge, 2001).
5 E.D. Lewis, ‘A Quest for the Source: the Ontogenesis of the Creation Myth of the Ata Tana Ai’, in James J. Fox, ed., To Speak In Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
6 Steven Feld, ‘From Ethnomusicology to Echo-Muse-Ecology: Reading R. Murray Schafer in the Papua New Guinea Rainforest’, Soundscape Newsletter, no.8, June 1994, and his ‘A Rainforest Acoustemology’, in Michael Bull and Les Back, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003). The distinction we make between singing and speaking would seem strange to the New Zealand Maori, who see both instrumental music and song as speech (Hymes, 1972, op cit).
7 Marcel Griaule and Genevieve Calame-Griaule, cited in Frances Dyson, ‘Circuits of the Voice: From Cosmology to Telephony’, in Dan Lander, ed., Radio Phonics and other Phonies (Toronto, Musicworks, no. 43, 1992).
8 Hymes, 1972, op cit.
9 Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe (University of Oklahoma Press, 1953).
10 Dwight Bolinger, Intonation and Its Uses (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), and Alan Cruttenden, ‘Falls and Rises: Meanings and Universals’, Journal of Linguistics, 17, 1981 although see below for instances of cross-cultural misunderstandings based on intonation, and the different ways Americans and the British ask questions.
11 Lomax, cited in Klaus R. Scherer, ‘Personality Markers in Speech’, in Klaus R. Scherer and Howard Giles, eds., Social Markers in Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
12 Honikman, cited in John Laver and Peter Trudgill, ‘Phonetic and Linguistic Markers in Speech’, in Scherer and Giles, op cit.
13 Maynard cited in Nigel Ward, ‘Using Prosodic Clues to Decide When to Produce Back-channel Utterances’, paper given at 4th International Conference, 1996.
14 Ward, op cit.
15 Haru Yamada, Different Games, Different Rules: Why Americans and Japanese Misunderstand Each Other (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
16 B. Malinowski ‘Phatic Communion’, p.151 in John Laver and Sandy Hutcheson, eds., Communication in Face to Face Interaction (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972).
17 ibid, p.150.
18 Hymes quoted in Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, ‘Situating Register in Sociolinguistics’, p.7 in Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan, eds., Sociolinguistic Perpsectives on Register (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
19 Ethel M. Albert, ‘Culture Patterning of Speech Behaviour in Burundi’, in Gumperz and Hymes, op cit.
20 Judith T. Irvine, ‘Registering Affect: Heteroglossia in the Linguistic Expression of Emotion’, in Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
21 See Pierre Bourdieu, Disctinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 1984) and The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
22 Jane Stuart-Smith, ‘Glasgow: Accent and Voice Quality’ in Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty, eds., Urban Voices (London: Hodder Headline, 1999). Linguists talk of speech communities, groups that share the same language, dialect, and other linguistic norms. We could also talk of vocal communities, groups – large or small – who use their voices in similar ways.
23 Bruce L. Brown and Wallace E. Lambert, ‘A Cross-cultural Study of Social Status Markers in Speech’, Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 8(1), 1976.
24 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, p.93 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
25 William Labov, ‘The Social Stratification of (r) in New York City Department Stores’, in Nikolas Coupland and Adam Jaworski, eds., Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursework (London: Macmillan, 1997).
26 Linda W.L. Young, Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
27 Howard Giles, ‘Ethnicity Markers in Speech’, in Scherer and Giles, op cit.
28 E.T. Hall, ‘A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior’, in Laver and Hutcheson, op cit.
29 Masashi Takeuchi et al, ‘Timing Detection for Realistic Dialog Systems Using Prosodic and Linguistic Information’, paper given at Speech prosody 2004, Nara, Japan.
30 Yamada, op cit.
31 Tetsuya Kunihiro, ‘Personality-Structure and Communicative Behaviour: A Comparison of Japanese and Americans’, in Walburga von Raffler-Engel, ed., Aspects of Nonverbal Communication (Swets Publishing, 1983). Between speakers of the North American Indian language of Athabaskan and the English, the potential for misunderstanding is even greater. The English, because they want to establish some kind of connection and feel uncomfortable with silence, invariably initiate conversation. Athabaskans, on the other hand, if they have any doubt about a social relationship and the appropriate way to behave, avoid speaking. So an English speaker will fill in a pause in English-Athabaskan conversation earlier than the Athabaskan. (One reason for the traditional British talk about the weather is that the British generally, except with intimates, can’t tolerate a silence of longer than about four seconds. Anything, even small talk about the weather, is better than silence.) ‘The Athabaskans go away from the conversation thinking that English speakers are rude, dominating, superior, garrulous, smug and self-centred. The English speakers, on the other hand, find the Athabaskans rude, superior, surly, taciturn, and withdrawn’ (Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, London: Penguin Books, 1974). The Greeks regard silence even more negatively than the British. In Greece it’s seen as a distancing device in a society where closeness, exuberance, and talkativeness are very highly valued. There a taciturn person is seen as unfriendly, snobbish and even dangerous (Sifanou, cited in Adam Jaworski ‘Silence and small talk’, in Justine Coupland, ed., Small Talk, London: Longman, 2000). The potential for vocal misunderstanding exists not only between cultures but also within them. Deborah Tannen (‘It’s Not What You Say, It’s The Way That You Say It’, undated, www.surfaceonline.org) argues that New Yorkers speak fast, and start talking before other people have finished. Non-New Yorkers expect a pause before they pitch in, but it never arrives. ‘People who are not from New York complain that New Yorkers interrupt them, don’t listen, and don’t give them a chance to talk.’
32 French and von Raffler-Engel, and Erickson, cited in Judee K. Burgoon et al, Nonverbal Communication: The Unspoken Dialogue (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996). Pauses even seem to be distributed differently according to the social class of the speaker, with working-class people spending less time pausing (Bernstein 1962, cited in Aron W. Siegman, ‘The Telltale Voice: Nonverbal Messages of Verbal Communication’, in Aron W. Siegman and Stanley Feld-stein, Nonverbal Behaviour and Communication, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1987). Discussion of Bernstein’s elaborated and restricted codes is beyond the scope of this book, although he applied his distinction also to the nonverbal aspects such as intonation.
33 Ron Scollon and Suzanne B.K. Scollon, ‘Interethnic Communication: How to Recognize Negative Stereotypes and Improve Communication Between Ethnic Groups’ (Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 1980). See also Carole Douglis, ‘The Beat Goes On: Social Rhythms Underlie All Speech’, Psychology Today, November 1987.
34 ‘What is it like to be German in Britain?’, Guardian, 28.6.02.
35 Alan Cruttenden, Intonation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
36 Leo Loveday, ‘Pitch, Politeness and Sexual Role: An Exploratory Investigation Into the Pitch Correlates of English and Japanese Politeness Formulae’, Language and Speech, vol. 24, part 1 1981.
37 Stephanie Martin and Lyn Darnley, The Teaching Voice (London: Whurr Publishers, 2004).
38 Deborah Tannen, ‘Did You Catch That? Why They’re Talking as Fast as They Can?’, Washington Post, 5.1.03.
39 Patsy Rodenburg, The Right to Speak, p.168 (London: Methuen, 1992).
40 Jaakko Lehtonen and Kari Sajavaara, ‘The Silent Finn’, in Deborah Tannen and Muriel Saville-Troike, Perspectives on Silence (New Jersey: Ablex, 1985). Young Finns, it seems, can no longer tolerate silence, and like young people everywhere walk around with iPods clamped to their ears. A Finnish speech and language therapist told me that her 14- and 9-year-old sons, when they go to their family’s country house, find the silence strange and hard to take.
41 Scott Allan, ‘The Rise of New Zealand Intonation’, in Allan Bell and Janet Holmes, eds., New Zealand Ways of Speaking English (Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters, 1990).
42 Cruttenden, 1986, op cit.
43 Mark Newbrokk, cited in Matt Seaton, ‘Word up’, Guardian, 21.9.03.
44 Robin Lakoff, Language and Woman’s Place (New York: HarperCollins, 1975).
45 McLemore, cited in Seaton, op cit.
46 K. Cave, ‘What teens are saying? It’s called uptalk?’, Orange County Register, 1994, reprinted in Martin S. Remland, Nonverbal Communication in Everyday Life, p.213 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).
47 This process, known as convergence, is discussed in chapter 17.
48 Claire Gardner, ‘Accent on Mimicry from Parrot Fashion Call Centres’, Scotland on Sunday, 2.5.04. To gain customers’ trust, more than 50 per cent of staff changed their accents in order to try and sound similar to them.
49 Malavika Sangghvi ‘Indian Talkaway’, Sunday Times, 7.12.03.
50 Peter Kingston, ‘Calls to Newcastle’, Guardian, 18.10.05.
51 Charles Haviland, ‘At Your Service: Indians Heed Call of the West’, Guardian, 18.10.03.
52 Andrew Clark, ‘Catching a Train to Crewe? Call Bangalore’, Guardian, 15.10.03.
53 Kingston, op cit. To immerse themselves in contemporary British culture, call-centre workers are shown films like Love Actually and Four Weddings and a Funeral, which themselves have been criticised for perpetuating an unrealistic view of Britain.
54 See, for instance, Laura Lehto et al, ‘Voice Symptoms of Call-centre Customer Service Advisers Experienced During a Work-day and Effects of a Short Vocal Training Course’, Logopedics Phoniatrics Vocology, 30, 2005; David Hencke, ‘Call Centres Voice Concerns’, Guardian, 20.6.05. British trades unions have also protested about the transfer of call-centre jobs to India (Kevin Maguire, ‘BT Strike Threat Over Indian Call Centres’, Guardian, 3.6.03).
55 Jeremy Seabrook, ‘Progress on Hold’, Guardian, 24.10.03.
56 Siddhartha Deb, ‘Call Me’, Guardian, 4.4.04.
57 Amelia Gentleman, ‘Indian Call Staff Quit Over Abuse on the Line’, Observer, 29.5.05.
58 Deb, op cit.
59 Sangghvi, op cit.
60 India Calling, BBC Radio 4, 2002.
61 Kingston, op cit.
62 Who Do You Think You’re Talking To?, BBC 2, 2004.
63 ibid.
