This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  3. Sedaris is interviewed in the movie Do I Sound Gay?

  4. J. Oates and G. Dacakis, “Voice Change in Transsexuals,” Venereology 10 (1997): 178–87. The authors measured typical frequency ranges: male voices in a range of 80–165 Hz; female voices 145–275 Hz with an overlap from 145 Hz to 165 Hz where the fundamental frequency cannot be assigned to one gender uniquely.

  5. David A. Puts, Leslie M. Doll, and Alexander K. Hill, “Sexual Selection on Human Voices,” Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Sexual Psychology and Behavior, eds. Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford and Todd K. Shackelford (New York: Springer, 2014), 69–86.

  6. Puts, Doll, and Hill, “Sexual Selection on Human Voices,” 70.

  7. J. S. Jenkins, “The Voice of the Castrato,” The Lancet 351 (1998): 1877–80.

  8. Jenkins, “The Voice of the Castrato,” quoting C. De Brosses, “Lettres historiques et critiques sur l’Italie,” Vol. 3 (Paris, 1799), 246.

  9. H. Pleasants, “The Castrati,” Stereo Review, July 1966, 38.

  10. Darwin, The Origin of the Species, (London: John Murray, 1859), 88.

  11. David Puts, S. J. C. Gaulin, and K. Verdolini, “Dominance and the Evolution of Sexual Dimorphism in Human Voice Pitch,” Evolution and Human Behavior 27, no. 4 (2006): 283–96.

  12. David Puts, “Mating Context and Menstrual Phase Affect Women’s Preferences for Male Voice Pitch,” Evolution and Human Behavior 26 (2005): 388–97.

  13. Puts, “Mating Context and Menstrual Phase Affect Women’s Preferences for Male Voice Pitch.”

  14. To say nothing of all the other negative social effects related to testosterone, including violence, divorce, and low investment in mates and offspring. A. Booth and J. M. Dabbs, “Testosterone and Men’s Marriages,” Social Forces 72 (1993): 463–77; and T. Burnham et al., “Men in Committed, Romantic Relationships Have Lower Testosterone,” Hormones and Behavior 44 (2003): 119–22.

  15. Puts, “Being Human.”

  16. Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty (New York: Anchor, 2018).

  17. Geoffrey F. Miller, “Evolution of Human Music Through Sexual Selection,” in N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and S. Brown, eds., The Origins of Music (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 329–60.

  18. Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2016), 252.

  19. P. J. Fraccaro, B. C. Jones, J. Vukovic, F. G. Smith, C. D. Watkins, et al., “Experimental Evidence That Women Speak in a Higher Voice Pitch to Men They Find Attractive,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 9 (2011): 57–67.

  20. D. R. Feinberg, “Are Human Faces and Voices Ornaments Signaling Common Underlying Cues to Mate Value?,” Evolutionary Anthropology 17 (2008): 112–18; and S. M. Hughes, F. Dispenza, and G. G. J. Gallup, “Ratings of Voice Attractiveness Predict Sexual Behavior and Body Configuration,” Evolution and Human Behavior 25 (2004): 295–304; and Yi Xu et al., “Human Vocal Attractiveness as Signaled by Body Size Projection,” PLOS ONE (April 24, 2013), https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0062397.

  21. Maria Südersten and Per-Åke Lindestad, “Glottal Closure and Perceived Breathiness During Phonation in Normally Speaking Subjects,” Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 33 (1990): 601–11.

  22. Reneé Van Bezooijen, “Sociocultural Aspects of Pitch Differences Between Japanese and Dutch Women,” Language and Speech 38, no. 3 (1990): 253–65.

  23. Nalina Ambady et al., “Surgeons’ Tone of Voice: A Clue to Malpractice History,” Surgery 132, no. 1 (2002): 5–9.

  24. Cecilia Pemberton, Paul McCormack, and Alison Russell, “Have Women’s Voices Lowered Across Time? A Cross Sectional Study of Australian Women’s Voices,” Journal of Voice 12, no. 2 (June 1998): 208–13.

