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This Is the Voice
There’s no shortage of books about public speaking, language, or song, but until now, there hasn't been a book about the miracle that underlies them all: the human voice. Beginning with the novel argument that humans' ability to speak is what made them the planet’s dominant species, John Colapinto traces the voice’s beginnings in lungfish millions of years ago to its culmination in the talent of Pavoratti, Martin Luther King Jr., and Beyoncé—and each of us, every day.
Along the way, he shows why the voice is the most efficient, effective means of communication ever devised: it works in all directions, in all weathers, even in the dark, and it can be calibrated to reach one other person or thousands. He reveals why speech is the single most complex and intricate activity humans can perform. He travels up the Amazon to meet the Piraha, a reclusive tribe whose singular language, more musical than any other, can help us hear how melodic principles underpin every word we utter. He heads up to Harvard to see how professional voices are helped and healed, and he ventures out on the campaign trail to see how demagogues wield their voices as weapons.
As far-reaching as this book is, much of the delight of reading it lies in how intimate it feels. Everything Colapinto tells us can be tested by our own lungs and mouths and ears and brains. He shows us that, for those who pay attention, the voice is an eloquent means of communicating not only what the speaker means, but also their mood, sexual preference, age, income, even psychological and physical illness. Anyone who talks, sings, or listens will find a rich trove of thrills in This Is the Voice.
Along the way, he shows why the voice is the most efficient, effective means of communication ever devised: it works in all directions, in all weathers, even in the dark, and it can be calibrated to reach one other person or thousands. He reveals why speech is the single most complex and intricate activity humans can perform. He travels up the Amazon to meet the Piraha, a reclusive tribe whose singular language, more musical than any other, can help us hear how melodic principles underpin every word we utter. He heads up to Harvard to see how professional voices are helped and healed, and he ventures out on the campaign trail to see how demagogues wield their voices as weapons.
As far-reaching as this book is, much of the delight of reading it lies in how intimate it feels. Everything Colapinto tells us can be tested by our own lungs and mouths and ears and brains. He shows us that, for those who pay attention, the voice is an eloquent means of communicating not only what the speaker means, but also their mood, sexual preference, age, income, even psychological and physical illness. Anyone who talks, sings, or listens will find a rich trove of thrills in This Is the Voice.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 26, 2021
131 people are currently reading
2057 people want to read
About the author
John Colapinto
14 books82 followersAn award-winning journalist, author and novelist and is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker.
Prior to working at The New Yorker, Colapinto wrote for Vanity Fair, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and in 1995 he became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone,[1] where he published feature stories on a variety of subjects ranging from AIDS, to kids and guns, to heroin in the music business, to Penthouse magazine creator, Bob Guccione (his Guccione story was a finalist for the ASME award in profile writing in 2004). In 1998, he published a 20,000 word feature story in Rolling Stone titled The True Story of John/Joan, an account of David Reimer, who had undergone a sex change in infancy—a medical experiment long heralded as a success, but which was, in fact, a failure. The story, which detailed not only Reimer's tortured life, but the medical scandal surrounding its cover-up, won the ASME Award for reporting and in 2000, Colapinto published a book-length account of the case, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. The book was a New York Times bestseller and the film rights were bought by Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Colapinto also wrote a novel, About the Author, a tale of literary envy and theft. It was published in August 2001 and was a number 6 pick on the Booksense 76 list of best novels of the season; it was a nominee for the IMPAC literary award and for a number of years was under option by Dreamworks, where playwright Patrick Marber (Closer and Howard Katz) wrote a screen adaptation. The film rights to the novel have since been acquired by producer Scott Rudin.
As a writer for The New Yorker, Colapinto has written about subjects as diverse as medicinal leeches; Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer; fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld and Rick Owens; the linguistic oddities of the Pirahã people (an Amazonian tribe); and Paul McCartney. His piece on the Piraha was anthologized in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" (2008); his New Yorker story about loss prevention (anti-theft in stores) was included in "The Best American Crime Reporting" (2009);[2] and his New Yorker profile of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran was selected by Freeman Dyson for inclusion in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" (2010).
John Colapinto lives on New York City's Upper East Side. He is married to fashion illustrator and artist, Donna Mehalko, and they have one son.
-Wikipedia
Prior to working at The New Yorker, Colapinto wrote for Vanity Fair, New York magazine and The New York Times Magazine, and in 1995 he became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone,[1] where he published feature stories on a variety of subjects ranging from AIDS, to kids and guns, to heroin in the music business, to Penthouse magazine creator, Bob Guccione (his Guccione story was a finalist for the ASME award in profile writing in 2004). In 1998, he published a 20,000 word feature story in Rolling Stone titled The True Story of John/Joan, an account of David Reimer, who had undergone a sex change in infancy—a medical experiment long heralded as a success, but which was, in fact, a failure. The story, which detailed not only Reimer's tortured life, but the medical scandal surrounding its cover-up, won the ASME Award for reporting and in 2000, Colapinto published a book-length account of the case, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl. The book was a New York Times bestseller and the film rights were bought by Peter Jackson, the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Colapinto also wrote a novel, About the Author, a tale of literary envy and theft. It was published in August 2001 and was a number 6 pick on the Booksense 76 list of best novels of the season; it was a nominee for the IMPAC literary award and for a number of years was under option by Dreamworks, where playwright Patrick Marber (Closer and Howard Katz) wrote a screen adaptation. The film rights to the novel have since been acquired by producer Scott Rudin.
As a writer for The New Yorker, Colapinto has written about subjects as diverse as medicinal leeches; Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer; fashion designers Karl Lagerfeld and Rick Owens; the linguistic oddities of the Pirahã people (an Amazonian tribe); and Paul McCartney. His piece on the Piraha was anthologized in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" (2008); his New Yorker story about loss prevention (anti-theft in stores) was included in "The Best American Crime Reporting" (2009);[2] and his New Yorker profile of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran was selected by Freeman Dyson for inclusion in "The Best American Science and Nature Writing" (2010).
John Colapinto lives on New York City's Upper East Side. He is married to fashion illustrator and artist, Donna Mehalko, and they have one son.
-Wikipedia
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February 4, 2021Naturally I'm interested in this from the evolutionary viewpoint, given all the recent books I've read by Neil Shubin (Your Inner Fish etc) and the equally marvellous Edward O. Wilson. So now we've got passed nodules-on-the-vocal-chords - the author (lived with it), Adele the singer (cured), Julie Andrews (not cured, sued) we're onto how language developed from emotions.