64 See, for instance, George Monbiot, ‘The Flight to India’, Guardian, 21.10.03, and Seabrook, op cit.
1 See J. Goody and I. Watt, ‘The Consequences of Literacy’, reprinted in Pier Paulo Giglioli, ed., Language and Social Context (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972); Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (London: Routledge, 1962); Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); and Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
2 Havelock, op cit, pp.65–66.
3 Goody and Watt, op cit; Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982). Hereafter all references to Ong apply to this.
4 Bernard Hibbitts, ‘Coming to Our Senses: Communication and Legal Expression in Performance Cultures’, Emory Law Journal, 4, 1992. When Aivilik Eskimos want information, they say to themselves or others, ‘Let’s hear.’
5 Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and, according to St Paul, ‘Ex auditu fides’ – From hearing comes belief (Romans 10:17).
6 Hibbitts, op cit.
7 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977).
8 Ong, op cit.
9 ibid.
10 Ong, op cit, p.102.
11 McLuhan, op cit, p.232.
12 Ong, op cit.
13 Carolthers, quoted in McLuhan, op cit, p.20.
14 Ong, op cit.
15 Macluhan, op cit, p.27.
16 Although a new system has been developed for turning a telephone call into a legally binding document. The conversation is digitally recorded, encrypted, and emailed to caller, law-firm, accountant, and the manufacturers of the technology (Kane Kramer on Monicall, Guardian, 30.09.04).
17 McLuhan, op cit.
18 Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
19 Ong, op cit, p.104.
20 ibid.
21 Ong, op cit, pp.40/1.
22 McLuhan, op cit, p.27. ‘Since the ear is a hot hyperaesthetic world and the eye world is a relatively cool, neutral world, the Westerner appears to people of ear culture to be a very cold fish indeed,’ remarked McLuhan (p.19). He didn’t anticipate how hot visual culture could be and how cool radio.
23 David Riesman, cited in McLuhan, op cit.
24 Carothers, quoted in McLugan, op cit, p.19.
25 Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘Hearing Loss’, p.46, in Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003).
26 Ong, op cit, p.121. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries punctuation was still guided by the ear and not the eye (McLuhan, op cit).
27 Ong, op cit.
28 Kamensky, op cit. Far from subscribing to the view that sticks and stones can break your bones but words can never hurt you, they believed rather that ‘a soft tongue breaketh the bone’.
29 McLuhan, op cit.
30 Havelock, op cit.
31 ibid.
32 The BBC Radio panel game Just a Minute gets participants to pronounce on a given topic without hesitation, deviation, or repetition for a minute. It owes its long success at least partly, I feel sure, to the fact that it’s a throwback to oral cultures. Trying, and often clumsily failing, to discard the written tics and spoken props on which so much broadcasting relies induces hilarity all round. This is a literate culture’s comic tilt at an oral one.
33 McLuhan, op cit. Where ‘primary oral’ cultures were totally untouched by writing or print, these ‘secondary oral’ cultures had telephones, radio, and television as well as print, and shared the features of both forms (Ong, op cit).
34 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, p. 76 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
35 Ong, op cit.
36 Havelock, op cit, p.64.
37 ibid.
38 Schmidt, op cit.
39 Scott L. Montgomery and Alok Kumar, ‘Telling Stories: Some Remarks on Orality in Science’, p.393, Science as Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, 2000.
40 ibid.
41 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (London: Tavistock Publications, 1976).
42 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: Strahan, 1755).
43 Schmidt, op cit, p.50.
44 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press; 2003).
45 He conducted a series of experiments, among them one in which he produced tones from the larynx of a goose by squeezing its lungs. (Hans von Leden, ‘A Cultural History of the Human Voice’, in Robert Sataloff, ed., Voice Perspectives’, San Diego: Singular Publishing, 1998). It took until 1741 for this to be repeated again by Antoine Ferrein, who coined the term vocal cords, which he pictured as comparable to the strings of a violin activated by a stream of air. In 1745 Bertin pointed out that the structures were folds and not cords and drew attention to their elasticity (Donald S. Cooper, ‘Voice: A Historical Perspective’, Journal of Voice, vol. 3, no. 3, 1989). No one before Manual Garcia’s invention of the laryngeal mirror in 1854 actually observed voice production in a living person (Cooper, op cit), although this claim has been contested. Some Americans have insisted that direct visualisation of the larynx began with Horace Green, the father of American laryngology. Green reported that, using a bent-tongue spatula to examine the throat and larynx of an 11-year-old girl in 1852, he spotted a polyp and, using direct sunlight for illumination, removed it. Laryngoscopes were refined by the Berlin physician Alfred Kirstein who, in 1895, conducted the first direct examination of the interior of larynx, and later by Gustav Killian and Chevalier Jackson. See Steven M. Zeitels, ‘Universal Modular Glottiscope System: The Evolution of a Century of Design and Technique for Direct Laryngoscopy’, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, – Supplement 179, vol. 108, no. 9, part 2 September 1999; Horace Green, ‘Morbid Growths Within the Larynx’, in Green, On the Surgical Treatment of Polypi of the Larynx and Oedema of the Glottis (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852); Gayle E. Woodson, ‘The History of Laryngology in the United States’, Laryngoscope, vol.106(6), June 1996; and Richard Cooper, ‘Laryngoscopy – its Past and Future’, Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, 51, Supplement 1:R6 2004.
46 Roy Porter, Enlightenment (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
47 Richard Sennet, The Fall of Public Mar, pp.81–82 (London: Faber and Faber, 1986).
48 Markman Ellis, The Coffee House: A Cultural History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004).
49 ibid, p.365.
50 Albert Mehrabian and Susan R. Ferris, ‘Inference of Attitudes from Nonverbal Communication in Two Channels’, Journal of Consulting Psychology, vol. 31, no. 3, 1967.
51 Albert Mehrabian and Morton Wiener, ‘Decoding of Inconsistent Communications’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 6, no. 1, p. 113, 1967.
52 Mehrabian and Ferris, op cit.
53 Albert Mehrabian, Nonverbal Communication, p.182 (Chicago: Aldine, 1972).
54 Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (London: Routledge, 2002).
55 See my Doctoring the Media: The Reporting of Health and Medicine (London: Routledge, 1988) for a more extensive critique of the popularisation of science and medicine.
56 Carol Tavris: ‘How to Publicize Science: a Case Study’, in Jeffrey H. Goldstein, ed., Reporting Science: The Case of Aggression (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates 1986).
57 Albert Mehrabian, cited by David Lapakko, ‘Three Cheers for Education’, Communication Education, 1999 (quoted on d3m e-news, District 3 Toast-masters, 1 December 2000).
58 Mehrabian and Wiener, op cit.
59 www.kaaj.com, op cit, where Mehrabian also vigorously markets his personality-testing software and emotional-intelligence-testing software. In fact there’s almost no aspect of emotional life for which Dr Mehrabian hasn’t devised and sold software.
60 J. Lotz, Linguistics: Symbols Make Humans (New York: Language and Communication Research Centre, Columbia University, 1955), cited in Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998).
1 Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), part two, chapter 8 (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1996).
2 And public speaking involves control over the voice: ‘These are the three things – volume of sound, modulation of pitch, and rhythm – that a speaker bears in mind’ (Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book 3, chapter 1 Loeb Classical Library, 1926).
3 R.C. Jebb, The Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeos, p.lxxviii/lxxix (London: Macmillan, 1876).
4 Browne and Behnke, cited in John Laver, ‘The Analysis of Vocal Quality: from the Classical Period to the Twentieth Century’, in John Laver, The Gift of Speech (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).
5 Hans von Leden, ‘A Cultural History of the Voice’ in Robert Sataloff, ed., Voice Perspectives (San Diego: Singular, 1998).
6 ibid.
7 Ynez Viole O’Neill, Speech and Speech Disorders in Western Thought Before 1600 (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980).
8 Stanford, cited in Laver, op cit.
9 See Jacqueline Martin, Voice in Modern Theatre (London: Routledge, 1991).
10 Cicero, De Oratore, Book 3, chapter 43 (London: Heinemann, 1942).
11 Scholars were also allowed to declaim once a month (Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Eloquence in an Electronic Age, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Cicero and Quintilian’s complete works were among the first books to be printed by the printing-press (Martin, op cit).
12 Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds., The Rhetorical Tradition (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 1990).
13 Quintilian, Institutiones Oratoriae, Book XI chapter 3 (Loeb Classical Library, 1992). In men, that is. As for the female voice, ‘physical robustness is essential to save the voice from dwindling to the feeble shrillness that characterises the voices of eunuchs, women and invalids.’
14 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, ‘Rhetoric and Relevance’ in David Wellbery and John Bender, eds., The End of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
15 Jamieson, op cit.
16 Thanos Vovolis, ‘The Voice and the Mask in Ancient Greek Tragedy’, in Larry Sider et al, eds., Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures, 1998–2001. (London: Wallflower Press, 2003).
17 Oliver Taplin, Greek Tragedy in Action (London: Methuen, 1978).
18 R. Murray Schafer, ‘The Soundscape: our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World’ (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977). The close connection between rhetoric and acting persisted and the declamatory style was expected. The influence extended in both directions: not only did actors have to deliver their speeches in the rhetorical style, but the orator Demosthenes, famous for trying to overcome his speech impediments and achieve clear diction by putting pebbles in his mouth while reciting, also trained by using actors’ methods of voice production.
19 Even though the dramatist and actor-manager Colley Cibber dismissed his ‘pantomimical Manner of acting … his Unnatural Pauses in the middle of a Sentence’ (Cibber quoted in Martin, op cit, p.8) Cibber was almost certainly driven by envy. Lampooned by Pope for his own excesses, he admitted in his autobiography that, though he longed to play the hero, ‘in this Ambition I was soon snubb’d by the Insufficiency of my Voice’ (Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Dover: 2000, originally published in 1740).