  25. Tina Tallon, “A Century of ‘Shrill’: How Bias in Technology Has Hurt Women’s Voices,” The New Yorker, September 3, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/a-century-of-shrill-how-bias-in-technology-has-hurt-womens-voices.

  26. C. E. Linke, “A Study of Pitch Characteristics of Female Voices and Their Relationship to Vocal Effectiveness,” Folia Phoniat 25 (1973): 173–85.

  27. Maria DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

  28. Lauren Bacall, By Myself (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978).

  29. Richard Brody, “The Shadows of Lauren Bacall,” The New Yorker, August 13, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/shadows-lauren-bacall.

  30. Germaine Greer, “Siren Song,” The Guardian, December 30, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/dec/30/film.

  31. Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Signet, 1983), 211.

  32. Mary Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto (New York: Liveright, 2017), 3.

  33. Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers, “Justice, Interrupted: The Effect of Gender, Ideology and Seniority at Supreme Court Oral Arguments,” Virginia Law Review 103 (March 2017): 1379–1496.

  34. Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).

  35. Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, 4.

  36. Ikuko Patricia Yuasa, “Creaky Voice: A New Feminine Voice Quality for Young Urban-Oriented Upwardly Mobile American Women?,” American Speech 85, no. 3 (2010): 315–37.

  37. Mark Liberman, “Freedom Fries,” Language Log, February 3, 2015, https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17489.

  38. Yuasa, “Creaky Voice.”

  39. Rindy C. Anderson and Casey A. Klofstad, “Vocal Fry May Undermine the Success of Young Women in the Labor Market,” PLOS ONE 9(5): e97506, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0097506.

  40. Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (New York: Bantam, 2001), 33–35.

  41. https://www.quora.com/Is-Chuck-Yeager-voice-something-they-teach-in-flight-school-Why-do-all-airline-pilots-have-the-same-cool-calm-cadence-when-they-speak.

  42. “US Airways Flight 1549 Full Cockpit Recording,” YouTube, uploaded February 5, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLFZTzR5u84.

  43. Lynette Rice, “ ’Keeping Up with the Kardashians’ Premiere Attracts Record Audience,” Entertainment Weekly, August 23, 2010.

  44. Consistent with this are the findings of Penelope Eckert, a leading expert in the sociological ramifications of how we use the voice, who told NPR’s Ira Glass that the young women in her Stanford class thought the vocal fry in NPR announcers’ voices sounded “authoritative”—whereas Eckert, who is in her sixties, thought the opposite. “I knew I was behind the curve,” she told Glass. Liberman, “Freedom Fries.”

  45. Mark Liberman, “You Want Fries with That?,” Language Log, posted February 3, 2015, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=17496.

  46. DVD extras, Seinfeld Season 6: Notes About Nothing, “The Pledge Drive,” Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2005.

  47. S. E. James, J. L. Herman, S. Rankin, M. Keisling, L. Mottet, and M. Anafi, “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey” (Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, December 2016), https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf.

  48. For an excellent summary on transwomen vocal surgery I recommend “Care of the Transgender Voice: Focus on Feminization,” UCLA Gender Health, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGxMA8JMBj0, uploaded December 18, 2018.

  49. Stef Sanjati, “Voice Training 101 (for Trans Women),” YouTube, uploaded April 21, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eTvS2wIUc&t=640s.

  50. Janet Pierrehumbert, “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116, no. 4 (October 2004): 1905–8.

  51. Sue Ellen Linville, “Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Versus Actual Sexual Orientation in Men’s Speech,” Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 50, no. 1 (1998): 35–48.

  52. Linville, “Acoustic Correlates of Perceived Versus Actual Sexual Orientation in Men’s Speech”: “gay judgments were significantly associated with higher peak /s/ frequency values and longer
/s/ duration values.” Also: Rudolf P. Gaudio, “Sounding Gay: Pitch Properties in the Speech of Gay and Straight Men,” American Speech 69, no. 1 (1994): 30–57.