This was unexpected: if the amigdala is stimulated in cats or monkeys, loud hissing and growling sounds of exactly the same profile are produced. And so it would seem that our emotive calls - pleasureable ones like orgasmic moans and cries, distinctly non-orgasmic ones (!) like pain, hitting your finger with a hammer for instance, excited screams like entering an empty dark room and turning on the light when everyone shouts happy birthday, have their roots in the lower animals, are part of our evolutionary make up.
I think this is why we recognise the cries of an unhappy puppy, the growls of an angry dog, why a cat will stop at the sound of a crying child, why any mammal calling out in pain gets our attention. These sounds come from the lower animals and all of us recognise them in each other.
The author writes of babies whose first reaction to the noise and light of a delivery room is that first cry. In babies born with anencephaly - no brain, only a brain stem, they have a perfectly normal response to pain showing that response comes from the oldest parts of the brain.
And so, says the author, these sobs, cries, laughter and other involuntary sounds, led to speech.
With all this evolutionary stuff, I'm finding the book fascinating.
This was unexpected: if the amigdala is stimulated in cats or monkeys, loud hissing and growling sounds of exactly the same profile are produced. And so it would seem that our emotive calls - pleasureable ones like orgasmic moans and cries, distinctly non-orgasmic ones (!) like pain, hitting your finger with a hammer for instance, excited screams like entering an empty dark room and turning on the light when everyone shouts happy birthday, have their roots in the lower animals, are part of our evolutionary make up.
I think this is why we recognise the cries of an unhappy puppy, the growls of an angry dog, why a cat will stop at the sound of a crying child, why any mammal calling out in pain gets our attention. These sounds come from the lower animals and all of us recognise them in each other.
The author writes of babies whose first reaction to the noise and light of a delivery room is that first cry. In babies born with anencephaly - no brain, only a brain stem, they have a perfectly normal response to pain showing that response comes from the oldest parts of the brain.
And so, says the author, these sobs, cries, laughter and other involuntary sounds, led to speech.
With all this evolutionary stuff, I'm finding the book fascinating.
March 10, 2021
Satisfying and unsatisfying in almost equal measure.
I make my living with my voice, think about the voice more than most (I like to think). What's more, I am a big fan of one earlier piece by Colapinto: his lengthy New Yorker story on the Piraha of the Amazon, who (maybe) cannot count past two in their language (one, two, many — there is a spirited debate about whether this is so, and what it means.)
The good: PROSODY. A word I barely knew before I read this book. It is the musicality of speech, which enables us, it seems, to converse with other humans without interrupting them. It is the reason you want foreign-language, subtitled TV series to be at full volume even if you don't understand the words. Though we are mostly not conscious of it, all human speech is inflected with these essential elements that help us to absorb it better: rhythm, tone, and texture. Prosody lets us understand each other, express ourselves, and relays tons of other information beyond the actual content of the words. A robot voice, with no prosody, is not nice to listen to.
Colapinto does a really good job of summarizing the social-psych-linguistic-brain science around speech and cognition, how prosody is acquired starting in infancy, and so on. I am grateful to him for wading through a lot of academic-scientific lit that was probably not fun to read.
The bad: the section on powerful speeches and speechmakers. Churchill, Kennedy, Reagan, Obama. And oh yeah, Hitler. Colapinto's observations here are totally pedestrian. I would much rather have gotten up close with some lesser-known figures who have contributed something to our understanding of the voice, like the 80-something year old woman who lives in "Orkney, Scotland," as Colapinto calls it, and is known around the world as a guru for fuller vocal self-expression. He mentions her twice, only in passing.
In general, the book feels like a breezy tour of some things Colapinto learned about the voice, rather than something deeply considered. At several points he basically admits his own confirmation bias in approaching the research on the voice.
With that, here are two really interesting things I learned:
- humans are the only species in which the female voice and the male voice are strongly differentiated (dimorphism.)
- it is only around puberty that humans develop the ability to calibrate their breathing to their speech (hence the endearing tendency of kids to run out of breath mid-sentence.)
I make my living with my voice, think about the voice more than most (I like to think). What's more, I am a big fan of one earlier piece by Colapinto: his lengthy New Yorker story on the Piraha of the Amazon, who (maybe) cannot count past two in their language (one, two, many — there is a spirited debate about whether this is so, and what it means.)
The good: PROSODY. A word I barely knew before I read this book. It is the musicality of speech, which enables us, it seems, to converse with other humans without interrupting them. It is the reason you want foreign-language, subtitled TV series to be at full volume even if you don't understand the words. Though we are mostly not conscious of it, all human speech is inflected with these essential elements that help us to absorb it better: rhythm, tone, and texture. Prosody lets us understand each other, express ourselves, and relays tons of other information beyond the actual content of the words. A robot voice, with no prosody, is not nice to listen to.
Colapinto does a really good job of summarizing the social-psych-linguistic-brain science around speech and cognition, how prosody is acquired starting in infancy, and so on. I am grateful to him for wading through a lot of academic-scientific lit that was probably not fun to read.
The bad: the section on powerful speeches and speechmakers. Churchill, Kennedy, Reagan, Obama. And oh yeah, Hitler. Colapinto's observations here are totally pedestrian. I would much rather have gotten up close with some lesser-known figures who have contributed something to our understanding of the voice, like the 80-something year old woman who lives in "Orkney, Scotland," as Colapinto calls it, and is known around the world as a guru for fuller vocal self-expression. He mentions her twice, only in passing.
In general, the book feels like a breezy tour of some things Colapinto learned about the voice, rather than something deeply considered. At several points he basically admits his own confirmation bias in approaching the research on the voice.
With that, here are two really interesting things I learned:
- humans are the only species in which the female voice and the male voice are strongly differentiated (dimorphism.)
- it is only around puberty that humans develop the ability to calibrate their breathing to their speech (hence the endearing tendency of kids to run out of breath mid-sentence.)
Read
March 31, 2021For my book about my five senses, I've been thinking a lot about talking, listening, and silence. I found this account fascinating.
July 22, 2021
Starts off well, with facts supported by third parties, but veers out of scope near the middle.