20 Tennyson’s voice, for example, ‘acted sometimes almost like an incantation, so that when it was a new poem that he was reading, the power of realizing its actual nature was subordinated to the wonder at the sound of the tones … sometimes … a long chant … sometimes a swell of sound like an organ’s’ (Francis Berry, Poetry and the Physical Voice, p.51, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). Shelley’s voice, by contrast, was described as ‘intolerably shrill, harsh and discordant … It was perpetual, and without any remission; it excoriated my ears’ (ibid, p.67).
21 Listen, for example, to the historic recordings of writers and poets from the British Library Sound Archive now issued on CD – ‘The Spoken Word: Writers’ and ‘The Spoken Word: Poets’.
22 Tom Paulin, ‘The Despotism of the Eye’, p.46, in Sider, op cit.
23 This he discovered in the trenches of the First World War (Martin, op cit), through the extraordinary sounds issuing from dying soldiers. Left with aural hallucinations, he worked on his own mental state and came to realise how many different aspects of the self the voice could express (Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework, London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998).
24 The voice teacher Kristin Linklater also focused on the voice as a bridge between mind and body, trying to free it from defences and tensions through exercises and voice-work (Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice, Quite Specific Media Group, 1988).
25 Angry young women, on the other hand, were nowhere on stage to be heard.
26 Brando quoted in Richard Eyre, ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’, Guardian, 31.7.04.
27 So demotic and under-played had acting styles become that one critic described Marianne Faithfull, in the role of Irina in the 1967 London Royal Court Theatre’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, as crying, ‘Moscow, Moscow, ’ as if she were calling for her dog (Peter Noble to the author, April 1967).
28 Joan Mills, ‘A Vocal Album: Snapshots from Vocal History’, p.8, in Frankie Armstrong and Jenny Pearson, Well-Tuned Women (London: The Women’s Press, 2000).
29 George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin Classics, 1995).
30 Interview, 26.11.03.
31 Interview, 30.11.03.
32 Henry Fairlie, quoted in Max Atkinson, Our Masters’ Voices: the Language and Body Language of Politics, p.107 (London: Methuen, 1984).
33 Pasty Rodenburg, The Need for Words (London: Methuen, 1993).
34 Samuel Beckett, Not I (London: Faber and Faber, 1973).
35 For the first time those of major public figures from the past can be heard on internet sites and CDs – an expression, almost certainly, of revived public interest in the voice. See, for example the History Channel, www.historychannel.com; G. Robert Vincent Voice Library, Michigan State University, www.vvl.lib.msu.edu; American Memory: Library of Congress – American Leaders Speak, www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/nfhtm; EyeWitness to History – Voices of the 20th Century, www.eyewitnesstohistory.com; Vintage Recordings of Presidential Elections, www.edisonnj.org.menlopark/. And among the CDS, ‘Voices of History – Historic Recordings from the British Library Sound Archive’, www.bl.uk; Margaret Thatcher, The Great Speeches (Politicos Media CD).
36 Edward D.Miller, Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
37 So much so that when listeners wrote to him, as they did in their thousands, they were unsure whether to address him formally or informally (ibid).
38 Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
39 ibid, p.159.
40 William E. Leuchtenburg, ‘The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy’, www.washingtonpost.com
41 He also changed the very texture of radio. Although his fireside chats don’t sound especially intimate to today’s audience, FDR’s calm, measured tones, emerging as they did unsponsored from between advertisements for toothpaste and cough drops, seemed extraordinary in their day (Miller, op cit).
42 Halberstam quoted in Leuchtenburg, op cit. Roosevelt’s voice, wrote the New York Times in 1933, ‘reveals sincerity, good-will and kindliness, determination, conviction, strength, courage and abounding happiness’ (New York Times Magazine, 18.6.33, quoted in G. W. Allport and H. Cantril, ‘Judging Personality from Voice’, p.155, in John Laver and Sandy Hutcheson, Communication in Face-to-Face Interaction, London: Penguin Books, 1972).
43 Miller, op cit. The familiarity of Roosevelt’s voice made it seem as if the medium of radio had disappeared, and his voice was coming to them unmediated, out of the either, fomenting the idea that the President had superhuman powers and was omnipotent.
44 The orthodoxy that FDR’s voice soothed the nation has been contested. In reality, it’s been argued, it ‘regulated panic’, creating the conditions for his own indispensability. ‘Roosevelt’s voice is heard as a voice of emergency, and his presidency becomes committed not so much to ending this emergency as to transmitting it, in order to secure a place for Roosevelt’s narrative voice. This voice reproduces the panic, even as it suggests that he, and his government, are well on the way to curing the ills of the country’ (ibid, p.79).
45 Adolf Hitler, quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936, p.147 (London: Penguin, 1998).
46 Propaganda, for Hitler, was the highest form of political activity (Kershaw, 1998, op cit) and was indistinguishable from ideology: ‘The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force’ (Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 317, 100, quoted in Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, London: Penguin Books, 1962).
47 William Carr, Hitler: A Study in Personality and Politics (London: Edward Arnold, 1978).
48 Kershaw, 1998, op cit.
49 Bullock, op cit, p.373.
50 Kershaw, 1998, op cit.
51 Carr, op cit, p.2.
52 Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, p.486 (London: Penguin Books, 1977).
53 Bullock, op cit, p.71.
54 Fest, op cit.
55 Konrad Heiden, Der Führer, p.81 (Constable and Robinson, 1999).
56 Bullock, op cit.
57 Fest, op cit, p.481. One extraordinary speech demonstrates his messianic fantasies. It’s hard to know whom he was talking about – Jesus Christ or himself. ‘You have once heard the voice of a man, and it has struck your hearts, and you have followed this voice. You have followed it for years, even without seeing the bearer of the voice. You only heard a voice, and you followed it. When we meet here, the miracle of this gathering fills us all. Not each of you sees me, and I do not see each of you. But I feel you, and you feel me! (Hitler’s speech to a Nuremberg Rally of 1936, quoted in Ian Kershaw, The Hitler Myth, pp.107–8, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
58 Traudl Junge, speaking in Blind Spot – Hitler’s Secretary (Im Toten Winkel – Hitlers Sekretarin), documentary film directed by Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer, 2002. Only one recording of Hitler speaking in his normal tone of voice has been found. Recorded secretly by a Finnish radio technician in 1942, it resurfaced a few years ago (and was used by the actor Bruno Ganz to help shape his performance in the 2004 German film, Downfall).
59 Hitler in the early 1920s, quoted in Kershaw, 1998, p.133.
60 Fest, op cit.
61 Bullock, op cit, p.373.
62 Paul Moses, The Voice of Neurosis (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1954).
63 Atkinson, op cit. In his novel The Karnau Tapes, the German writer Marcel Beyer dubbed it ‘a war of sound’. His central character, a sound engineer, described how Nazi meetings were manipulated by four microphones in front of the speaker’s desk, containing batteries of loudspeakers aimed at the stadium from all angles. A fifth, designed to pick up special frequencies, would be adjusted throughout the speech to bring out special vocal effects, and a sixth, beneath the desk, could be controlled by the speaker himself. Additional microphones were installed at a radius of one metre to help create a stereophonic effect, and there was even a gigantic public address system setting up continuous vibrations in their bodies (Marcel Beyer, The Karnau Tapes, London: Vintage, 1998) – an echo of Vetruvius’s suggestion that the acoustics of the theatre at Epidaurus could be improved by placing large bronze or earthenware ‘sounding vases’ in the auditorium that would pick up and reinforce certain notes (see Vovolis, op cit). Of course Beyer’s is a modern fictional re-imagining of the Nazi attempt to manipulate through the voice, and yet so overwhelming was its capacity to generate paranoia that, after all these years, it still seems feasible.
64 Virginia Woolf, quoted in Gillian Beer, ‘ “Wireless’’: Popular Physics, Radio and Modernism’, p.165, in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
65 Susan J. Douglas, Listening In (New York: Times Books, 1999).
66 Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War 2 Espionage. (New York: Random House, 2001).
67 Quoted in Churchill’s Roar, BBC Radio 4, 24.01.05.
68 ibid.
69 Jean Seaton, in ibid.
70 Andrew Roberts, Hitler and Churchill, p.36 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2003).
71 Churchill’s Roar, op cit. When the programme speeded up Churchill’s last sentence to Bragg’s pace, it lost most of its drama. When, on the other hand, they slowed Bragg’s tempo down to Churchill’s, it gained enormously in power.
72 Winston Churchill speech to House of Commons, 14.07.40. The idea, floated by the revisionist historian David Irving, that the recordings of some of Churchill’s most famous speeches – including the ‘We shall fight them on the beaches’ Dunkirk one of 4 June 1940 and the ‘their finest hour’ address of 18 June 1940 – were made not by Churchill but the actor Norman Shelley, has been taken up by serious historians and entered into popular mythology (see, for instance, Vanessa Thorpe, ‘Finest Hour for Actor Who Was Churchill’s Radio Voice’, Observer, 29.10.00). Although recordings of Shelley speaking some of Churchill’s speeches undoubtedly exist, the idea that Shelley’s voice was substituted for Churchill’s seems to have been comprehensively debunked by the Winston Churchill Archives (www.winstonchurchill.org/myths).
73 Peter Preston, ‘Towering He Wasn’t’, Guardian, 7.6.04.
74 Roger Rosenblatt, writing in Time, quoted in Paul D. Erickson, Reagan Speaks, p.14 (New York: New York University Press, 1985). A voice coach remarked, ‘Just before he would speak he would say, “Well, ” and what I read into that “Well” is him giving himself permission to let go which … I don’t think people in general do … [or] men in particular. “Well, here goes, what the hell … Now I’ll just come from the heart’” (interview with Charles Michel, 28.05.03).
