Every day, in countless different ways, we employ sublime skills of which we’re only faintly, fleetingly, conscious. We use them when we buy a newspaper as much as when we comfort a bereaved friend, when we ask for a rise as much as when we recite poetry. Without them, our language instincts would count for nothing: we simply wouldn’t be able to understand one another. For not only are they the channel through which thoughts become speech, but also they give our words meaning, and tint them with feelings. However hesitant we might think we are, most of us, from the very moment of birth, spontaneously demonstrate the use of this most glorious instrument – our human voice.
Throughout our lives we make decisions, often unwittingly, on the basis of the sound of a person’s voice: lovers as well as political candidates get selected for vocal reasons. Our lilt, twang, or tremor are eloquent often beyond words. The voice can also make sentences do somersaults. ‘I don’t think so’ might be an innocent expression of uncertainty or an example of withering sarcasm – the voice tells us which. ‘Not bad’ – given the right tone – can glow with praise. Yet signal oddly with your voice – by transgressing the normal codes of volume, pause, and pitch – and you can entirely sabotage conversation, turning sense into nonsense.
But the voice isn’t just a conduit for language, information, and mood: it’s our personal and social glue, helping to create bonds between individuals and groups. One Christmas Eve, for example, a woman in the kitchen of a friend’s house accidentally slices open her finger. Her husband, who is outside, comes running in, bandages the finger, and takes her to hospital. But their friends are astonished: she’d said, ‘Ow,’ softly, over the din of chatting friends, yet her husband had not only heard her, but also could identify something quite serious. ‘I know an “Ow” versus an “Ow”,’ he said.1
Or consider this. A 63-year-old man phones his 91-year-old mother, who lives some seventy-five miles away, every two or three days. ‘I can tell, less than a second into the call, how my mother is. I know every one of her ailments from her voice as she answers. I know that my voice has an emotionally cheering and uplifting effect on her. If she’s down, at the end of the call I can hear her very picked up. It doesn’t matter what I’ve said – I can use my voice to pick her up from her 90-something doldrums.’ People who have to rely on the phone to maintain close relationships tend to hone those skills. A 50-year-old American woman living in London says, ‘I don’t ring my mother if I’m feeling distressed or drunk because I know that she’s fantastically good at hearing what’s wrong.’2
Then there’s the 12-year-old boy, six weeks into his new school, who has worked out which of his teachers like him mainly through their tone of voice. As a result he speaks in a more friendly way to those teachers, who respond more warmly back to him, creating a loop of approval.3
None of these people possesses exceptional vocal abilities: they’re simply using the acoustic capacities with which they were born. Of course there are some individuals who are aurally gifted, like the 56-year-old woman who told me, ’somebody can say hello to me on the phone and I know if I can trust them.’4 And others with highly developed vocal talents. A 65-year-old GP with an authoritative but mellow voice (and an enthusiastic member of his local choir) is the most popular doctor in his group practice. His sister-in-law is certain that his voice is responsible: it makes patients feel that they can safely entrust themselves to his care.5
Her hunch seems less far-fetched when you learn that a recent American study found that, from just forty seconds of surgeon-patient consultations from which the words had been filtered out, leaving tone of voice alone, listeners could tell which doctors had been sued for malpractice and which hadn’t. The degree of dominance or concern in the surgeons’ voice was a giveaway.6
Despite all this, we have very little collective sense in Western societies of the importance of the voice, and almost no shared language with which to talk about it. We persist instead with the idea that the move from a primarily oral to a mainly literate society has made the voice much less important than the image and the written word, as if the voice belonged at the periphery of human experience, rather than at its centre. In all the last few decades’ excited debate over the role of language, speech, and conversation, the voice is often no more than an afterthought.
In reality, as I hope to show, the voice lies at the heart of what it is to be human. It plays a crucial role in helping babies establish secure emotional ties, acquire language, develop empathy and social skills. Adults milk it for information in their intimate relationships and professional lives. And now, when radio and television are so prominent and telephone and digital media inescapable, there’s a renewed interest in sound7 that’s beginning to stoke fresh fascination with the role of the voice.
In the pages that follow, I hope to convince you of the extraordinary properties of what are essentially vibrations of air. I want you to be bewitched, as you sit on a bus or in a restaurant, by the way that different parts of the body – lungs, abdomen, throat, lips, teeth, tongue, palate, and jaw – unite to make a voice, and how tiny changes in one of them can entirely alter mood and meaning. We can do with our voices what typographers do with print – italicise, put into bold or inverted commas. Some people make their words purr, others use their voice as a bayonet. Within the space of a few minutes, we can become siren or screamer, patron or soother, just through labial flexibility and the reshaping of our internal cavities.
The voice is one of our most powerful instruments, lying at the heart of the communication process. It belongs to both the body and the mind. It’s shaped by our earliest infant experience and by powerful social conventions. It bridges our internal and external worlds, travelling from our most private recesses into the public domain, revealing not only our deepest sense of who we are, but also who we wish we weren’t. It’s a superb guide to fear and power, anxiety and subservience, to another person’s vitality and authenticity as well as our own.
You can’t really know a person until you have heard them speak. Most of us have hidden under the duvet, remembering how our voice unintentionally betrayed some emotion that we’d thought – and hoped – was securely padlocked away. There can hardly be a person who hasn’t bristled over a conversation with someone whose words were unexceptional but whose tone of voice delivered an entirely different message. The voice can invite or discourage intimacy, without our having to be verbally explicit,8 or even conscious of what we’re doing: a lonely person might be unwittingly creating subtle vocal cues that keep other people at a distance, whilst considering themselves a victim, because unable to take responsibility for the negative feelings they elicit in listeners.9 We use our voice to repel and attract, encourage or undermine. As animals with smell, so are humans with voices.
And yet we’re often shockingly indifferent to this instrument – an indifference this book sets out to challenge. Part 1 shows how the voice is implicated in almost every area of our personal and social lives, explains how we modulate it, and explores its origins in human development and experience. Part 2 tracks the psychological, gender and cultural aspects of the voice, using original interviews to examine our relationship with our own voice and those of the people we’re close to. Part 3 looks at how the voice has changed and is changing, partly because of technology. This journey round the voice visits the realms of psychology, anatomy, linguistics, anthropology, as well as history, child development, gender and cultural studies. I hope it will play some part in helping us attune to the human voice in a new way, to develop fresh ears and awe for one of our most stunning abilities.