The author mysteriously chooses to dump or skim through important topics (e.g. the aging of the voice to a 5-page 'coda' at the end), but spends tons of real estate on the content of Cicero's speeches, Hitler's rise to power, how amazing Obama is and dreadful Trump is.
I'm an amateur singer and musician, when I picked up this book, I didn't sign up to read all these off-topic opinions, but real hard facts about 'The Voice', and unfortunately there is too little of that in here.
On the plus side, it's very short and well written so its easy to skim through when it becomes obvious that the book becomes of vehicle for the author's wider commentary on life, politics, etc.
The author mysteriously chooses to dump or skim through important topics (e.g. the aging of the voice to a 5-page 'coda' at the end), but spends tons of real estate on the content of Cicero's speeches, Hitler's rise to power, how amazing Obama is and dreadful Trump is.
I'm an amateur singer and musician, when I picked up this book, I didn't sign up to read all these off-topic opinions, but real hard facts about 'The Voice', and unfortunately there is too little of that in here.
On the plus side, it's very short and well written so its easy to skim through when it becomes obvious that the book becomes of vehicle for the author's wider commentary on life, politics, etc.
November 13, 2021
I enjoyed this account of John Colapinto's learning and thinking about the fascinating subject of the human voice. But science journalism is hard, and Colapinto is not a science journalist, so I did quibble with those areas where I had some previous knowledge.
Colapinto says that Chomsky is wrong that children learn to speak without being taught; he says that we do teach children to speak, by speaking to them in Motherese, and that "these prosodic exaggerations are adopted by parents in all cultures and languages and that every adult uses them when talking to babies (whether they are aware of it or not)." (p. 36) But the Tsimané, in Bolivia, do not use Motherese, and do not talk to small children much at all, and their children learn to speak by listening to fluent speakers talking to each other.
Especially when you're talking about sex, it's way too easy to oversimplify things you read and stitch them together to make a good story. Like, "With their evolved attraction to voices that are low (but not too low), women have dialed-up the average pitch of the male voice from that of our primate ancestors, even at the cost of a slightly weaker immune system in their offspring." (147) Earlier, Colapinto said that testosterone makes your immune system stronger. Here, he's talking about a study that says women prefer low male voices during the more-fertile part of their menstrual cycle, but not the rest of the time. Papers about female sexual preferences are way out on the hinky end of the reproducibility crisis to begin with, and once you mush that into "voices that are low (but not too low)", you're really not talking about science any more.
Colapinto says that Chomsky is wrong that children learn to speak without being taught; he says that we do teach children to speak, by speaking to them in Motherese, and that "these prosodic exaggerations are adopted by parents in all cultures and languages and that every adult uses them when talking to babies (whether they are aware of it or not)." (p. 36) But the Tsimané, in Bolivia, do not use Motherese, and do not talk to small children much at all, and their children learn to speak by listening to fluent speakers talking to each other.
Especially when you're talking about sex, it's way too easy to oversimplify things you read and stitch them together to make a good story. Like, "With their evolved attraction to voices that are low (but not too low), women have dialed-up the average pitch of the male voice from that of our primate ancestors, even at the cost of a slightly weaker immune system in their offspring." (147) Earlier, Colapinto said that testosterone makes your immune system stronger. Here, he's talking about a study that says women prefer low male voices during the more-fertile part of their menstrual cycle, but not the rest of the time. Papers about female sexual preferences are way out on the hinky end of the reproducibility crisis to begin with, and once you mush that into "voices that are low (but not too low)", you're really not talking about science any more.
April 4, 2021
“For now, anyway, we remain the only entities, animal or machine, capable of blending emotion and language in a single vocal sound wave.”
Colapinto, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, writes a compelling analysis of the functions of our voice. From a discussion of his own trouble with a vocal polyp and how it changed him, to the voice as tool and a source of joy, he delves deep into studies of the voice and linguistics, how it develops through our lives, and theories about how and why the human voice is unique among living creatures on earth. Though the bibliography is impressive, Colapinto’s style is not scholarly, but more of a journalistic ramble, touching on the development of the voice in babies and adolescents, the voice in oratory and politics, the differences between the male and female voice (dimorphism), cultural aspects of vocalization, and the emotive beauty of the singing voice. The book was a delightful read.
Colapinto, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, writes a compelling analysis of the functions of our voice. From a discussion of his own trouble with a vocal polyp and how it changed him, to the voice as tool and a source of joy, he delves deep into studies of the voice and linguistics, how it develops through our lives, and theories about how and why the human voice is unique among living creatures on earth. Though the bibliography is impressive, Colapinto’s style is not scholarly, but more of a journalistic ramble, touching on the development of the voice in babies and adolescents, the voice in oratory and politics, the differences between the male and female voice (dimorphism), cultural aspects of vocalization, and the emotive beauty of the singing voice. The book was a delightful read.
January 9, 2025
I have a few minor quibbles about some things, but honestly, this is one of the best books about speech and language, maybe because he's not a linguist or SLP. This book is definitely a great book for those folks, but also people interested in drama, singing, AI, and really if you want to know more about what makes us human. Highly recommended.
April 9, 2021
Last summer, I received an injection of Prolaryn-plus in my vocal cords. It was supposed to compensate for atrophy of my vocal fold muscles, but the effect seemed catastrophic. Suddenly I could only speak in a squeaky falsetto. So, in October, I got a second injection of the same stuff by way of a long needle stuck through the front of my neck. Again, bad luck. That led to a few helpful sessions with a voice pathologist. We moved from North Carolina to Kentucky, and now I have an appointment with a voice therapist in Lexington. In the midst of this ordeal, my dear wife presented me with John Colapinto’s book, This is the Voice.
At first, I thought the entire book might be about problems like mine, and the first part was, but there’s so much more. The author traces the entire evolutionary development of the voice from the brainstem of a silent lizard and the primitive noise of a lungfish to our Neanderthal cousins to politicians and opera divas.
We begin learning how a voice communicates when we’re in the womb, hearing in the final weeks the melody of our mother’s speech. We continue learning in the same way during infancy long before we can say Ma-ma or Da-da. We learn the prosody of our parents, which underlies our native language.
Colapinto approaches his study of the voice as a journalist, investigating the phenomenon with fresh, curious eyes. He amplifies the work of linguists whose research has been under-recognized while he challenges the dominance of linguists like Noam Chomsky. I find his arguments stimulating and convincing.