75 Jamieson, op cit.
76 He also suffered from significant hearing loss caused by the firing of a gun near his ear when he was making westerns in Hollywood. In 1983 he was fitted with a hearing-aid (the first US president to use one), which had to be specially ‘swept’ for KGB bugs at regular intervals (Brendan Bruce, Images of Power: How the Image-Makers Shape Our Leaders, London: Kogan Page, 1992).
77 Between 1975 and 1979, after stepping down as Governor of California and before he became President, he made more than 1,000 daily radio broadcasts, to keep himself in the public mind. He turned down television offers, on the other hand, telling friends, ‘People will tire of me’ (Ronald Reagan, quoted in Howard Kurtz, Hot Air, New York: Basic Books, 1997).
78 Atkinson, op cit.
79 Vicki Woods, ‘Notebook, ’ Daily Telegraph, 18.12.01.
80 Margaret Thatcher, The Great Speeches, op cit.
81 Interview with Tim Bell, 19.02.03.
82 ibid.
83 ibid.
84 She disliked the Blackpool Winter Gardens especially (email to the author from Chris Collins, the Thatcher Foundation, 29.1.04).
85 Wapshott and Brock, quoted in Atkinson, op cit, p.115.
86 ibid.
87 ‘[For public meetings] we put pause lines in her speeches. We didn’t put applause lines in – she’d get petrified if they didn’t applaud’ (interview with Tim Bell, 19.02.03). Yet Margaret Thatcher wasn’t much given to self-doubt – self-assurance coursed through her delivery. She was good with hecklers, having learned to use the power of her office with them in an almost pantomime way. ‘They’ve come to listen to me, not you’ (Margaret Thatcher, quoted by Bell).
88 Interview with Tim Bell, 19.02.03.
89 Her statement on devolution to the House of Commons on 13 January 1976 is marked, ‘Keep voice low & relaxed. Don’t go too slow’ (email to the author from Andrew Riley, Archivist, Thatcher Papers, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, 6.2.04).
90 Edward Pearce, obituary of Sir Gordon Reece, Guardian, 27.09.01.
91 Obituary of Sir Gordon Reece, Daily Telegraph, 25.09.01.
92 Pearce, op cit.
93 Caroline Henton, ‘The Abnormality of Male Speech’, p.46, in George Wolf, ed., New Departures in Linguistics (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982).
94 The broadcaster Jon Snow said that ‘she had that absolute, crisp, decisive delivery that made you feel wrong before you’d even finished the question’ (interview with Jon Snow, 3.3.04).
95 Quoted in David Crystal and Hilary Crystal, Words on Words: Quotations about Language and Languages (London: Penguin Books, 2001).
96 Geoffrey W. Beattie, ‘Turn-taking and Interruption in Political Interviews: Margaret Thatcher and Jim Callaghan Compared and Contrasted’, Semiotica, 39–1/2, 1982 .
97 ibid.
98 During the 2001 general election campaign Tony Blair declared that his goal was ‘not just to win your vote. It is to win your heart and mind’ (Tony Blair quoted in Sarah Hall, ‘Blair Preaches Lesson of Trust and Change’, Guardian, 9 May 2001 – not something one can imagine Harold Macmillan ever saying). This recalled Princess Diana’s desire to be ‘the Queen of Hearts’: if Diana was the People’s Princess, Blair seemed to aspire to be the People’s PM.
99 Sam Wallace, ‘Hague’s Voice is Top Choice with Voters’, Daily Telegraph, 12.10.99.
100 Email to Simon Mayo, BBC Radio 5 Live, 12.11.03.
101 Simon Hart, quoted in Donald Hiscock, ‘The Apathy Generation’, Guardian, 9.5.01.
102 The modern politician, wrote the playwright Arthur Miller, must learn to be an actor: ‘The single most important characteristic a politician needs to display is relaxed sincerity’ (Arthur Miller, ‘The Final Act of Politics’, Guardian, 21.7.01).
103 Richard Sennett, The Fall of the Public Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1986).
104 ibid, pp.262, 263, 265.
105 Larry Moss, cited in Dave Denison, ‘Role of a Lifetime: Two Top Acting Coaches on How to Play the President’, Boston Globe, 12.09.04.
106 Geoffrey Nunberg, quoted in Peter S. Canellos, ‘In Kerry Speaking Style, Something Presidential’, Boston Globe, 23.03.04.
107 ibid.
108 Don Aucoin, ‘Kerry’s Oratory Style Needs Work’, Boston Globe, 25.03.04.
109 Renee Grant-Williams, quoted in Liza Porteus, ‘Candidates Say It With Style’, 6.10.04, www.foxnews.com.
110 Quoted in Porteus, op cit.
111 Arthur Miller, ‘On Politics and the Art of Acting’, 30th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, 26.03.01 www.neh.gov.
112 Denison, op cit.
113 Peggy Noonan, ‘Will the Real John Kerry Please Stand Up?’, Wall Street Journal, 22.07.04.
1 Barbara Engh, ‘Adorno and the Sirens: tele-phono-graphic bodies’, in Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones, eds., Embodied Voices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
2 Henry M. Boettinger, ‘Our Sixth-and-a-Half Sense’, p.205, in Ithiel de Sola Pool, ed., The Social Impact of the Telephone (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1977).
3 Asa Briggs, ‘The Pleasure Telephone: A Chapter in the Prehistory of the Media’, in ibid.
4 John Brooks, ‘The First and Only Century of Telephone Literature’, in ibid.
5 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, p.283 (London: Sphere Books, 1967).
6 Boettinger, op cit.
7 Sidney H. Aronson, ‘Bell’s Electrical Toy: What’s the Use? The Sociology of Early Telephone Usage’, in de Sola Pool, op cit.
8 Sir William Preece, 1879, quoted in Ithiel de Sola Pool et al, ‘Foresight and Hindsight: The Case of the Telephone’, p.128, in ibid.
9 ‘A Reporter’s Visit to the Boston Telephone Exchange’, Scientific American, 12.02.1887, quoted in Engh, op cit.
10 ibid.
11 Brenda Maddox, ‘Women and the Switchboard’, in de Sola Pool, op cit.
12 C.E. McCluer, 1902, quoted in Lana F. Rakow, ‘Women and the Telephone: The Gendering of a Communications Technology’, pp.214-5, in Cheris Kra-marae, Technology and Women’s Voice (London: Routledge, 1988).
13 Ann Moyal, ‘The Gendered Use of the Telephone: An Australian Case Study’, Media, Culture, and Society, 1992:14.
14 Stuart Millar, ‘Handheld PC Bridges Digital Divide’, Guardian, 9.07.01.
15 Alan H. Wurtzel and Colin Turner, ‘Latent Functions of the Telephone: What Missing the Extension Means’, in de Sola Pool, op cit, p.256.
16 Bell quoted in Aronson, op cit, p.22.
17 ‘The Phonograph’, New York Times, 7.11.1877.
18 Harper’s Weekly, 30.03.1878.
19 Edward Johnson, ‘A Wonderful Invention – Speech Capable of Indefinite Repeition from Automatic Records’, Scientific American, 17.11.1877.
20 Gillian Beer, ‘Wireless: Popular Physics, Radio and Modernism’, in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
21 ‘This machine bears a paradox: it identifies a voice, fixes the deceased (or mortal) person, registers the dead and thus perpetuates his living testimony, but also achieves his automatic reproduction in absentia: my self would live without me – horror of horrors!’ (Charles Grivel, ‘The Phonograph’s Horned Mouth’, in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992, quoted in Michael Douglas Heumann, ‘Ghost in the Machine: Sounds and Technology in Twentieth Century Literature’, PhD dissertation, Faculty of English, University of California, Riverside, June 1998.) This has an interesting analysis of the role played by the phonograph in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a subject also discussed by John M. Picker in ‘The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice’, New Literary History, 32, 2001.
22 ‘The Talking Phonograph’, reproduced from Scientific American, 22.12.1877, in Engineering, 18.01.1878. It can be found, along with many other fascinating original documents of the time, on Mike Penney’s ‘The Sound of a Voice’ website, www.members.lycos.co.uk/MikePenney.
23 The Phonograph, New York Times, 7.11.1877.
24 Sousa quoted in McLuhan, op cit, p.293.
25 ‘The claim that sound reproduction has “alienated” the voice from the human body implies that the voice and the body existed in some prior holistic, unalienated, and self-present relation … But the idea of the body’s phenomenological unity and sanctity gains power precisely at the moment in its history that the body is being taken apart, reconstituted, and problematized’ (Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, p.21 Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2003).
26 Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
27 Sterne, op cit, p.8.
28 ‘Acoustic space modelled in the form of private property allow[ed] for the commodification of sound’ (ibid, p.162).
29 John Belrose, ‘Fessenden and Marconi: Their Differing Technologies and Transatlantic Experiments During the First Decade of this Century’, paper given at an international conference on 100 Years of Radio, September 1995, www.anten-top.bel.ru.
30 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraph to Television (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2000).
31 On the other hand Rudolf Arnheim, the Berlin-born psychologist and theorist of the arts, saw broadcasting as offering ‘unity by aural means’ (Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, p.135, London: Faber and Faber, 1936). Having fled Germany in the 1930s, radio in his utopian imagination would spread the voice of enlightenment and eliminate the boundaries between countries.
32 Kathy Newman, ‘Radio-Activity: Reconsidering the History of Mass Culture in America’, Cultural Matters, issue 2, Spring 2003; ‘Changing Our Ways’, www.culturalstudies.gmu,edu.
33 Susan J. Douglas, Listening In, p.7 (New York: Times Books, 1995).
34 Ray Lapica, quoted in Newman, op cit.
35 Arnheim, op cit, p.211.
36 Hilda Matheson, Broadcasting, pp.81–2 (London: Butterworth, 1933). For a discussion of the BBC radio talk in the 1930s, see Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. 1, 1922–1939: Serving the Nation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
37 For a discussion of this voice’s origins, see Frances Dyson, ‘The Genealogy of the Radio Voice’ in Daina Augaitis and Dan Lander, eds., Radio Rethink (Banff, Alberta: Walter Phillips Gallery, 1994). The fact that, until the war, BBC radio announcers were anonymous helped fortify this sense of disembodied oracle.
