ABSTRACT
In this audio essay, the author/speaker contemplates the perceived relationship between the voice and the speaker—the person in the voice—and asks the following questions: What does it mean when we judge that the person does not sound like they should? In terms of pedagogy and beyond, what does it mean when we judge a person as not speaking the way we think they should? How does our judgment affect and effect the speaker?
KEYWORDS:
Transcript of audio essay
What you are about to hear will not be perfect. Undoubtedly, my content—my interpretations and arguments—can be refuted. But my warning is about my form—how I say what I have to say. Surely, I will flub a line or trip over a word or tangle my tongue or commit all three and more. But I won’t clean it up. I will not edit to erase the imperfections. I will not adjust my levels or mix the sound. Because doing so would contradict my call to you and myself. I want us to think more carefully about—to attend more carefully to—the person in the voice.
I want us to ask ourselves:
What does it mean for someone not to sound like we think they should?
And, what does it mean when we judge, “That person does not sound like they should”?
Over the past nine years, I have been teaching and doing research in the area of media studies. In the classroom, I direct students’ attention to music as a rhetorical force and a nondiegetic element in film, television, and video games. But I spent a significant portion of my academic career studying, doing, and teaching performance. I still consider myself “performance studies folk.” These days, I have the pleasure of teaching the only performance studies course my department offers: Oral Interpretation of Children’s Literature. I teach students basic elements of literary and performance criticism, and shepherd them in moving the text from the page to the stage with exercises that increase the ranges of their vocal and bodily dimensions. I use Pelias and Shaffer’s textbook,Footnote 1 so I also move beyond these standards and cover the empathic process and the ways in which all human communication is like performance—and it is on these last two areas that I have anchored my thoughts about sound and pedagogy, particularly the voice and our perceptual and bodily response to it in performance and everyday life contexts. I am interested in how we perceive the Person in the Voice.
What does it mean for someone to not sound like they should?
What does it mean to judge, “That person does not sound like they should”?
I began asking myself these questions a lot since 2017 when I first met an extraordinary student. This student is very frank. He says what he thinks. And he thinks well. Let’s call him “Frank.”
Frank does not speak “well.” That is, Frank does not speak fluidly. His speech is staggered with long pauses—great gaps that I have a great urge to jump into. To fill the silence. To finish his thought in quicker fashion. Because I think I know what he is thinking. I think I know what he might be about to mean. Because I think his thought is my own. But, I resist.
It could be said that such resistance to fill the gap is a way of being-present and empathic—with Frank and for Frank. A way of letting the silence—letting Frank—be. I don’t know what causes the great gaps in his speech and I don’t know that any explanation would alter my experience of those moments. I just believe that they matter—and that the absence of speech in the middle of expression has matter, has force. But it is not a force that works in his favor.
Frank is an extraordinary case of someone not speaking like we think they should. But, he got me thinking about all the other times I have worked with a student—almost every student who has performed in my classroom—to get them to alter somehow their speech. To “increase projection.” To “vary tones.” To “slow down a bit.” I have never taught a class in voice and diction, but I have some training, so I tell the students how important breathing is and direct them in exercises to control their anatomy and modulate their voices. But I keep thinking these days, to what end?
And I keep thinking about Hillary Clinton. “Shrillary Clinton,” as she was disparagingly nicknamed by detractors—and some supporters. If you Google “Hillary Clinton voice,” you will see 68,400,000 results with the top results containing the word “shrill” in the headlines—though I don’t think all of the authors are necessarily hateful. A top result, from Psychology Today, is “How to De-Shrill Hillary Clinton,” in which the author patiently explains that her shrillness is a result of “fearful aggression” and seemingly empathically suggests that she view her opponents as “hurt children who needed to be talked with and reassured and given hope.”Footnote 2
Here’s the thing: I have never heard shrillness in her voice. And she did give me hope.
But I don’t think she could have sounded in any way that was pleasing to those who opposed her. Hillary Clinton could never have sounded the way certain people thought she should.