My enjoyment of this book might be due to my lifelong devotion to public speaking and singing. However, I believe anyone with vocal cords, lungs, and a pair of ears will also find This is the Voice thought-provoking, entertaining, and informative. It will stick around as a reference on several topics for years to come.
At first, I thought the entire book might be about problems like mine, and the first part was, but there’s so much more. The author traces the entire evolutionary development of the voice from the brainstem of a silent lizard and the primitive noise of a lungfish to our Neanderthal cousins to politicians and opera divas.
We begin learning how a voice communicates when we’re in the womb, hearing in the final weeks the melody of our mother’s speech. We continue learning in the same way during infancy long before we can say Ma-ma or Da-da. We learn the prosody of our parents, which underlies our native language.
Colapinto approaches his study of the voice as a journalist, investigating the phenomenon with fresh, curious eyes. He amplifies the work of linguists whose research has been under-recognized while he challenges the dominance of linguists like Noam Chomsky. I find his arguments stimulating and convincing.
My enjoyment of this book might be due to my lifelong devotion to public speaking and singing. However, I believe anyone with vocal cords, lungs, and a pair of ears will also find This is the Voice thought-provoking, entertaining, and informative. It will stick around as a reference on several topics for years to come.
November 28, 2020
Phenomenal Discussion, Perhaps Marred by Blatant Political Preferences In The Closing Chapters. This was a truly phenomenal discussion of all things related to the human voice: its physiology, evolutionary development, and impact on all areas of human life. However, the ultimate "taste" of the book will likely be more based on whether the reader agrees with the author's fawning over former US President Barack Obama and blatant disregard of current US President Donald Trump. Even in these sections of the book, however, where Colapinto is discussing the actual voices of the two men and how they are created and perceived, the book continues its phenomenal look at an oft-overlooked topic. The "YMMV" bit is more concerned with where the author steps away from a strict analysis of the voice and instead veers into editorializing over which man is preferred and why. Still, ultimately a well written and researched book, and very much recommended.
May 23, 2021
Fabulous book about the human voice. So important, but not studied or written about enough. Very well written. I thought the last couple or three chapters lagged a bit, but the first two-thirds of the book was packed full of interesting stuff.
December 1, 2023
Recommended to me, I enjoyed this book about history and biology of the human voice. It comes across as popular science and the author wanders a bit, touching on some interesting topics.
The author himself has damage to his voice, leading to a very personal start to the book. I found this interesting, almost a medical travelogue. He then takes on other topics, mostly history and evolution. There is more speculation than fact (women prefer voices that are low ... but not too low). I wanted more fact from the section on a recent curse, vocal fry.
I understand the author narrates the introduction to the audio book. Overall, I liked this but didn't love it. It is indicative that it took me more than a month of picking it up and putting it back down to finish the book.
The author himself has damage to his voice, leading to a very personal start to the book. I found this interesting, almost a medical travelogue. He then takes on other topics, mostly history and evolution. There is more speculation than fact (women prefer voices that are low ... but not too low). I wanted more fact from the section on a recent curse, vocal fry.
I understand the author narrates the introduction to the audio book. Overall, I liked this but didn't love it. It is indicative that it took me more than a month of picking it up and putting it back down to finish the book.
March 27, 2021
First heard about this book on a CBC interview on Sunday Magazine. His voice is what caught my attention and his breezy style is what made me go for the audiobook instead of the physical copy. It has made for a very enjoyable number of walks around the neighbourhood! https://www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday/the-s...
Loved this book - enough science to root it in evidence and enough anecdotal evidence to give it personality. Loved hearing the author read the introduction and coda as his research into his own voice problems are the reason for the book.
Loved this book - enough science to root it in evidence and enough anecdotal evidence to give it personality. Loved hearing the author read the introduction and coda as his research into his own voice problems are the reason for the book.
November 18, 2021
Very interesting book.
Learned a lot about linguistics and voice science.
A great companion read to Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever
Would recommend
4.3/5
Learned a lot about linguistics and voice science.
A great companion read to Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever
Would recommend
4.3/5
October 20, 2021
Interesting listen, especially the intro by the author with his damaged vocal cords. The first ⅔ of the book were fascinating and filled with science and excellent observations, but the end drifted into politics.
October 4, 2021
Language evolved from music and the importance of sing, plus a whole lot of science stuff I didn't understand.
Still a decent read
Still a decent read
April 6, 2023
As a speech, teacher and debate coach, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I’ve always taken the voice for granted. This was a very enjoyable read. It really made me aware of how powerful and important our voices are. I came to learn how much information is conveyed not by what we say but HOW we say it. I highly recommend this book for anyone, but especially those who use their voice.
February 21, 2022
A surprisingly readable book about what separates us from virtually all the other animals...not dry at all. Great stuff on the origin of language and an interesting theory as to why 60s vocal music sounds better than music today...it's not as electronically sanitized!
April 17, 2021
This book caught my attention when I stumbled upon it in a book store. Here are some of my main takeaways. Evolutionary theories such as Origin of Species didn't at first try to address human speech or development. Human communication, making complex sounds and annunciations to convey thoughts and ideas is very unique and often under appreciated. The book covered several famous scientists and researchers such as B.F. Skinner and Pavlov. One cool fact I wasn't aware of was that Pavlov also trained dogs not to salivate on the bell, which is arguably more difficult than the mainstream Pavlovian phenomenon we're aware of.
More interesting facts from book.
- Humans take oxygen in the lungs before speaking.
- there is what appears to be a flaw that causes choking, Darwinian theory would consider this a flaw, but when you look closer that anatomical feature that allows food to go down the wrong pipe also allows speech in humans via the larynx.
- Neanderthals larynx didn’t descend as far down as humans did.
- The birth process is similar to evolution process.
- In the womb, as a zygote, we’re more like a fish, breathing in water before we develop to the form when we take out first breath.
- Neanderthals could only produce a strict amount of vowels. Researchers did a silicone and computer mode to test.
- For purely anatomical reasons Neanderthals speech and vowels were limited.
- Neanderthal extinction was due to Homo Sapiens who had better speech and communication. We had better vowels.
- language formed around 400,000 years ago due to anatomical developmental reasons coupled with the brain’s development.
- The breathing and descent of the larynx combined with the tongue and lips to have all these hundreds of muscles create this under appreciated power of speech. language is an expression of thought.