38 A not-too-subtle allusion to the show’s producers, Time magazine. Van Voorhis was referred to as the ‘Voice of Time’, but came to be known as the ‘Voice of God’ (Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Film, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
39 Olive Shapley, Broadcasting a Life, p.46 (London: Scarlet Press, 1996).
40 For a discussion of ITMA’s role in the war, see Barry Took, Laughter in the Air (London: Robson Books, 1976), and Derek Parker, Radio: The Great Years. (Newton Abbot, Devon: David and Charles, 1977).
41 The BBC established a news department only in 1934.
42 An extract from Morrison’s report can be heard on www.eyewitnesstohistory.com. Morrison’s tones remain so iconic of the breakdown of normal voice that their tremor and irregular breathing have even been measured by acoustic researchers (Carl E. Williams and Kenneth N. Stevens, ‘Emotions and Speech: Some Acoustical Correlates’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 52, no. 4, 1972).
43 Even though ironically this ‘live’ broadcast was actually a taped recording transmitted by NBC the day after the actual event (Edward D. Miller, ‘Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003).
44 Indeed, in an almost direct echo of Morrison, he exclaims, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever witnessed’ (Orson Welles, War of the Worlds, CBS, 30.10.38).
45 Although it was also an expression of America’s economic instability and the coming war, War of the Worlds was transmitted just a month after the Munich crisis (Douglas, op cit).
46 ibid.
47 ibid.
48 Indeed one commentator has explained the panic over War of the Worlds as a reaction to broadcasting’s omnipotent, omniscient presence: it was ‘fascinating not so much as a story of the end of the world, but as a story of the end of the media. Listening to the simulated live dismantling of the network voice and the authority it implied, the “War of the Worlds” audience heard the empire of the air collapse into rubble … an experience both terrifying and exhilarating’ (Sconce, p.16, op cit). It was as if radio, newly established font of facts, had itself been destroyed.
49 Before Pickles’ first broadcast the press dusted down all its stereotypes of northerners, wondering if he’d say, ‘Here is the news and ee bah gum this is Wilfred Pickles reading it’ (Wilfred Pickles, Between You and Me, pp.136–7, London: Werner Laurie, 1949). In the event, he rounded off one midnight news bulletin with the words, ‘Good night to you all – and to all northerners wherever you may be, good neet!’ (ibid, p.142).
50 Although letters of abuse poured into the BBC, door-to-door interviews conducted by its Listener Research department discovered that he was more popular in the South than the North. Northerners, Pickles speculated, were probably thinking, Here we are ‘avin’ got on and sent t’childer to a good school to teach ‘em to speak proper an’ then they put a fellow on t’wireless talkin’ like this (ibid, p.146).
51 Anne Karpf, Doctoring The Media: The Reporting of Health and Medicine (London: Routledge, 1988).
52 See Douglas for a description.
53 Seven Ages of the Voice, BBC World Service, 2.5.98.
54 In the same radio interview he admitted, ‘When I left school, I had one of those terrifically high-pitched middle-class voices, sounding like a minor member of the Royal Family … [even though I spent] two years living in Dallas, Texas … And when I came back to Britain in 1967 I tried to get rid of that accent and thought I had been fairly successful, but recordings of me from around that time were still that kind of middle-class drawly voice’ (ibid).
55 Umberto Eco, ‘Independent Radio in Italy: Cultural and Ideological Diversification’, Cultures vol. 5, no. 1, 1978.
56 Brian Hayes, quoted in Martin Shingler and Cindy Wieringa, On Air, p.113 (London: Arnold, 1998).
57 Please Believe Us, BBC Radio 3, 27.04.97. Even Miriam Margolyes, voice-over actress extraordinaire, has confessed that she doesn’t get asked to do so many any more ‘because my voice is of another generation. I believe in the value of the vowel and consonant’ (Gerald Jacobs, ‘Roles’ Voice’, Jewish Chronicle, 15.07.05)
58 Interview with Jon Snow, 3.3.04. The whole subject of prestige accents, prejudice and discrimination against less-favoured ones, and accent change is fascinating but beyond the scope of this book. For an accessible and compelling account of accent discrimination in the US, see Rosina Lippi-Green’s brilliant English With an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination (London: Routledge, 1997). For the British experience, John Honey’s Does Accent Matter? (London: Faber, 1989) is an excellent starting-point.
59 Interview with Dan Rather, 18.7.03.
60 See Peter Lewis and Corinne Pearlman, Media and Power: From Marconi to Murdoch (London: Camden Press, 1986) for a literally graphic guide to this phenomenon.
61 Lorenzo W. Milam, Sex and Broadcasting (California: Dildo Press, 1975).
62 Not everyone was so enthusiastic about the addition of sound to pictures. The British writer Aldous Huxley confessed that the warbling of ‘Mammy’ at the film’s end – ‘those sodden words, that greasy sagging melody’ – had made his flesh creep (quoted in Scott Eyman, The Speed of Sound, p.14, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999). The director Josef von Sternberg dismissed talkies as ‘a visual skeleton clattering with voices’ (ibid, p.270), and the psychologist Rudolf Arnheim claimed that sound ruined film because it would be hard ‘to rustle up enough fodder for the speaking machines’ (Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Sound Film’, p.30, in Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). He also argued that ‘the libretti of most talkies apparently are of an utterly unbearable quality’ (ibid, p.270), and believed that the first time that the actor opened his or her mouth and spoke through an amplified voice, ‘film art abdicated its good old place back to the peep-show’.
63 ibid, p.182.
64 ibid.
65 ibid, p.181.
66 Edward Bernds, Mr Bernds Goes to Hollywood: My Early Life and Career in Sound Recording at Columbia with Frank Capra and Others (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1999).
67 Few actors were given direction about what or how to speak in voice tests, other than told to say anything that came into their heads, which sometimes turned out to be nursery rhymes or non sequitur phrases. They had no idea whether to talk softly or loudly, or whether the talkies resembled the stage or were another phenomenon altogether. One production person later rued the fact that, with Clara Bow, ‘We didn’t train her; we should’ve taken six months to send her to school, teach her how to speak. [But] we were bringing in all these Broadway actors and directors’ (Eyman, op cit, pp.182–4).
68 The New York Herald Tribune reported, ‘Her voice is revealed as a deep, husky contralto that possesses every bit of that fabulous poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world.’ (Margarita Landazuri ‘Anna Christie’, www.turnerclassicmovies.com).
69 Eyman, op cit, p.261. Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s 1930 comedy, Once in a Lifetime, centres round a voice school for silent screen stars, set up following the advent of the talkies.
70 Even Garbo suffered from this: from her chiselled beauty, no one had imagined that her voice would be so husky, and some even tried to attribute this to microphone distortion (Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
71 ibid, p.125.
72 Eyman, op cit, p.301. By the 1930s voice had become an important element in casting. When Gregory La Cava was casting Stage Door in 1937, he and his female scriptwriter hung around the cafeteria listening to the voices of the RKO starlets. ‘Try to get a voice’, he told her, meaning a distinctive one, with individual tone and colour (Elizabeth Kendall, quoted in Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
73 Rick Altman, Introduction, in Rick Altman, ed., ‘Cinema/Sound’, Yale French Studies, no. 60, 1980.
74 For a discussion of the silencing of women’s voices in film, see Lawrence, op cit, and Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Hollywood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
75 Altman, op cit.
76 See, for instance, Christian Metz, ‘Aural Objects’, in Altman, op cit.
77 Alan Williams, ‘Is Sound Recording Like a Language?’, in ibid.
78 Chion, op cit.
79 Altman, op cit, p.6.
80 ibid.
81 See Rick Altman, ‘24-Track Narrative? Robert Altman’s Nashville, Cinema(s), vol. 1, no. 3, Spring 1991.
82 Interview with Charles Michel, 28.05.03.
83 Achieved with the aid of cotton wool stuffed into his mouth and designed to convey the impression, according to the notes he scrawled on his script, of ‘Through the nose, high voice, nose broken early in youth to account for his difficulties’ (‘Godfather Script Sold for Record Price’, Guardian, 1.07.05).
84 According to the director, McCambridge worked for three weeks on the voice. ‘She was chain-smoking, swallowing raw eggs, getting me to tie her to a chair – all these painful things just to produce the sound of that demon in torment. And as she did it, the most curious things would happen in her throat. Double and triple sounds would emerge at once, wheezing sounds, very much akin to what you can imagine a person inhabited by demons would sound like. It was pure inspiration’ (William Friedkin quoted in Ronald Bergen, obituary of Mercedes McCambridge, Guardian, 19.03.04).
85 Mary Ann Douane, ‘The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space’, in Altman, 1980, op cit.
86 ibid. See also Chion, op cit.
87 Laura Mulvey, ‘Cinema, Sync Sound and Europe 1929: Reflections on Coincidence’, in Larry Sider et al, eds., Soundscape, p.20 (London: Wallflower Press, 2003).
88 Peter Wollen, ‘Mismatches of Sound and Image’, in Sider, op cit.
89 Jeff Matthews, ‘Hey, You Sound Just Like Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman’, www.faculty.ed.umuc.edu.
90 Agnieszka Szarkowska, ‘The Power of Film Translation’, Translation Journal, vol. 9, no. 2, April 2003.
91 Masterpiece: The Voice, BBC World Service, 3.05.05.
92 Had television been dominant in Hitler’s time, according to Marshall McLuhan, he’d either have vanished quickly or never risen to power because television is a ‘cool medium’ that rejects ‘hot figures’ (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London: Sphere Books, 1967).
93 Erika Tyner Allen, ‘The Kennedy-Nixon Presidential Debates, 1960’, The Museum of Broadcast Communications, www.museum.tv/archives.
94 A charge refuted by J.K. Chambers, ‘TV Makes People Sound the Same’, in Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, Language Myths (London: Penguin, 1998).