And here’s another thing—in this case even more obvious, but is weighing heavily on me now: Vocal descriptors are valenced. For example, it’s not a good thing to have your voice be characterized as “shrill.” It’s not a good thing to be “shrill.”
But it is a good thing to be Deep—to have a Deep Voice. Yesterday, I got an emailed advertisement. The subject line reads: “How to Develop Deep Voice; Specific Exercises and Training.” The body of the email reads:
Your voice is everything!
If you have ever been on the phone with someone you don’t know, after a few seconds of conversation you already have a picture of what they are like. They also get a picture of what you are like. Are you nice, are you open, are you shy, or confident? Some people prefer to hear you speak so they can figure out who you are. Why not learn the secrets of what makes you a confident speaker with deep voice, resonating voice, someone who has a projecting voice that can own the room. I have learned myself over the years that voice can really save you in situations and help you to be perceived the way you want to be perceived. Imagine what power you can have and what it can do to your personal life, your work life, career, dating, relationships, interactions? You can control it. By having your own fully developed voice you will come out ahead of everyone else.Footnote 3
Here’s something I didn’t know: Vocal specialists across specialties have long had difficulty agreeing on vocal descriptors. Eleven years ago, a research group in France noted that, internationally, “The listening modes and the descriptive terms vary between fields: physicians, speech therapists, actors, singers, voice teachers, voice coaches, and voice scientists share neither the same listening mode nor a common vocabulary to describe the perceived quality of a voice” (Heinrich, page 2, 72).Footnote 4 Not surprisingly, the harder scientists use the least valenced terms, such as “hyperprosodic”—though even that such word is used in relation to a word most lay people would valence negatively: “monotone.” Most lay people would also probably find “hyper” to have a negative connotation. As that research group notes, “Perception of voice quality is subjective and depends on the listener’s own experiences and expectations” (page 71).Footnote 5 But it is also sociocultural.
Frank’s speech isn’t staggered when he performs. Not unlike people who normally stutter but do not stutter when they sing. No doubt, Hillary Clinton does not sound exactly the same at the podium and on the patio at home. Through performance we can change our voice. To some extent. But more important, whatever public or private stage we are on, vocal descriptors evoke personae. When a person is described as “shrill” or “deep,” a whole lot more than voice comes to mind.
I know you know these things. But I don’t get the sense that we performance studies folks uniformly spend a whole lot of time asking ourselves or our students to reflect on the person in the voice. I think George Home-Cook has given me a perspective—and some language—to start the conversation with my students. In his book, Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves, he shares a phenomenological investigation into sound in performance. It doesn’t explicitly get at what I’m getting at here—the voice, in this particular way—but his root metaphor is helpful. We need to “stretch” to attend to sound—arguably, I say, including the voice. He writes:
Stretching ourselves [. . .] foregrounds the sense of exertion that the act of attending necessarily entails. In “paying attention,” whether in the theatre or in the world at large, we must work hard: to perceive is to “grasp,” and this act of grasping requires effort. “Stretching” also implies a sense of elasticity, variation, spontaneity, and “play”: attention is enactive. Finally, the notion of “stretching” is specifically intended to refer to the act of “listening” as a specialised mode of attention (page 3).Footnote 6
Supplemental Material
Download (24.3 MB)Notes
1 Ronald J. Pelias and Tracy Stephenson Shaffer, Performance Studies: The Interpretation of Aesthetic Texts, 2nd. ed. (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 2007).
2 Mark Goulston, “How to De-Shrill Hillary Clinton,” Psychology Today, March 16, 2016, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/just-listen/201603/how-de-shrill-hillary-clinton.
3 Simpliv, “How to Develop Deep Voice,” email to author, October 30, 2019.
4 Nathalie Henrich et al., “Towards a Common Terminology to Describe Voice Quality in Western Lyrical Singing: Contribution of a Multidisciplinary Research Group,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies 2, nos. 1 & 2 (2008): 72.
5 Ibid., 71.
6 George Home-Cook, Theatre and Aural Attention: Stretching Ourselves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3 original emphases.