- Parkinson’s dementia
- many scientific breakthroughs start as studies of anomalies and abnormalities of human behaviors.
- grammar genes were expected, but it was ruled out during a study.
- There was a palsy, the basil ganglia, which addresses the fine motor movements of speech.
- Speech problems, or grammar, motor control of articulators, the power to tune our voices is all related to the basil ganglia.
- FOXP2 gene - we all have 2 copies. one from mom and one from dad.
- All family members with shriveled basil ganglia had speech, grammar and learning problems.
- Oxford lab found all this during studies.
- Wolfgang Enard - was tasks to lead this effort to study FOXP2
- sometime after our species branched off from apes there were two amino acid changes and substitutions in the FOXP2gene.
- resulted in a high charged basil ganglia.
- Neanderthals FOXP2 underwent the same changes as ours.
- The neural pathways to the basil ganglia's were enhanced.
- birds and mice also have the FOXP2 gene.
- this genetic similarity with birds and humans makes sense.
- birds evolved before mammals, basically flying reptiles, dinosaurs.
- birds either evolved their FOXP2 by convergent evolution During the Cambrian age
- FOXP2 isn’t a gene for language, it is rather more accurately the first gene ever found responsible for the unique specialization of our human voice.
- It is the best evidence we have for a species of slow hairless primates made their improbably journey to the top of the food chain.
- For Lieberman, the developments of FOXP2 and the basil ganglia are only the latest evidence to support his theory that language, far from being a purely mental phenomenon is a physical act, whose first tracings can be traced back 100s of millions of years to the oldest lung breathing vertebrate ancestor, the lung fish and its voice, regardless of how much like a fart it sounded.
- the exigency of survival and reproduction gave rise to speech some 100,000 years ago when a series of random, but advantageous genetic mutations led in our early hominid line to increased control over respiration, to the descent of the larynx, and the powering of the basil ganglia for articulation. All anatomical accidents, selected by nature and the advantages in survival and reproduction that they conferred and which bred a better, language capable brain.
- The Voice, thus in Lieberman’s conception played a major role in creating language.
- As he once put it, “we talked ourselves into becoming human.”
- Noam Chomsky has often expressed indifference to where language came from, dismissing Darwinian selection, but not providing any plausible alternatives.
- In a 1999 interview Chomsky said that he might see a role for Darwinian selection aspect to language after all. In 2002 he published a paper on the subject.
- His paper caused a major upheaval in the linguistics field. He proposed that speech didn’t develop for communication, but rather for thinking. They focused on the pure cognitive changes that endowed us with the capabilities of speech.
- Alone among animals with the ability to think linguistically.
- They concluded that this ability emerged due to one operation and one only, recursion.
- Recursion refers to our ability to put one idea inside of another.
- Thanks to recursion, you can just keep embedding ideas.
- The man walked down the street. The man had on a top hat. - becomes - The man with a top hat walked down the street.
- Did Chomsky and his colleagues call recursion the only mental link that creates language?
- Steve Pinker and Ray Jackendoff argued against Chomsky and said that while recursion was important, it was by no means the only distinguishing factor of voice and language.
- Deep in the 37 page paper was a paragraph about the pueraha tribe of only 400 people deep in the Amazon rain forest spoke an unusual language which distinctive factor was it didn’t use recursion.
- Daniel Everett, a missionary turned linguist who lived with and studied the Pirahã tribe for 30 years.
- He said that instead of saying I saw the dog, at the beach bitten by a snake. They would say. I saw the dog. He was at the beach. He was bitten by a snake.
- They lack the recursive ability to embed ideas within ideas and have to spell everything out separately.
- The linguist community said that this may be a result of retardation due to inbreeding, which Everett shot down. The tribe regularly refreshes its DNA pool by mating with traders and outsiders often those in the Brazil nut trade.
- All evidence shows they’re just as capable mentally as other humans
- The inability to use recursion wasn’t a cognitive restraint, but a cultural one.
- Goes in and out of experience instead of going away. The candle flicker goes in and out of experience. The person who goes beyond the river goes out of experience.
- The missionary said due to the tribes view of experience they couldn’t relate and lost all interest in the story that Jesus died for their sins 2,000 years ago.
- Eventually, so did Everett. In the late 1990’s he became an atheist and ceased trying to convert the tribe and focused instead on understanding their unusual language.
- The tribe didn’t learn farming skills that are future focused and still used their hunter gatherer skills and remain unchanged over the years.
- The immediacy of experience principle shaped their culture and society.
- All of this affected their speech and resulted in them not having what Chomsky said was universal in human speech, recursion.
- Because the Pirahã only accepts as real what they can see in the here and now, their speech consists of direct assertions.
- Abstractions are impossible in the tribes tongue.
- Their speech was also based on only 8 consonants and 3 vowel sounds as an 11 letter alphabet compared to our 26. One of the simplest sound systems known.
- It’s tonal like Mandarin Chinese to make sounds that can use fewer characters to make more speech.
In addition, the book talks about accents which often say something about class and standing in the world. This book is a fascinating study of the human voice. Once you read it, I think you'll have a greater appreciation for the miracle of how effortlessly we as humans communicate. You'll also probably pay more attention to people's voices. It's a good, interesting book.
More interesting facts from book.
- Humans take oxygen in the lungs before speaking.
- there is what appears to be a flaw that causes choking, Darwinian theory would consider this a flaw, but when you look closer that anatomical feature that allows food to go down the wrong pipe also allows speech in humans via the larynx.
- Neanderthals larynx didn’t descend as far down as humans did.
- The birth process is similar to evolution process.
- In the womb, as a zygote, we’re more like a fish, breathing in water before we develop to the form when we take out first breath.
- Neanderthals could only produce a strict amount of vowels. Researchers did a silicone and computer mode to test.
- For purely anatomical reasons Neanderthals speech and vowels were limited.
- Neanderthal extinction was due to Homo Sapiens who had better speech and communication. We had better vowels.
- language formed around 400,000 years ago due to anatomical developmental reasons coupled with the brain’s development.
- The breathing and descent of the larynx combined with the tongue and lips to have all these hundreds of muscles create this under appreciated power of speech. language is an expression of thought.
- Parkinson’s dementia
- many scientific breakthroughs start as studies of anomalies and abnormalities of human behaviors.
- grammar genes were expected, but it was ruled out during a study.
- There was a palsy, the basil ganglia, which addresses the fine motor movements of speech.