95 In Britain at least, they’re much louder than the surrounding programmes, perhaps contributing to the increasing national volume.
96 Seth Stevenson, ‘The Voice-Over Gets a Make-Over’, www.slate.msn.com, 28.03.05.
97 See, for instance, Rana Foroohar, ‘Signal Lost’, Newsweek, 24.01.05.
98 In one study undergraduates, tutored by computers that had been given distinct voices, responded ‘as if the voices represented distinct selves. Thus, we demonstrate that users can be induced to behave as if computers were human, even though users know that the machines do not actually possess “selves” or human motivations’ (Clifford Nass et al, ‘Anthropomorphism, Agency, and Ethopoeia: Computers as Social Actors’, SRCT Paper no. 105, presented at the INTERCHI ’93 conference, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 1993). Other experiments from the same team found that people were willing to disclose all sorts of personal information to computer voices, especially ones that they felt they were unlikely to encounter again (Kathleen O’Toole, ‘Computers With Voices: Students Explore How People Respond’, Stanford University News Service, 27.07.00www.stanford.edu).
99 Peter Norvig’s splendid ‘The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation’ (19.11.1863) reconfigures the Gettysburg address into what it would have been if Abraham Lincoln had had access to PowerPoint. Slide 4 (of 6), which reviews Key Objectives and Critical Success Factors, reads:
- What makes nation unique
- Conceived in Liberty
- Men are equal
- Shared vision
- New birth of freedom
- Gov’t of/for/by the people (www.norvig.com)
100 Sherry Turkle, quoted in ibid.
1 Harry Hollien, Forensic Voice Identification, p.19 (San Diego: Academic Press, 2001).
2 Some judges, however, have proposed a counter-argument – namely that a woman in such a terrifying situation couldn’t be expected to recall the subtleties in her assailant’s voice that would allow her to identify him purely on the basis of auditory memory (Harry Hollien, The Acoustics of Crime, New York: Plenum Press, 1990).
3 ‘Every language universally legible, exactly as spoken. Accomplished by means of self-interpreting symbols, based on a discovery of the exact physiological relations between sounds’ (Alexander Melville Bell, Visible Speech, London: 1864).
4 Hollien, 1990, op cit.
5 The passage of time, however, has done little to blunt the controversies surrounding the Lindbergh case – a website, the Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax, is still animatedly debating it (see note 2 in David Ormerod, ‘Sounds Familiar? – Voice Identification Evidence’, Criminal Law Review, pp.595–622, August 2001).
6 The rule of thumb is someone you’ve heard fairly regularly for about two years. The evidence also shows that we’re much more accurate when recognising the voices of people our own age, and that children and old people are poorer identifiers (Hollien 2001, op cit). The distinction here is between voice recognition, where an offender’s voice is already known to a witness, and voice identification, in which a witness tries to pick out a voice they hadn’t heard before the offence took place (John Wilding et al, ‘Sound familiar?’, Psychologist, vol. 13, no. 11, November 2000).
7 Ormerod, op cit.
8 ibid. More than two-thirds of witnesses choose innocent voices from voice parades from which the suspect is absent (Yarmey, cited in ibid). Anthony Barron (‘Speaker Identification by Earwitness: A Bigger Picture’, Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds, May 2001) has argued that if witnesses aren’t required to recognise or identify a voice but describe it, the problems are compounded – because of the lack of a shared vocabulary of voice discussed in chapter 1. In one study, neither speakers nor their friends agreed with expert and lay judges’ assessments of loudness, pitch, or resonance (Scherer, 1974, cited in Ormerod, op cit). As a result, courts are reduced to techniques like asking a witness to compare a suspect’s voice with their own or with that of a famous person. For the time being English law still hasn’t decided whether to adopt voice parades, and in what form. An exhaustive survey of voice evidence concluded that ‘it is now well recognised to be extremely unlikely that people can identify with any accuracy voices of strangers which they have heard only once before for a short period’ (Ormerod, op cit).
9 Yarmey cited in Ormerod, op cit. A recent study has found that voice witnesses, at their most confident, are ‘catastrophically’ worse than eyewitnesses (Olson, Juslin and Winman, cited in ibid).
10 Hollien, 2001, op cit.
11 Hollien, 2001, op cit.
12 ibid.
13 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle, p.33 (London: Fontana Books, 1970).
14 Clifford Irving had secured a lucrative publishing deal with McGraw-Hill to turn in what he claimed was Hughes’s ghosted autobiography, but which Hughes in the call pronounced a blatant fake. NBC hired Lawrence Kersta to make a voice-print analysis. Kersta, comparing pitch, tone, and volume in the call with those in a recording of Hughes from 1947, concluded that the phone-caller was indeed the authentic Hughes. Irving was arrested, convicted of forgery, obliged to reimburse the publisher and sent to jail.
15 The opposite argument, though, has also been advanced: that ‘all visual projections of sounds are arbitrary and fictitious’, and that the more that sound has been pictorialised, the worse our listening skills have become. Many modern acousticians, goes this argument, have exchanged an ear for an eye, and simply read sound from sight, although R. Murray Schafer (The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, p.127, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), was tilting more at engineers and audiologists than phoneticians.
16 Hollien, 2001, op cit.
17 For these reasons the term spectrographic voice recognition is preferred to voiceprint: though it hardly trips off the tongue, and is far less likely to capture the popular imagination, it’s much more accurate.
18 Hollien, 1990, op cit, p.10.
19 Judges, though, are expected to give the usual cautionary advice required of them in identification cases, particularly if prosecution is based solely on a witness’s identification of a suspect’s voice, or if there’s any risk that voice evidence might jeopardise fairness and lead to an ‘unsafe conviction’. See Ormerod, op cit, for a thorough discussion of the problems associated with voice identification evidence.
20 Bizarrely, British juries may sometimes be called upon to become speaker-recognition experts themselves: they can be invited to listen to a recording and then compare it with another voice.
21 Other methods being developed or already in use include iris scanning, signature analysis, even body-odour matching. Biometrics is one of the oldest forms of identification – the Egyptians identified people by their scars, complexion, eye colour, and height – but speaker verification developed originally in the early 1980s to support communications and intelligence projects funded by the US government (Steven F. Boll, ‘Testimony before the Subcommittee on Domestic and Internal Monetary Policy, Commerce, Banking and Financial Services’, House of Representatives, Washington, DC, May 20 1998).
22 Richard Mammone, ‘Your Voiceprint Will Be Your Key’, Speech Technology Magazine, Jan/Feb 1998 (www.speechtechmag.com).
24 Clive Summerfield, ‘The Future Is Hear: Securing Government Services Using Speaker Verification’, VeCommerce Ltd (www.biometricsinstitute.org).
25 And 768 million ATM transactions annually require authentication (ibid).
26 Mammone, op cit.
27 It works like this. A customer pre-records, either over the phone or in person, a two to six second example of their voice, by speaking their name or a predetermined phrase. If the background noise is excessive, they may be told, ‘Please move away from the dishwasher’ (Orla O’Sullivan, ‘Biometrics comes to life’, ABA Banking Journal, January 1997, www.banking.com). This is then digitally encoded. When they call in, the sound of their voice, cleaned up, is set beside the pre-recorded sample. By checking the formants or dominant frequencies over segments of sound in the caller’s voice and comparing them with all the other samples in the database, those with differing elements can be eliminated, leaving the matched one. A voice can be accepted or rejected in half a second, perhaps even one-tenth of a second.
28 Summerfield, op cit.
29 O’Sullivan, op cit.
30 ‘Passwords hold key to IT Help Desk problems’, 14.1.03 (www.axiossytems.com).
31 Sheryl P Simons, ‘Voice Recognition Market Trends’, Faulkner Information Services 2002 (www.stanford.edu).
32 ‘Voice Authentication: Datamonitor Consumer Survey Results (www.vocent.com).
33 ‘Large Scale Evaluation of Automatic Speaker Verification Technology’, The Centre for Communication Interface Research, University of Edinburgh, May 2000.
34 ‘At the present time,’ according to one group of researchers, ‘there is no scientific process that enables us to uniquely characterise a person’s voice or to identify with absolute certainty an individual from his or her voice … Given the current state of knowledge, there are no methods, either automatic or based on human experience, that enable one to state with certainty that a person is (or is not) the speaker in a particular recording’ (Jean-Francois Bonastre et al, ‘Person Authentication by Voice: A Need for Caution’, Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology, Geneva, Switzerland: Eurospeech, 2003).
35 ‘Large Scale Evaluation of Automatic Speaker Verification Technology’, op cit.
36 Mizuko Ito, ‘Mobile Phones, Japanese Youth, and the Replacement of Social Contact’, www.itofisher.com.
37 Denis Campbell, ‘Mobiles, DVDs and MP3s Send Under Eights to Techno Heaven’, Observer, 13.02.05.
38 Ling and Yttri, quoted in Ito, op cit.
39 McLuhan, op cit.
40 Sadie Plant, ‘On the mobile’, 2002, www.receiver.vodaphone.com.
41 ibid.
42 See Jeannette Hyde, ‘Hello! I’m on the beach’, Observer, 6.05.01.
43 Ito, op cit. There’s even a website, www.cellmanners.com, trying to develop courtesy in mobile-phone use.
44 Rachel Cusk, ‘Finding Words’, Guardian, 14.09.01.
45 James Meek, ‘Hi I’m in G2’, Guardian, 11.11.02.
46 Interview with Jeremy Green, 16.07.04.
47 Meek, op cit.
48 Rebound Voice Verification Service (www.reboundecd.com).
49 Judith Markowitz, ‘Speaker Verification for Community Release’, Speech Technology Magazine, Nov/Dec 2003 (www.speechtechmag.com).
50 Each morning a judge gets a full printed readout of calls (admissible in court). Says one, ‘If there was a violation I know the type of violation it was: no answer, hang up, unrecognised voice … Usually we get little violations at the beginning. It’s kind of a training process. Once you train them how to use the system, you’ll see “voiceprint successful” over and over. With the bad ones you still see “No answer, no answer, no answer, hang up, hang up, no answer”. Not every child is a candidate for voice’ (ibid).