  53. Janet B. Pierrehumbert, Tessa Bent, et al., “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116, no. 4, part 1 (October 2004): 1905–8.

  54. Pierrehumbert and Bent, “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production”: “young people predisposed to becoming GLB adults (perhaps through a genetic disposition or difference in prenatal environment) selectively attend to certain aspects of opposite-sex adult models during early language acquisition” (1908).

  55. Pierrehumbert and Bent, “The Influence of Sexual Orientation on Vowel Production,” 1908.

  56. Do I Sound Gay?, director, David Thorpe, release date, July 10, 2015.

  57. Guy Branum, My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture (New York: Atria, 2019), 49.

  58. John Laver, “Phonetic and Linguistic Markers in Speech,” in The Gift of Speech: Papers in the Analysis of Speech and Voice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991), 246.

  SIX: THE VOICE IN SOCIETY

  1. George Bernard Shaw, preface, Pygmalion (London: Penguin, 2003), 3.

  2. Patricia E. G. Bestelmeyer, Pascal Belin, and D. Robert Ladd, “A Neural Marker for Social Bias Toward In-Group Accents,” Cerebral Cortex 25, no. 10 (October 2015): 3953–61, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhu282.

  3. Jairo N. Fuertes, William H. Gottdiener, et al., “A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Speakers’ Accents on Interpersonal Evaluations,” European Journal of Social Psychology 42 (2012): 120–33.

  4. Howard Giles and Caroline Sassoon, “The Effect of Speaker’s Accent, Social Class Background and Message Style on British Listeners’ Social Judgements,” Language & Communication 3 (1983): 305–13.

  5. Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robin MacNeil, The Story of English (New York: Viking, 1986), 21.

  6. Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue and How It Got That Way (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 109.

  7. Thomas Sheridan, British Education: Or, The Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757).

  8. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London: W. Strahan, 1753), 30.

  9. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 30.

  10. McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil, The Story of English.

  11. McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil, The Story of English.

  12. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 247.

  13. John Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe: The Development of the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), 233.

  14. Honey, Tom Brown’s Universe, 233.

  15. McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil, The Story of English, 24.

  16. Vivian Ducat, “Bernard Shaw and King’s English,” Shaw 9 (1989): 186.

  17. John Reith, Broadcast over Britain (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924).

  18. Shaw said that he became interested in phonetics “toward the end of the eighteen seventies,” which means he could have been as young as twenty. A relentless self-improver, it is hard to imagine that his “interest” in the subject did not include ridding himself of his extremely out-group Dublin accent. None of Shaw’s innumerable biographers have addressed the question, which, to my mind, demonstrates an amazing incuriosity, at the very least.

  19. Ducat, “Bernard Shaw and King’s English,” 187.

  20. Ducat, “Bernard Shaw and King’s English,” 190.

  21. Daniel Jones, An English Pronouncing Dictionary (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, sixth ed., 1944), x–x1.

  22. Afferbeck Lauder, Fraffley Suite (London: Ure Smith/Wolfe, 1969), 13.

  23. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner, 1995), 127.

  24. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 13–14.

  25. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 11.

  26. Author interview with William Labov, April 7, 2017.

  27. William Labov, “The Social Motivation of a Sound Change,” Word 19, no. 3 (1963): 273–309.

  28. William Labov, The Social Stratification of English in New York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  29. Edward McClelland, How to Speak Midwestern (Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2016).

  30. Edward Hall Gardner and Edwin Ray Skinner, Good Taste in Speech: The Manual of Instruction of the Pronunciphone Course (Chicago: Pronunciphone Company, 1928).

  31. William Labov, Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009).

  32. McClelland, How to Speak Midwestern, 23.

  33. The historical-political account that follows is from Labov’s Dialect Diversity in America.

  34. This comes from Labov’s quotation, in Dialect Diversity in America, of The History of McLean County, Illinois (Chicago: Wm. Le Baron, Jr. & Co: 1879), 97.

  35. Labov, Dialect Diversity in America, 38.

  36. John Russell Rickford, African American Vernacular English: Features and Use (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999).