- Speech problems, or grammar, motor control of articulators, the power to tune our voices is all related to the basil ganglia.
- FOXP2 gene - we all have 2 copies. one from mom and one from dad.
- All family members with shriveled basil ganglia had speech, grammar and learning problems.
- Oxford lab found all this during studies.
- Wolfgang Enard - was tasks to lead this effort to study FOXP2
- sometime after our species branched off from apes there were two amino acid changes and substitutions in the FOXP2gene.
- resulted in a high charged basil ganglia.
- Neanderthals FOXP2 underwent the same changes as ours.
- The neural pathways to the basil ganglia's were enhanced.
- birds and mice also have the FOXP2 gene.
- this genetic similarity with birds and humans makes sense.
- birds evolved before mammals, basically flying reptiles, dinosaurs.
- birds either evolved their FOXP2 by convergent evolution During the Cambrian age
- FOXP2 isn’t a gene for language, it is rather more accurately the first gene ever found responsible for the unique specialization of our human voice.
- It is the best evidence we have for a species of slow hairless primates made their improbably journey to the top of the food chain.
- For Lieberman, the developments of FOXP2 and the basil ganglia are only the latest evidence to support his theory that language, far from being a purely mental phenomenon is a physical act, whose first tracings can be traced back 100s of millions of years to the oldest lung breathing vertebrate ancestor, the lung fish and its voice, regardless of how much like a fart it sounded.
- the exigency of survival and reproduction gave rise to speech some 100,000 years ago when a series of random, but advantageous genetic mutations led in our early hominid line to increased control over respiration, to the descent of the larynx, and the powering of the basil ganglia for articulation. All anatomical accidents, selected by nature and the advantages in survival and reproduction that they conferred and which bred a better, language capable brain.
- The Voice, thus in Lieberman’s conception played a major role in creating language.
- As he once put it, “we talked ourselves into becoming human.”
- Noam Chomsky has often expressed indifference to where language came from, dismissing Darwinian selection, but not providing any plausible alternatives.
- In a 1999 interview Chomsky said that he might see a role for Darwinian selection aspect to language after all. In 2002 he published a paper on the subject.
- His paper caused a major upheaval in the linguistics field. He proposed that speech didn’t develop for communication, but rather for thinking. They focused on the pure cognitive changes that endowed us with the capabilities of speech.
- Alone among animals with the ability to think linguistically.
- They concluded that this ability emerged due to one operation and one only, recursion.
- Recursion refers to our ability to put one idea inside of another.
- Thanks to recursion, you can just keep embedding ideas.
- The man walked down the street. The man had on a top hat. - becomes - The man with a top hat walked down the street.
- Did Chomsky and his colleagues call recursion the only mental link that creates language?
- Steve Pinker and Ray Jackendoff argued against Chomsky and said that while recursion was important, it was by no means the only distinguishing factor of voice and language.
- Deep in the 37 page paper was a paragraph about the pueraha tribe of only 400 people deep in the Amazon rain forest spoke an unusual language which distinctive factor was it didn’t use recursion.
- Daniel Everett, a missionary turned linguist who lived with and studied the Pirahã tribe for 30 years.
- He said that instead of saying I saw the dog, at the beach bitten by a snake. They would say. I saw the dog. He was at the beach. He was bitten by a snake.
- They lack the recursive ability to embed ideas within ideas and have to spell everything out separately.
- The linguist community said that this may be a result of retardation due to inbreeding, which Everett shot down. The tribe regularly refreshes its DNA pool by mating with traders and outsiders often those in the Brazil nut trade.
- All evidence shows they’re just as capable mentally as other humans
- The inability to use recursion wasn’t a cognitive restraint, but a cultural one.
- Goes in and out of experience instead of going away. The candle flicker goes in and out of experience. The person who goes beyond the river goes out of experience.
- The missionary said due to the tribes view of experience they couldn’t relate and lost all interest in the story that Jesus died for their sins 2,000 years ago.
- Eventually, so did Everett. In the late 1990’s he became an atheist and ceased trying to convert the tribe and focused instead on understanding their unusual language.
- The tribe didn’t learn farming skills that are future focused and still used their hunter gatherer skills and remain unchanged over the years.
- The immediacy of experience principle shaped their culture and society.
- All of this affected their speech and resulted in them not having what Chomsky said was universal in human speech, recursion.
- Because the Pirahã only accepts as real what they can see in the here and now, their speech consists of direct assertions.
- Abstractions are impossible in the tribes tongue.
- Their speech was also based on only 8 consonants and 3 vowel sounds as an 11 letter alphabet compared to our 26. One of the simplest sound systems known.
- It’s tonal like Mandarin Chinese to make sounds that can use fewer characters to make more speech.
In addition, the book talks about accents which often say something about class and standing in the world. This book is a fascinating study of the human voice. Once you read it, I think you'll have a greater appreciation for the miracle of how effortlessly we as humans communicate. You'll also probably pay more attention to people's voices. It's a good, interesting book.
June 2, 2021
We use our voices each day, but how often do you stop to think about yours? Maybe when you lose your voice from a cold, or when you hear an audio recording of yourself and think - do I actually sound like that?! For author John Colapinto, his voice odyssey started in a rock band. He loved singing, giving 100% even in rehearsal, until he noticed he couldn't. He even developed postural changes in his neck to try to compensate before being diagnosed with a polyp on his vocal cords. After realizing that he (his true character) was no longer being transmitted by his voice, he embarked on a journey to learn more about the voice, its origins, and why it's so important.
The personal hook really grabbed me, and I so enjoyed embarking on this study of the voice with Colapinto. Humans are the only animals with a descended larynx, and this anatomical change makes us capable of clear and precise speech, with the consequence of making us more likely to choke to death on our food. In fact, our affinity for spoken language may explain why so many of us love audiobooks and podcasts, and why oral traditions predated the development of writing systems.
Colapinto explores language acquisition in children and the role of the voice in communication with them - it turns out that our lapsing into the sweet tones of baby talk, which Colapinto labels Motherese, is not without a purpose. I also loved the exploration of accents and how we make judgments based on others' speech patterns - whether they represent UK received pronunciation, a Boston accent, or Eliza Doolittle cockney. He also explores the magic of singing and dramatic speech, how voice can convey emotion and persuade almost independently of the words spoken.
