This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  Irony and sarcasm are not the only way we use prosody. We use it every time we express tenderness, or anger, or enthusiasm, or any number of other nuanced emotional states that give the human voice its peculiar power to woo, persuade, threaten, cajole, and mollify. Prosody makes the difference between the affectless utterances of HAL the computer in 2001 (or Mr. Spock in Star Trek) and the rich and expressive instrument of Morgan Freeman or Meryl Streep—or even just the lilting, songlike way you say “Hello” when you answer the phone, so your caller doesn’t think you’re a machine. The term comes from the ancient Greek: pro, meaning “toward,” and sody, meaning “song.” We speak toward song. Except I didn’t anymore, according to Zeitels.

  “You’re behaving through a veil of monotone,” he went on. “When you talk, you can’t express emotion properly. You can’t change pitch, can’t get loud, can’t do the normal things that a voice does to express how you feel.”

  This hit me hard. I had not been consciously aware of these changes; but now that he pointed them out, I had to acknowledge that my range of expression had indeed diminished. I had, before developing a polyp, enjoyed exercising the emotive powers of my voice: as well as singing in a high school choir and in college coffeehouses (and, ill-advisedly, Jann’s band), I had competed in public speaking contests, taking first prize in two poetry reading competitions at my high school (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…”) and winning a raconteur contest in college. Part of the fun of publishing my first book, which got me onto Oprah and a bunch of other TV and radio shows, was talking about the thing, exercising the public speaking skills that had lain dormant since that college competition. Though I could still drive my voice through the basic melodic shifts necessary to make my emotional state more or less known, it had become burdensome to do so (too much expressive talking still left me pretty wiped out at the end of a day); and my voice was by no means the precision instrument it had once been. More cudgel than scalpel, it would, when imbuing a word or syllable with special emphasis (“He said what?”), often break up, or cut out, altogether.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. For Zeitels now added:

  “You are not being transmitted by your voice.”

  That the voice is a vital clue to character and personality—to fundamental identity—was not news to me. We all make split-second judgments about people according to whether they speak in a deep, resonant, commanding baritone, or a high, piping soprano, or a girlish whisper. We draw inferences about everything from where they were born and raised (according to how they pronounce their vowels and consonants, their accent), to their socioeconomic status, to their degree of education. And, of course, people do this to us. When I moved to New York City from Toronto, at age thirty, I was regularly interrupted by strangers who would say, with a knowing smile, “What part of Canada are you from?” They had detected the distinctive way I pronounce the words “out” and “about”—Americans hear them as oot and aboot—which is a function of how I move my mouth when forming the sounds that Americans say as “ow” and I say as “oo”—a gesture of the tongue and lips that I learned in earliest infancy from hearing my (Canadian) parents and my kindergarten friends pronounce that speech sound and which was duly hardwired into the motor nerves that control my vocal organs when I talk. Because such aspects of voice are laid down during a critical period of brain development, “unlearning” them is extremely difficult—impossible for some. Today, after more than thirty years living in the United States, I have never lost my oot and aboot, and it never fails to make me feel a bit self-conscious about how my voice is telling strangers something intimate about me.

  So, yes, I had always known that the voice is a kind of aural fingerprint, something unique to every individual and from which listeners draw strong inferences—hence my worry over sounding like a Bukowski-esque barfly or Sopranos-style heavy after my injury. But in “speaking around” that injury, I was apparently projecting a new personality into the world: a more monotone, less enthusiastic, less engaged personality.

  But my polyp wasn’t just changing how others perceived me; it was actually changing my behavior. “People with your type of injury withdraw from scenarios intuitively,” Zeitels said. “It must be a nightmare in a loud New York restaurant.”

  It certainly was. Raising my voice above the din caused my vocal polyp to smash against my healthy vocal cord with extra force, creating swelling in both vocal cords that could take a week to subside and that made my rasp even worse. Loud restaurants, raucous parties, clubs, concerts—I tended to avoid them now, and when I did find myself in these environments, I deliberately clammed up. As a child, I had always been extroverted, verbal, performative—an aspect of my personality that everyone in my family attributed to my position in the birth order: I was the youngest of three boys all born within three years. Our sister came along four years after me. I thus occupied an ambiguous region: youngest of the boys, but not the youngest in the family. I must have seen it as a treacherous place to dwell (I did see it as a treacherous place to dwell), where it would be all too easy to be lost, eclipsed, overshadowed, forgotten. Accordingly, I learned early how to compete for attention, staking my claim on the airspace: I became the loudest, most verbal, and, I suspect, most irritating of the kids in our family. I was about four years old when, after improvising a stand-up routine in our kitchen (“Dad, if you’re a ‘doc,’ why can’t I dive off you?”), my parents announced that when I grew up I would have my own talk show—“Just like Johnny Carson!” Music to my ears, and a further prod to seizing the floor, to raising my voice. None of this surprised Zeitels. “Oh yeah,” he said, “you might have been brewing this polyp for decades before you sang in Jann’s band. Wallflowers and introverts don’t get this injury.”