  37. Author interview with John Baugh, April 19, 2017.

  38. T. Purnell, W. Idsari, and John Baugh, “Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18 (1999): 10–30.

  39. William Labov, “The Logic of Nonstandard English,” in Report of the Twentieth Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1969), 1–44.

  40. C. Bereiter and S. Engelmann, Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966).

  41. John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2000), 195.

  42. John McWhorter, Talking Back, Talking Black (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2017), 15.

  43. Rickford and Rickford, Spoken Soul, 147–52.

  44. John Gramlich, “Black Imprisonment Rate in the U.S. Has Fallen by a Third Since 2006,” Fact Tank, Pew Research Center (May 6, 2020), https://pewrsr.ch/2zc6PKi.

  45. Rickford and Rickford, Spoken Soul, 223, citing Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the Burden of Acting White,” Urban Review (1986): 181–82.

  46. Labov, Dialect Diversity in America.

  47. Author interview with John McWhorter, June 2017.

  48. McWhorter, Talking Back, Talking Black, 71.

  49. McWhorter, Talking Back, Talking Black, 73

  50. Or longer. According to Marvin McAllister, author of Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), nineteenth-century African American “white minstrels” “appropriated white-identified gestures, vocabulary, dialects, dress, or social entitlements… [to] satirize, parody, and interrogate privileged or authoritative representations of whiteness.” Page 1.

  51. William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, The Atlas of North American English (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005).

  52. Labov, Dialect Diversity in America.

  53. Labov, Dialect Diversity in America.

  SEVEN: THE VOICE OF LEADERSHIP AND PERSUASION

  1. Thomas Habinek, “Introduction,” Ancient Rhetoric from Aristotle to Philostratus, trans. and ed. Thomas Habinek (New York: Penguin, 2017), xi.

  2. Habinek, “Introduction,” xviii.

  3. Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing (New York: HarperResource, 2004), 6–7.

  4. G. Blakemore Evans, “Shakespeare’s Text,” The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 55–69.

  5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1955), 11.

  6. Carolyn Eastman, “Oratory and Platform Culture in Britain and North America, 1740–1900” (Oxford Handbooks Online, July 2016), 7.

&
nbsp; 7. Marlana Portolano, The Passionate Empiricist (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), 27.

  8. Eastman, “Oratory and Platform Culture in Britain and North America, 1740–1900,” 8.

  9. Eastman, “Oratory and Platform Culture in Britain and North America, 1740–1900,” 19.

  10. Horace White, The Lincoln and Douglas Debates: An Address Before the Chicago Historical Society (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1914), 20.

  11. Wendi Maloney, “Hearing Abraham Lincoln’s Voice,” Library of Congress blog (January 3, 2018), https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2018/01/hearing-abraham-lincolns-voice/.

  12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g9v8y5FvSo, December 3, 2012.

  13. White, The Lincoln and Douglas Debates, 20.

  14. White, The Lincoln and Douglas Debates, 21.

  15. Stephen A. Douglas, “Homecoming Speech at Chicago, July 9, 1858,” https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/homecoming-speech-at-chicago/.

  16. “2018 Winter Lecture Series—The Lincoln-Douglas Debates,” YouTube, uploaded June 14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NgmkFy5EJM.

  17. History.com, Editor, “President Lincoln Delivers Gettysburg Address,” https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lincoln-delivers-gettysburg-address.

  18. William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (New York: Longman, 2000), 77.

  19. Gesine Manuwald, Cicero (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 142.

  20. Richard Hidary, “Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric,” in Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), i–ii.

  21. Philip Halldén, “What Is Arab Islamic Rhetoric? Rethinking the History of Muslim Oratory Art and Homiletics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37, no. 1 (February 2005): 23.

  22. Halldén, “What Is Arab Islamic Rhetoric?,” 22.

  23. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741).

  24. Jim Ehrhard, “A Critical Analysis of the Tradition of Jonathan Edwards as a Manuscript Preacher,” Westminster Theological Journal (Spring 1998).