5 stars to a creative and entertaining exploration of the voice, a topic I didn't know much about. I highly recommend to another looking for a good popular science read.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster for providing an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Review posted to Goodreads 4/18/21
Review to be posted to Instagram 4/25/21
The personal hook really grabbed me, and I so enjoyed embarking on this study of the voice with Colapinto. Humans are the only animals with a descended larynx, and this anatomical change makes us capable of clear and precise speech, with the consequence of making us more likely to choke to death on our food. In fact, our affinity for spoken language may explain why so many of us love audiobooks and podcasts, and why oral traditions predated the development of writing systems.
Colapinto explores language acquisition in children and the role of the voice in communication with them - it turns out that our lapsing into the sweet tones of baby talk, which Colapinto labels Motherese, is not without a purpose. I also loved the exploration of accents and how we make judgments based on others' speech patterns - whether they represent UK received pronunciation, a Boston accent, or Eliza Doolittle cockney. He also explores the magic of singing and dramatic speech, how voice can convey emotion and persuade almost independently of the words spoken.
5 stars to a creative and entertaining exploration of the voice, a topic I didn't know much about. I highly recommend to another looking for a good popular science read.
Thank you to Simon & Schuster for providing an ARC on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Review posted to Goodreads 4/18/21
Review to be posted to Instagram 4/25/21
April 11, 2021
This book was so fascinating; I was learning so much and was excited about the topics presented, until I got to chapter 7. There it became so riddled with opinion, blatantly misleading and dishonest information, that despite the fact that the rest of the book was so interesting and presumably well researched, I couldn't give it higher than two-stars. Such a disappointment. I think I'd still recommend this book but maybe suggest you avoid chapter 7, unless you're a Trump-hating, Obama-sycophant like the author clearly is, then you'll probably love every word in all it's seething prosody (audiobook).
June 15, 2021
The main thesis of the book is that humanity’s ability to use the voice to convey complex ideas that carry both information and emotion is the characteristic that distinguishes humanity from other life forms on earth. The book starts with how the human voice works at an anatomical/biological level and then moves to language acquisition, language and identity, and finally how the sounds we make define, at a fundamental level, how we see and understand the world. It is a fascinating read.
March 11, 2021
If this book doesn't become a bestseller I'd be greatly surprised.
October 24, 2021
Dude has a serious crush on Obama.
February 9, 2021
https://www.themaineedge.com/style/sp...
How much thought have you given to your voice?
Not the way it sounds, mind you. We’re not talking about the words that you might say or the notes that you might sing, but rather the actual voice itself. The physiological and neurological underpinnings of how we as human beings are able to harness its many complexities.
If you’re at all curious, then you desperately need to sit down with John Colapinto’s “This Is the Voice.” It is a deeply researched and incredibly informative plunge into what proves to be a surprisingly robust topic, one that digs into not just the nuts and bolts of how our voice works, but some ideas about WHY it works the way it does.
This unapologetically wonky book is rife with fascinating facts about the origins of human voice, packed with interviews that address the topic from all angles. Through delving into the physical, emotional and cultural connotations of voice, Colapinto illustrates just how vital a part the voice plays in our world – who we were, who we are and who we may yet become.
The fundamental idea that this book explores is a simple, yet far-reaching one. Basically, Colapinto argues that the ability to speak – not just to make sounds, but to SPEAK – has been the key to humankind’s evolutionary journey to the top of the heap. That ability to communicate concisely and flexibly is what truly separated us from the pack and allowed for the many developments that led us to our current status.
And it all started with a song. Kind of.
Colapinto’s fascination with the voice started when he suffered an injury to his own. Specifically, he was the singer in a band and he overdid. When he tried to push through, his condition worsened. By the time he finally went to see a doctor, years later, the damage was done – a node on his vocal cords that could only (maybe) be fixed via a risky surgery. What followed was the deepest of deep dives, a wide-ranging and sprawling investigation of the voice from a variety of angles.
We learn about the lungfish, whose move from the sea to the land proved to be the kickstart of the development of the larynx. We learn the differences between the vocal apparatuses of other primates and our own. We’re given insight into great debates – scientific debates driven by linguists like Noam Chomsky in the middle of the 20th century and the famed Lincoln-Douglas political debates from a century earlier. We meet a reclusive Amazonia tribe whose language helps us understand the inherent musicality of our words. We learn about regional accents and vocal fry. And we’re part of a conversation about the weaponization of the voice by demagogues, including their ability to command and control through rhetorical tone and tricks.
Not to mention the fact that a person’s voice can communicate far more than the content of their words – not just meaning, but gender, class, mood and so much more.
Now, all of this information could have become overwhelming – there’s a lot here. But rather than succumbing to the granular, Colapinto manages to strike the balance between informational conveyance and entertaining engagement. There’s a conversational quality to “This Is the Voice” that makes connecting to the work very easy, even as we venture into heady notions like evolutionary biology and Universal Grammar; the layman is never lost, as sometimes happens when science writers relegate craft to the back burner.
Again – this is all intended to show that our voice is what allowed us to build and maintain the civilization in which we live. It’s a heady concept, this notion that our voice is the reason we are where we are as a species. And yet … Colapinto certainly puts forward a strong argument. It makes sense that an intricately-controlled, scalable medium of communication would be an advantage, but for so many of us – certainly for myself – the voice is something that we take for granted. As a performer, someone who relies heavily on the quality of my voice, it’s wild to think that I’ve never given much consideration to its wider importance.
“This Is the Voice” is a prime example of quality popular science, striking that ideal balance between informative and entertaining. It embraces the wide-ranging aspects of its subject matter, digging in wherever necessary and capturing the reader’s curiosity. But it’s also an engaging read, thoughtful and funny and finely crafted. Books that accomplish this combination are few and far between, but John Colapinto has definitely written one that does just that.
“The human voice is the organ of the soul.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
How much thought have you given to your voice?
Not the way it sounds, mind you. We’re not talking about the words that you might say or the notes that you might sing, but rather the actual voice itself. The physiological and neurological underpinnings of how we as human beings are able to harness its many complexities.
If you’re at all curious, then you desperately need to sit down with John Colapinto’s “This Is the Voice.” It is a deeply researched and incredibly informative plunge into what proves to be a surprisingly robust topic, one that digs into not just the nuts and bolts of how our voice works, but some ideas about WHY it works the way it does.