  Feeling shaken, I said, “So—this changes my life, in a way?”

  “Totally,” he said.

  * * *

  In my article, I omitted all mention of my own voice injury, focusing on the microsurgeries Zeitels performed on his patients and his research into a gel-based filler—an “artificial vocal cord”—for repairing the kind of damage that Julie Andrews sustained from her botched operation. The article went over well, and it was suggested to me that I perhaps expand it into a book about “the voice, in general.” My first impulse was to say “Not possible.” As my own injury made clear, the voice is a deceptively simple-seeming subject (you sing, you talk—big deal) that actually touches on some of the deepest mysteries in the natural world: namely, how we communicate thoughts, emotions, personality, upbringing, and a lot of other personal data (including clues about race, mental health, social class, even sexual orientation), on tiny ripples of air that we beam into other people’s brains by moving our lips and tongue while exhaling. An alien species watching us perform this bio-lingual-psycho-acoustical feat would no doubt think, “This is unreal!”

  And it is. But how to get one’s hands around so big and diffuse a subject? The difficulty in even saying what the voice is did not bode well for attempting a book. Is the voice singing? Talking? Is a cough voice? A laugh? “Indeed, it seems we know exactly what we mean by the word voice as long as we don’t try to define it!” as Johan Sundberg, the world’s foremost authority on the physiology of singing, put it in the introduction to his classic textbook The Science of the Singing Voice (1987).2 Aristotle, who defined the voice as “the sound produced by a creature possessing a soul,” explicitly ruled out coughing as voice because a cough does not call up a “mental image.”3 That is, words. Unfortunately, that definition also rules out the high clear sustained note that an opera tenor hits and which sends shivers through us despite the isolated vowel’s calling up no specific “mental image” (especially if we don’t understand Italian). To say nothing of the fact that, in the 1950s, a branch of speech science, called paralinguistics, emerged that convincingly showed that all manner of vocal noises (coughs, sighs, gasps, ums and ers) can be highly revealing of a person’s inner state of mind and heart—and
as such have a communicative salience that, even by Aristotle’s definition, qualify them as voice.4

  Add to these confusions the epistemological conundrum that the voice is, conceptually, impossible to “locate.” It is “in” the speaker’s body as an act of breathing and articulation, but doesn’t exist until it is manifest in the air as a sound wave. Arguably, the voice comes into existence, as voice, only when someone is around to process that sound wave in the brain’s auditory cortex. (In voice science, the answer to the philosophical riddle: “Does a tree that falls in a forest make a sound if there’s no one to hear it?” is “No!”) A final complication arises from the fact that what science calls The Voice—everything from the buzzing sound source in our throats, to the way we sculpt that buzz into speech sounds with movements of our mouths, to the rhythm and melody of spoken language or song—results from the synchronized actions of many distinct body parts (lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips, soft palate, or velum), all of them originally designed (by natural selection) for quite different tasks. Which of these is the voice—some, all, none?

  In short, it didn’t seem possible to write a book about something that the smartest people in the world couldn’t agree on how to define. Best to give up thinking about it.

  * * *

  Except I couldn’t. Every morning before tackling whatever writing project was on the front burner, I would scribble free-associative notes on a legal pad, writing down whatever came to mind when I thought of the word “Voice.” Those pages look like the jottings of a madman: “wooing,” “weapon!!” “talking cure,” “Ebonics,” “stuttering? Lisp?” “Primal Scream,” “Dylan,” “baby talk—babbling,” “opera,” “HITLER,” “transex,” “code-switch,” “Henry Higgins,” “Rich Little?” “castrati?” and on and on. I did this for weeks. Gradually, some order emerged from the chaos, as certain words and ideas kept recurring, attaching themselves (with the swooping arrows I drew) to other words and ideas. I was reading widely: books on phonetics, on animal vocal communication, on human motor control (voice is a physical gesture, after all), on language acquisition in babies, on male and female voices. After a couple of months, a way of embracing all of the disparate topics within a single narrative began to coalesce.

  The key, I realized, was to think about what makes the human voice different from that of every other creature. All mammals and birds use vocal noises to communicate vital needs, through an array of oinks and squawks, chirps, barks and baahs. Parrots can even expertly mimic human speech—but without any idea what they’re saying. My wife and I have owned a succession of parakeets over the last thirty years and while every one of them learned to echo back to us a few phrases with varying degrees of clarity (“You’re so cute!” “Oh, I love you!”), none was ever able to make the association between the word “seeds,” upon which I patiently tutored them, and the food we gave them. Highly social and intelligent, our birds were perfectly capable of flying into the living room and squawking and chattering noisily to let us know we’d forgotten to fill the food cup. But none ever learned to save their energy by staying in the cage and simply saying: “Seeds.” We are the only animal that can perform that miraculous feat: to make the link between a specific vocal sound and an object that exists in the world.5 Which is to say, we alone have tamed all those barks and squawks and chirps and roars—domesticated them—into articulate speech.