51 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p.206 (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
52 Indeed Bentham also envisaged, as a crucial part of the Panopticon, a vast system of eavesdropping through speaking tubes (Leigh Eric Schmidt, ‘Hearing Loss’, in Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford: Berg, 2003).
53 Robert Winnett and David Leppard, ‘Yobs face losing their mobile phones’, Sunday Times, 21.3.04. Since many of the young people who’d be penalised in this way are the same ones who mug other young people for their mobiles, one can’t help thinking that this proposal would simply increase the number of mobile thefts.
54 This automatically synchronises our voice with the lip movements of the character we’ve chosen to play, stretching or shrinking the recording of our voice to match them without affecting our pitch (Barry Fox, ‘Dub Your Own Voice to Shrek Characters’, New Scientist, 10.12.01, www.newscientist.com).
55 You can hear it on www.ai.mit.edu.
56 Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, ‘Making Robots More Like Us’, New York Times, 06.03.03.
57 It leaves the recipient with a voice that’s neither their own nor that of the donor (James Meek, ‘Voice Box Transplants May Restore Lost Speech Within Decade’, Guardian, 16.06.01; Anthony Browne, ‘New Op Gives Living Voice of the Dead’, Observer, 26.11.00).
58 Some argue that these produce synthetic voices that no longer resemble Stephen Hawking’s but, on the contrary, sound increasingly natural since they’ve been pumped full of the acoustic of human emotion (Iain R. Murray et al, ‘Emotional Stress in Synthetic Speech: Progress and Future Directions’, Speech Communication, 20, 1996; Clifford Nass et al, ‘The Effects of Emotion of Voice in Synthesized and Recorded Speech’, Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Emotional and Intelligent II: The Tangled Knot of Social Cognition, North Falmouth, Massachusetts, 2001; Iain R. Murray and John L. Arnott, ‘Synthesizing Emotions in Speech: Is it Time to Get Excited?’, Proceedings of ICSLP 96 the 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Philadelphia, PA, 1996. Others argue that, even after twenty years of speech synthesis, you still know that you’re listening to a computer (David Howard, PEVOC 6, Royal Academy of Music, London, 2.09.05).
59 Marc Moens, quoted in www.pentechvc.com.
60 From audio artists like Disinformation, Scanner (Anne Karpf, ‘Scanner in the Works’, Guardian, 15.09.99), Hildegard Westerkamp (www.sfu.callwesterka/bio.html), David Toop (David Toop, Haunted Weather, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004). Bruce Naumann’s 2004 sound installation, ‘Raw Materials’, in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, enveloped visitors in cajoling, caressing, and melancholic voices. Gregory Whitehead’s work uses the voice and is also about it: pieces like ‘Principia Schizophonica’ engage playfully with the unearthly delights of the voice in the era of electronic media (on ‘The Pleasure of Ruins’, 1993, released by Staalplaat. See also Gregory Whitehead, ‘Radio Play Is No Place’, Drama Review, 40, 3 (T151), Fall 1996, and ‘Who’s There? Notes on the Materiality of Radio’, Art & Text, December-February, 1989).
61 John Arlidge, ‘Tyranny@work’ (Observer, 24 February 2002).
62 Lucy Ward, ‘Email Could Replace Talks with Teacher’ (Guardian, 10 December 2001).
63 ‘Y TEXTING MAYBE BAD 4 U’, www.textually.org, 8.3.04.
64 Will Woodward, ‘Parents Not Preparing Children for School, Ofsted Head Warns’ (Guardian, August 1 2003).
65 Rebecca Smithers, ‘Teachers to Work on Pupils Lost for Words’ (Guardian, 13 November 2003).
66 Oliver Pritchett quoted in ‘Grunting’, Guardian, 18.1.02.
67 Smithers, op cit.
68 BBC TV 6 o’clock news, 17 November 2003.
69 John L. Locke, The De-Voicing of Society (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998).
70 Even the inspiring social analyst Ivan Illich evoked an egalitarian utopia when he recalled arriving in 1926 on the Dalmatian island of Brac at the same time as the first loudspeaker. ‘Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became a resource for which loudspeakers compete … the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced. Ivan Illich, ‘Silence is a Commons’ (www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich.html).
71 Kathleen Edgerton Kendall, ‘Do Real People Ever Give Speeches?’ (The Central States Speech Journal’, Fall vol.xxv, no.3, 1974.
72 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).
73 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber & Faber, 1986).
74 Nancy Cartwright, My Life as a 10-Year-Old Boy, p.175 (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).
75 Duncan Campbell, ‘Homer Banned from Public Speaking’, Guardian, July 2002.
76 Nick Campbell, ‘Ask the Scientists: Alan 2.0’, Scientific American Frontiers archives, PBS, Fall 1990 to Spring 2000 (www.pbs.org/safarchives). A new voice-processing system can help a voice ‘evolve’ to sound the way the speaker wants it to through a microphone – less weedy, say, or more joyful, calm, or even manly. A genetic algorithm analyses the voice signal to work out which aspects of it need to be enhanced or suppressed to produce a better sound (Ian Sample, ‘Genetic Algorithm Tunes up Public Speakers’, New Scientist, 17.07.02).
77 Vocaloid, Yamaha’s new software, has synthesised the human singing voice. A male soul voice called Leon, and a female soul voice called Lola, have been generated after recording two real singers for a week and then processing the sounds into a database of snippets, which can then be reassembled in a different form and the pitch altered to fit a new tune. Leon and Lola, it hardly needs saying, will cost a lot less to hire than their real-life counterparts.
78 Will Knight, ‘Computer Program Raises Possibility of Voice Theft’, New Scientist, 13.8.01.
79 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Standard Edition, vol. XVII trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).
80 For an invigorating discussion of ventriloquism, see Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
1 ‘How Does Chanting Improve Our Health and Wellbeing?’, www.russilpaul.com; Vandana Mohata, ‘Mantras: An Interview with Jonathan Goldman’, www.healingsounds.com.
2 Jill Purce, pioneer of overtone or harmonic singing or chanting, a version of Tibetan and Mongolian monks’ traditional throat singing, calls it ‘sonic massage’, or ‘musical medicine’ (Jill Purce, ‘The Healing Voice’ flyer, 2005, and www.healingvoice.com). Tibetan Buddhists explain its origin through the story of the Lama Je Tzong Sherab Senge who, one day in 1433, awoke from a dream in which he heard two voices – one deep as the growling of a wild bull, and the other high, pure, and sweet like a child’s. Both were combined into one voice and emanated from him. The dream instructed him to take this ‘one voice chord’ and use it for tantric chanting, uniting male and female aspects of divine energy.
3 A more novel form of sound healing has recently emerged – the reading aloud of Homer’s hexameters. Used by many Ancient Greek epic poems, the hexameter has six metres to the line: according to a German study, this helps synchronise the heart and breathing, slow the breathing down, and raise oxygen in the blood. Dirk Cysarz et al, ‘Oscillations of Heart Rate and Respiration Synchronize During Poetry Recitation’, American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology, 287, 2004. The Iliad, in other words, may be good for the heart.
4 Daniel R. Boone, Is Your Voice Telling on You? How to Find and Use Your Natural Voice, p.7 (San Diego: Singular, 1997).
5 One of the best-known books of this kind for actors is called Freeing the Natural Voice by Kristin Linklater, first published in 1976 (Quite Specific Media Group, 1998).
6 See, for instance, Paul Newham, Therapeutic Voicework, (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1998), a broad survey of ideas about the voice whose author is a leading practitioner of therapy through voicework.
7 Eugene Rontal et al, ‘Vocal Cord Dysfunction – An Industrial Health Hazard’, Annals of Otology, Rhinology, and Laryngology, 88: 1979, Ann-Christine Ohlsson et al, ‘Vocal Behaviour in Welders A Preliminary Study’, Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 39, 1987; Joanne Long et al, ‘Voice Problems and Risk Factors Among Aerobics Instructors’, Journal of Voice, vol. 12, no. 1. For the side-effects of medication like inhaled corticosteroids see Eva Ihre et al, ‘Voice Problems as Side Effects of Inhaled Corticosteroids in Asthma Patients – a Prevalence Study’, Journal of Voice, 18(3), September, 2004.
8 Heavier workloads brought about by the national curriculum have aggravated the problem (Stephanie Martin and Lyn Darnley, The Teaching Voice, London: Whurr, 2004). The idea that the demands of a job can impinge upon the voice isn’t a modern one, however. In 1897 Mrs Emil Behnke wrote that ‘there are two sections of professional voice users in whom the effects of want of training for the physical side of their work are increasingly apparent – namely, the clergy and school teachers. In many of these cases vocal power becomes greatly diminished and its quality injured by wrong voice use, even when the speaker is not incapacitated from all work by entire breakdown’ (Mrs Emil Behnke, The Speaking Voice: Its Development and Preservation, p.3, London: J. Curwen & Sons, 1897).
9 ‘Not training teachers about voice skills would be like training a surgeon how to do an operation without explaining about the tools or instruments they have to use’ (James Williams, quoted in Janet Murray, ‘A Quiet Word of Advice’, Guardian, 13.01.04).
10 The Voice Care Network UK, www.voicecare.org.uk.
11 M. Robin DiMatteo, ‘Nonverbal Skill and the Physician-Patient Relationship’, in Robert Rosenthal, ed., Skill in Nonverbal Communication: Individual Differences (Cambridge, Mass: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1979). See also Lesley Fallowfield et al, ‘Efficacy of a Cancer Research UK Communication Skills Training Model for Oncologists: a Randomised Controlled Trial’, Lancet, 359, 2002; Adam Jones, ‘Hearing the worst’, Guardian, 25.04.01; Jo Carlowe, ‘And the Good News Is’, Observer, 21.07.02; and Jo Revill, ‘How Doctors Deliver the Curt Words that Mean Life or Death’, Observer, 10.11.02.
