This is the Voice
John Colapinto's delightful new book touches on nearly ever facet of the human voice with a litany of tantalizing facts, but loses its focus near the end.
Most famous for his Space Odyssey series, Arthur C. Clarke was rather accurate in his predictions for the technology of the future. In Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Clarke’s 1968 book and screenplay, 2001: A Space Odyssey, voiceprint identification, computers regularly beating international chess champions, and routine space shuttle launches were all realized with astonishing precision. To commemorate the film and book’s thirtieth anniversary, in 1998 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation co-sponsored a special screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey featuring a panel of many of the surviving actors as well as some of the country’s top technological and scientific minds. Unfortunately, Clarke, 81 at the time, was not able to make the trip in person to Los Angeles from his home in Sri Lanka and would join via satellite. When the panel began, a consensus very quickly began to form that Clarke’s vision for the future fell short in one major category: voice recognition. It was only fitting that in the attempt to beam a satellite broadcast from his home several thousand miles away, the audience could only chuckle as they saw Clarke complaining to his technical assistant that he could not understand anything anyone was saying for forty-five minutes.
The New Yorker’s John Colapinto maps out some of the reasons for this clearly and with great charm in his latest book (not to be confused with the hit NBC television program’s slogan), This is the Voice (2021, Simon & Schuster):
“The two c’s in the word ‘concave,’ for instance, are completely different sounds, because of how you round your lips in anticipation of the upcoming o when you say the first c, and how you retract your lips in anticipation of the a vowel for that second c. (Say the word slowly while looking in a mirror and you’ll see what I mean.) We think they’re the same sound, but computers know they’re not.”
Though any classical singer would be able to tell you that these sounds are decidedly not the same (a first-year English diction class at any music school would see to that), I doubt any non-singer would realize this. But, Colapinto’s dense book is chock-full of so many accessible and downright fascinating facts about the human voice from which singers, linguists, vocal pedagogues, and even otolaryngologists can learn:
Dyslexia is actually a hearing issue and not a visual one.
Baby talk from parents is actually led and encouraged by the baby to teach itself language and is present in every language and culture.
The lungfish — or “living fossil” — is the first vocalizing species on the planet.
The list goes on and on and each of these head-spinners is told with enthusiasm and punctuated with captivating anecdotes. In Colapinto’s telling of the lungfish and the sounds it makes, he tries to explain the fish’s technical vocal mechanism before finally giving up and confessing, “I am trying to avoid the word ‘farts’ but I’m afraid those were the first vocal sounds heard on Earth.”
I could quibble over the erroneous use of “falsetto” to describe the female head voice and maybe a couple of other clumsily worded descriptions of the passaggio (or transition area/break in the voice) but that would belie the joy I had reading This is the Voice.
The evolutionary aspects of the voice explored made for some hilarious reading — especially for those in the music business. In describing the robust sex appeal of higher-voiced male singers, Colapinto explains:
“[Led Zeppelin’s Robert] Plant’s sexual success might have derived from the message his singing voice (like [Justin] Bieber’s and [Paul] McCartney’s) sent to female fans of a lack of sexual threat, or at the very least the promise of monogamous devotion—a dishonest signal, if ever there was one.”
In his discussion of the female appeal of Elvis Presley, Colapinto speculates that it was a product of Presley’s employing of higher tones such as those in “That’s All Right, Mama.” Maybe it’s my low-voiced bias, but I think it could have been his baritonal tones just the same.
“I am trying to avoid the word ‘farts’ but I’m afraid those were the first vocal sounds heard on Earth.”
Where This is the Voice falls off — and sadly, it does so in quite a big way — is, fittingly, when Joseph Colapinto is not really talking about the voice. In the final third of the book, Colapinto spends many pages in defense of “code-switching” (the practice of alternating between two or more languages or varieties of language in conversation -Merriam-Webster). Quoting heavily from Columbia University’s resident linguistic genius, John McWhorter, is certainly the right move to make when discussing the sensitive subject of whether one “sounds black,” but this entire lengthy section felt like Colapinto was having an argument with nobody and strayed into more political ideas (including a rather ham-fisted analysis of the “Southern Strategy”) than anything really related to the voice. Former President Barack Obama finds himself mentioned 55 times in what reads more like a mini hagiography and less so a discussion of his signature baritone mechanism (Colapinto even praises one of Obama’s speeches as “on a par” with Lincoln and “second only to King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech”). Not to be outdone, Donald Trump’s name is mentioned 71 times and though the description of his mouth shape and posture in his fiery speeches is very appropriate and well done, I’m still not quite sure how a discussion about his full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty against the falsely convicted “Central Park Five” in 1989 is in any way relevant to the larynx.
This is the Voice should be required reading for every singer in the world and would certainly be useful and fulfilling to everyone else. It is that informative and it is that entertaining. The overwhelming majority of the book will remain relevant for decades. And it is for this reason that the odd focus in one large section on our current American political moment feels so out of place. But, maybe I would have felt differently about it had it all been sung to me in a higher tone.
Very nice !! I’m also low voice biased ❤️