  I call it a “miraculous feat,” but that understates the case considerably. It is the reason that we, as a species, rocketed to the top of the food chain. If you’ve read Yuval Noah Hariri’s superb Sapiens,6 you know that scientists usually attribute our ascent to language, a faculty that allows us to refer to events in the past or future, to allude to people and things not immediately present (“seeds!”), to elucidate abstract philosophical concepts, and to make complicated plans and goals that we share with others of our species. No other animal can come close to doing this. Birds, dogs, chimps, dolphins—you name it—use their voices to make in-the-now proclamations about immediate survival and reproductive concerns, including expressions of fear, anger, hunger, and mating urges. Our unique ability for language has thus been described as the great dividing line, the “unbridgeable Rubicon,” between us and every other living creature. More than that, Hariri explains, it is the key to how we came to rule the earth, since it enabled early humans—a relatively slow-running, physically weak, easily-preyed-upon animal—to plan and cooperate and strategize with each other to outsmart bigger, faster, more lethal predators, to organize into groups (or tribes) of a greater size than any other animal (chimpanzees, our closest animal relation and the next closest in terms of cooperation, can manage about one hundred members per group), eventually to build the villages, towns, cities, and nations that have given us primacy over the planet and everything on it. Written language eventually speeded this process, but writing only came along about five thousand years ago, a blink of the eye in terms of human history. Up until then all verbal communication in our species was achieved via speech. So, I’m not disputing the grand claims for language made by Hariri and others. I just think we need to refine the concept, to emphasize that we owe our planetary dominion not to language alone, but to our special talent for turning that awesome attribute into sound. The voice.

  * * *

  The current reluctance, in science, to accord the voice this special role in the life of our species seems to make sense. Language, after all, can be transmitted without voice. Deaf-mute people converse perfectly well using silent finger, hand, arm, and head movements, adding layers of emotional nuance to their “utterances”—prosody—through variations in body posture, speed of gesturing, and facial expressions. Writing is further evidence that voice is by no means necessary for language. This is clear from the very words I am typing and you are reading, words I’m building into grammatical structures that carry meaning, and upon which I’m also imposing a layer of prosody by strategically sprinkling commas, periods, dashes, and other punctuation—even resorting to italics and the odd exclamation point!

  So, yes: the voice is by no means necessary for language.

  Yet we would not have attained our present position at the top of the food chain had we been forced to rely on either sign language or writing alone to communicate. Gestural signing imposes severe limitations on sender and receiver, and in the brute struggle for survival that is evolution by natural selection, such things matter—a lot. The mute hunter-gatherer who spots a leopard a few yards off would, to notify the rest of his hunting party of this specific threat, have to turn and catch the attention of his scattered band and sign the word: “Leopard!”—thus risking being eaten before he dropped his spear to free up his hands. The hypothetical humans who relied purely on written language would be even worse off. Imagine the confusions that might arise as the band huddled to read the lead hunter’s hastily written missive. (“Does that say leopard?”)

  By then, it would be all over.

  The human voice, in short, has a set of adaptive advantages that cannot be matched by signing or writing or indeed any other means of language transfer. The voice transmits words at a speed roughly five times faster than the movements of sign language. Lowered to a whisper, the voice can be heard in the pitch black by hunters or warriors stalking prey or enemies at night. The voice is unique in how it “splits” into as many channels as there are ears to hear it, so that a shout touches off the alarm in anyone within earshot (visual signs also “split,” but only among receivers whose eyes happen to be turned toward the signaler).7 Voice can travel great distances, penetrate dense jungle, travel around corners, and even through some solid barriers, yet leaves no trace—unlike footprints, scent, or other clues useful to a tracking predator. It can do all this even when the signaler is engaged in important tasks that occupy the hands, arms, and legs: nursing a baby; making a fire; fashioning a weapon; sewing clothing; raising the aforementioned spear—or running from an ambush by a group of invaders, the hands not gesturing or writing but bunch
ed into fists and pumping hard. The shouted words, “Surprise attack—run!” might save a whole village.

  For this reason, I challenge the current orthodoxy of language being the decisive factor in our species’ rise. What ultimately put us on top is the faculty that makes language so potent—a faculty so ubiquitous, so everyday, yet so fleeting (the sound dying to silence, even as it leaves the lips), that we fail to remark upon it, but which would astonish that visiting alien species more than echolocation in bats or the intricate songs of the humpback whale.

  Lest all of this smack of a certain tiresome human exceptionalism, or misplaced triumphalism (our stewardship of the planet might leave some things to be desired), let me quickly add that often the most useful information we convey with our voice is in those elements of the sound signal that are not language—not just the timbre, or “sound quality,” like the rasp and rumble that made me sound like an underworld heavy, but the prosody, much of which was (as we will see) braided into our DNA over millions of years by our prehuman ancestors. It is upon this level of vocal signaling that a shaken employee draws when he gets off the phone with his boss and tells his coworkers, “Well, he said he liked the report, but I can tell he’s going to fire me,” or a wife who, upon hearing her husband ask for the remote, blurts out, “Are you having an affair?” (later telling a friend: “I just heard something in his voice”).