12 Sir Donald Irvine, quoted in Sarah Boseley, ‘Doctors Failing 3m Patients’, Guardian, 18.12.04.
13 DiMatteo, op cit.
14 Nalini Ambady, ‘Surgeons’ Tone of Voice’, Surgery, 132, 2002. ‘If physicians improve their communication skills,’ said an attorney elsewhere, ‘they can reduce their legal risk’ (Heidi Foster, quoted in Judith Kapuscinski ‘Who Sues, Who Gets Sued and Why?’ Insights into Risk Management, vol. 3, no.4, Fall 2002).
15 Chris Arnot, ‘Let’s Put Theory into Practice’, Guardian, BT School Awards supplement, 27.09.05.
16 Sue Horner, quoted in Stephen Hoare, ‘It Takes Two to Communicate’, Guardian BT Schools Award Supplement, 27.09.05.
17 ibid.
18 Standford Gregory et al, ‘Voice Pitch and Amplitude Convergence as a metric of Quality in Dyadic Interviews’, Language and Communications, vol. 13, no. 3, 1993.
19 Howard Giles et al, ‘Speech Accommodation Theory: The First Decade and Beyond’, in M. McLaughlin, ed., Communication Yearbook, vol.10 (Newbury Park: Sage, 1987).
20 Howard Giles and Angie Williams, ‘Accommodating Hypercorrection: A Communication Model’, Language and Communication, vol. 12, no. 3/4, 1992.
21 ibid.
22 For example, a speaker talking at 50 words per minute can move to match exactly another speaker’s rate of 100 words per minute (total convergence) or 75 words per minute (partial convergence) (Giles et al 1987, op cit).
23 Giles and Williams, op cit.
24 ibid, p.349.
25 Joseph N. Capella, ‘Management of Conversational Interaction’, in Mark L. Knapp and Gerald R. Miller, eds., Handbook of Interpersonal Communication (Newbury Park: Sage, 1994).
26 Stanley Feldstein et al, ‘Gender and Speech Rate in the Perception of Competence and Social Attractiveness’, Journal of Social Psychology, 141(6), 2001, although the ratings of competence were also influenced by the gender of both listeners and speakers.
27 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.
28 Norbert Freedman and Joan Lavender, ‘Receiving the Patient’s Transference: the Symbolising and Desymbolising of Counter-transference’, Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 45, no. 1, 1997. Schizophrenics and learning-disabled people, on the other hand, seem to display less convergence (Condon and Ogston, and Condon, cited in Judee K. Burgoon, Interpersonal Adaptation: Dyadic Interaction Patterns, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
29 Clifford Nass and Kwan Min Lee, ‘Does Computer-Synthesised Speech Manifest Personality? Experimental Tests of Recognition, Similarity-Attraction, and Consistency-Attraction’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, vol. 7, no. 3, September 2001.
30 Noriko Suzuki et al, ‘Effects of Echoic Mimicry Using Hummed Sounds on Human-Computer Interaction’, Speech Communication, 40 p.569, 2003.
31 Patrick Boylan, ‘Accomodation Theory Revisited’, paper given at Sietar European Congress, Brussels, 16.3.00. Converging works with words as well as voice. A waitress in a restaurant got larger tips when she repeated back the customer’s order using exactly the same words than when she paraphrased it (van Baaren et al, cited in Rick B. van Baaren, ‘Mimicry and Prosocial Behaviour’, in Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 1 January 2004).
32 Stanford W. Gregory Jr. et al, ‘Verifying the Primacy of Voice Fundamental Frequency in Social Status Accomodation’, Language and Communication, 21 2001.
33 Berg, cited in Giles et al 1987. When interviewers speak louder or more softly, one study found, the interviewee changes their volume to match them (Michael Natale, ‘Convergence of Mean Vocal Intensity in Dyadic Communication as a Function of Social Desirability’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 32, no. 5, 1975). Another interviewer, by halving the length of time of his own questions, influenced the length of the interviewee’s answers (Matarazzo et al, cited in Robert G. Harper et al, eds., Nonverbal Communication: The State of the Art, New York: John Wiley, 1978), while in a different experiment, the interviewee’s interruption rate regularly matched that of the interviewer (Wiens et al, cited in Harper et al, op cit).
34 Stanford W. Gregory, Jr. and Stephen Webster, ‘A Nonverbal Signal in Voices of Interview Partners Effectively Predicts Communication Accomodation and Social Status Perceptions’, pp.1232, 1239, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 70, no. 6, 1996. ‘It is quite obvious that the lower-frequency signal of the human voice communicates much more than just pitch … the lower frequency of the voice communicates social status relations between partners.’
35 Stanford W. Gregory, Jr. and Timothy J. Gallagher, ‘Spectral Analysis of Candidates’ Nonverbal Vocal Communication: Predicting US Presidential Election Outcomes’, Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, p.305, 2002. Acoustic analysis of the candidates’ pitch produced ‘a nonverbal, unconscious measure of social dominance … [which] may be communicated to observers of the debate, and the resulting perception of one candidate’s social dominance over the other ultimately may be expressed through the observers’ voting behaviour.’ The single exception was 2000, when the more dominant speaker – Al Gore – won the popular vote but lost the election.
36 Boylan, op cit. So accommodation ‘can include being the kind of foreigner that one’s interlocutors wish one to be: that is, one can accommodate optimally by accommodating minimally just as, in other cases, by accommodating to the hilt’ (ibid).
37 Howard Giles and Peter Powesland, ‘Accomodation Theory’, in Nikolas Coup-land and Adam Jaworski eds., Sociolinguistics: A Reader and Coursework (London: Macmillan, 1997).
38 Interview, 31.10.03.
39 Mulac et al, cited in Giles et al, 1987.
40 Capella, op cit.
41 Leslie M. Beebe and Howard Giles, ‘Speech Accommodation Theories: a Discussion in Terms of Second Language Acquisition’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 46, 1984.
42 ‘Mimicry Makes Computers the User’s Friend’, New Scientist, 2.6.03.
43 Renee Grant-Williams, Voice Power: Using Your Voice to Captivate, Persuade, and Command Attention, p.106 (New York: Amacom American Management Association, 2002). She urges not just converging but also some canny diverging, reminding readers that ‘you have a part to play in this, too. Use whatever you know about colour and variety to steer the duet in the direction you want to take. Your partner may soon be adjusting their voice to yours’ (p.108).
44 Joseph O’Connor and John Seymour, Introducing NLP, p.20 (HarperCollins, 2002)
45 Davis, cited in Burgoon et al, 1995, op cit.
46 Interview, 28.5.03.
47 ibid.
48 Interview, 10.10.04.
49 Interview, 10.10.04.
50 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Preface, p.15 (London: Pelican Books, 1971).
52 Boyd Clarke, ‘The Leader’s Voice’ (Select Books, 2002).
53 Rene Grant-Williams, Voice Power: Using Your Voice to Captivate, Persuade, and Command Attention (New York: Amacom American Management Association, 2002).
54 Khalid Aziz, Presenting to Win (London: Oak Tree Press, 2000).
55 See Rosanna Lippi-Green’s coruscating attack on these in her perceptive analysis, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States (London: Routledge, 1997).
56 See ‘Add a “Voice Lift” to Your Tummy Tuck’, 19.04.04, www.CNN.com; Toby Moore, ‘Tune In, Stay Young’, The Times, 21.04.04; Claire Coleman, ‘Voice Lift’, Daily Mail, 3.10.05.
57 Peter Jaret, ‘My Voice Has Got to Go’, New York Times, 21.7.05.
58 Advice to call-centre workers quoted in Deborah Cameron, Good to Talk?, pp.105-6 (London: Sage, 2000).
59 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart, p.108 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
60 David J. Lieberman, Never Be Lied to Again (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).
61 Lillian Glass, I Know What You’re Thinking (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley, 2002).
62 Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, Reading People (London: Vermillion, 1999).
63 Elisabeth Zetterholm, ‘Intonation Patterns and Duration Differences in Imitated Speech’, in Bernard Bel and Isabelle Marlien, eds., Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002 (Aix-en-Provence: Laboratoire Parole et Langage, 2002).
64 David Howard in I’d Know That Voice Anywhere, BBC Radio 4, 14.6.03.
65 Interview with Rory Bremner, 12.05.03.
66 Interview with Rory Bremner, 12.05.03.
67 Deso A. Weiss, ‘The Psychological Relations to One’s Own Voice’, Folia Phoniatrica, vol.7, no. 4, p.213, 1955.
68 ibid.
69 ibid, p.214. In this specialist’s view, ‘A successful therapy of the voice might be equivalent to the effects of a thoroughgoing psychotherapy.’
70 Robert F. Coleman and Ira W. Markham, ‘Normal Variations in Habitual Pitch’, Journal of Voice, vol. 5, no. 2, pp.176–7, 1991. See also John A. Haskell, ‘Vocal Self-Perception: The Other Side of the Equation’, Journal of Voice, vol. 1, no. 2, p177, 1987, and John A. Haskell, ‘Adjusting Adolescents’ Vocal Self-Perception’, Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, vol. 22, July 1991.
71 Interview with Charles Michel, 30.05.03.
72 Interview with Andrea Haring and Elena McGee, 28.05.03.
73 See Newham, op cit.
74 Interview, 30.10.03.
1 Andrew Gumbel, Obituary of Sidney Morgenbesser, Independent, 06.08.04. Thanks to Stan Cohen for drawing my attention to this.
2 Anita McAllister and Svante Granqvist, ‘Child Voice and Noise: The Effects of a Day at the Daycare on Vocal Parameters in 10 Five-year-old Children’, paper given at PEVOC 6, Royal Academy of Music, September 2005.
3 See R. Murray Schafer’s pioneering analysis of legislation against the human voice and changes to the soundscape, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977).
4 Michael Bull, ‘Introduction: Into Sound’, in Michael Bull and Les Back, The Auditory Culture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003).