Fun Facts About the Voice

Here’s my favorite fact from Anne Karpf’s new book, The Human Voice.

Women seem more likely to be interrupted when they smile … — and women smile significantly more than men when they begin to speak. A woman’s smile seems to serve as an invitation to men to interrupt them, whereas a man’s smile has precisely the opposite effect, inhibiting women from interrupting. (p. 161)

Talk about a stacked deck!

No, wait. I think my favorite fact might be this one:

Consonants [give] meaning to the words and vowels [supply] the emotion … The feelings behind a Shakespeare speech (but not its meaning) can be communicated by pronouncing only the vowels (p. 42)

Oo ee oh ah oo ee!

Karpf’s book is heavily salted with little facts about speaking. It is not a story, not a theory, not an argument, not a thesis, but an almanac of surprises about the voice. For a blog like this one, it is a natural. There is no chapter titled, “The Origins of the Voice,” but there are several sections that are of particular interest to anyone who is interested in the question of where our ability to speak came from.

Karpf is also excellent at reminding readers that speaking and listening is not an abstract process. It is a physical one. She is very effective in making her complaint about studies of oratory and language that do not take into account the voice’s impact.

So an entire book on Ronald Reagan’s oratory included just one single reference to his voice. The study was called “Reagan Speaks, but, given its focus on the verbal at the expense of the vocal, it should have been called “Reagan Reads.” Its omission is all the more extraordinary when you consider how important Reagan’s voice was in creating his folksy image. (pp. 13-14)

That’s something often forgotten about Reagan. His background in radio, speech-making, and hosting television programs like G.E. Theater and Death Valley Days made him deeply practiced in using his voice to win people over, no matter what he happened to be saying. And this book is an excellent resource in listing all kinds of ways to use the voice to manipulate a situation.

In the chapter, “How the Voice Achieves Its Range and Power,” Karpf clearly and simply sets forth the physiology of speaking. The description includes another candidate for favorite fact;

With the exception of the muscles around the eyes, those of the human larynx have more nerves than any other muscles in the human body, including the hand and face, even though we only use around one-third of their capacity in speaking. Each can produce a different balance of forces in the larynx, generating a different pulse wave and sound quality. They’re our vocal palette: through them we colour our voices with affection, bitterness, pleasure, disgust, etc. (p. 27)

This kind of nervous system does not come easily. There had to be persistent selection for it over many generations.

Another detail we take for granted is that our mouths and ears are in harmony. Our ears work best at detecting sounds in the vocal range. Are there species where this balance is different? Are the ears of predators better tuned to the sounds of prey rather than their own noises? Is prey better able to hear, say, the diving swoop of a hawk than its own yawping? In particular, of course, it would be good to know the hearing range of apes. (That’s my reaction. Karpf seems more dubious: “we can be sure that even now, the hearing abilities of apes are being proved with indecent enthusiasm by researchers around the world,” p. 56)

Karpf does provide a fine chapter on, “What Makes the Voice Distinctly Human,” that, as usual, is a cornucopia of facts and details smoothed on with a clear prose that seems so easy you know she worked very hard.

Though complex communication sounds are emitted by a whole range of animals, only three groups of mammals: humans, cetacean (whales and dolphins) and bats, and three groups of birds: parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds have to learn them. In all the rest they’re innate. (p. 48)

We are used to talking glibly about “left-brained” thinking, meaning logical, verbal kinds of thoughts, so it is good to be reminded that “most of our intonation-decoding abilities lie” in the right hemisphere. You can look at this as warring hemispheres if you wish, but I think Karpf is correct in looking at speech as something that demands the cooperation of the whole brain. She tips her English roots by proposing that “a socialist model — the cooperative — may be a more apt guide to how the brain processes vocal emotion.”

And then it is on to other facts about the voice. Maybe this one is my real favorite:

More than half the world’s top 500 companies now outsource … to India, where over 170,000 people work in call centres. They must first complete a spell of ‘accent training’ … [where they learn to] repeat ‘can’t’ with a long ‘a’ after watching Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. (p. 193)

What began as G. B. Shaw’s socialist satire is now big business with a straight face.

Comments

[David]

A great piece, thank you. Language evolutionists tend to obsess about syntax, but the voicing that underlies it carries so much of the interpersonal meaning that enacts our social lives, and presumably did so long before words came along to complicate things.

[TLTB]

The vowels carry the emotions, eh?

Hmmmmmmmm....

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THE BLOGGER RESPONDS

Oh, that was a good one.

[David]

Yes a wry point. It's the tone of hmmm that expresses the interpersonal meaning "I'm not sure I agree with your blog about vowels" :-)

More precisely, voicing carries the emotions, rather than just vowels. Or the fuller version...articulation (vowels and consonants forming syllables) carries rhythm (sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables) which carries intonation (including tone). Interpersonal meanings including emotions are expressed by variations in tone (rising and falling pitch movements).

From this angle speech is a carrier wave (articulation), modulated by amplitude (rhythm) and frequency (intonation). Hm?

[kare anderson]

I just finished reading Anne's book and had put post-its on the same favorites as you. In fact, as I am writing this I am listening to our Michale krasney (The Forum on KQED in San Francisco) is interviewing a somewhat flustered (she had trouble getting a phone line through from the UK). Michael commented on their voice tones th(his and hers) during the interview and she choose to ignore them and continued to discuss her book. Ah how our humanity leaks out. What a great blog you have!
I signed up to keep getting it.

[coco wang]

this was a great, imformational piece of knowlege, it is wonderful.

[R.Rajagopalan]

"From the moment they're born, babies exploit the full vocal range available to them, using their whole body to make a sound, the shoulders and neck are free, the mouth open, the breath travels freely from the lower abdomen..."..one of many stunning facts in the book by Anne.