This unapologetically wonky book is rife with fascinating facts about the origins of human voice, packed with interviews that address the topic from all angles. Through delving into the physical, emotional and cultural connotations of voice, Colapinto illustrates just how vital a part the voice plays in our world – who we were, who we are and who we may yet become.
The fundamental idea that this book explores is a simple, yet far-reaching one. Basically, Colapinto argues that the ability to speak – not just to make sounds, but to SPEAK – has been the key to humankind’s evolutionary journey to the top of the heap. That ability to communicate concisely and flexibly is what truly separated us from the pack and allowed for the many developments that led us to our current status.
And it all started with a song. Kind of.
Colapinto’s fascination with the voice started when he suffered an injury to his own. Specifically, he was the singer in a band and he overdid. When he tried to push through, his condition worsened. By the time he finally went to see a doctor, years later, the damage was done – a node on his vocal cords that could only (maybe) be fixed via a risky surgery. What followed was the deepest of deep dives, a wide-ranging and sprawling investigation of the voice from a variety of angles.
We learn about the lungfish, whose move from the sea to the land proved to be the kickstart of the development of the larynx. We learn the differences between the vocal apparatuses of other primates and our own. We’re given insight into great debates – scientific debates driven by linguists like Noam Chomsky in the middle of the 20th century and the famed Lincoln-Douglas political debates from a century earlier. We meet a reclusive Amazonia tribe whose language helps us understand the inherent musicality of our words. We learn about regional accents and vocal fry. And we’re part of a conversation about the weaponization of the voice by demagogues, including their ability to command and control through rhetorical tone and tricks.
Not to mention the fact that a person’s voice can communicate far more than the content of their words – not just meaning, but gender, class, mood and so much more.
Now, all of this information could have become overwhelming – there’s a lot here. But rather than succumbing to the granular, Colapinto manages to strike the balance between informational conveyance and entertaining engagement. There’s a conversational quality to “This Is the Voice” that makes connecting to the work very easy, even as we venture into heady notions like evolutionary biology and Universal Grammar; the layman is never lost, as sometimes happens when science writers relegate craft to the back burner.
Again – this is all intended to show that our voice is what allowed us to build and maintain the civilization in which we live. It’s a heady concept, this notion that our voice is the reason we are where we are as a species. And yet … Colapinto certainly puts forward a strong argument. It makes sense that an intricately-controlled, scalable medium of communication would be an advantage, but for so many of us – certainly for myself – the voice is something that we take for granted. As a performer, someone who relies heavily on the quality of my voice, it’s wild to think that I’ve never given much consideration to its wider importance.
“This Is the Voice” is a prime example of quality popular science, striking that ideal balance between informative and entertaining. It embraces the wide-ranging aspects of its subject matter, digging in wherever necessary and capturing the reader’s curiosity. But it’s also an engaging read, thoughtful and funny and finely crafted. Books that accomplish this combination are few and far between, but John Colapinto has definitely written one that does just that.
“The human voice is the organ of the soul.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
June 19, 2021
A pretty interesting book about, well, the voice. Colapinto's thesis is that while language was obviously important to the development of our species, having a way to quickly communicate with our voices was just as important, and obviously something else that no other species can do.
Odds and ends:
- You can speak words around five times faster than using sign language!
- After some research done in the 1990s, we now understand dyslexia is a problem of hearing and processing voices. Neat!
- "Prosody" is the word for the patterns of stress and intonation you use when speaking.
- The way adults talk to babies in a high-pitched singsong voices is universal across cultures and languages; the theory is that this helps babies learn to distinguish between words and start figuring out how to make sounds. (One of the other themes of the book is that making all the sounds in a language is quite difficult!)
- Darwin discovered that babies learn how to use prosody before they learn how to say words!
- There's a whole interesting section about how good we are at conversations, and how we can anticipate the timing of what people are going to say. They did an experiment where they asked students "So you're a student?" and "So you're a student at Radboud University?". In both cases the student answered "Yes" with no overlap as soon as the sentence finished, even though one sentence is a subset of the other!
- In English conversation, we speak in roughly three tones - high, mid, and low. Of course, some other languages use those tones for meaning, and we also use it to convey more information. A high pitch means we disagree with something that someone just said to us, a mid pitch (matching the pitch of the other speaker) means that we agree, and a lower pitch means that we agree so strongly that it's a foregone conclusion. Neat!
- From ages one to sixteen, kids learn one new word every two hours, which is insane if you stop and think about it!
- Another thing in the vein of "things that are surprisingly tricky that we do without thinking" is inhaling enough air based on how long we think we're going to speak for. Kids as old as twelve still haven't mastered this and sometime run out of air mid-sentence!
- A researcher (Dr. Nalina Ambady) did a fascinating experiment on the voices of surgeons talking to patients during office visits. She ran the speech through a low-pass filter that removed the language content but preserved the tone and pitch. (i.e. the prosody) She then asked listeners to rate the voices for things like "warmth", "anxiety", "concern", "interest", "hostility", and "dominance". Using only these ratings, Dr. Ambady was able to predict with 100% accuracy which surgeons had been sued! (using a dominant tone was the giveaway) This seems to be independent of the surgeons' actual abilities - the ones with a dominant tone were off-putting enough that when they did do something wrong, people wanted to sue them, I guess!
- I've read this before, but it's still neat: the reason every airline pilot speaks in that same voice you're probably imaging now ("well folks, looks like we're about to begin our descent into Austin International Airport, current weather is clear skies...") is that that was the way Chuck Yeager spoke, and Chuck Yeager was the first to break the sound barrier, so naturally pilots wanted to be like him.
- There's an interesting section with a theory that the "gay voice" starts when toddlers who are biologically predisposed towards being gay identify more closely with opposite-sex parents and caregivers, and learn their speech patterns better. I'm always a little skeptical about theories like this, but...maybe? (there's a whole documentary on the "gay voice" that I haven't watched, to be honest)
- The high-class British accent (in My Fair Lady, say) is known as Received Pronunciation (RP), and when the BBC was started in 1922, they mandated that RP be used because it was the clearest, most intelligible speech. (which is what everyone thinks about their own dialect!) They also hoped to influence everyone in England to use the same accent and erase class differences. This utterly failed; to change your accent after puberty you have to really work at it. (like in My Fair Lady!) But even babies and kids generally don't learn accents from a broadcast; they need a back and forth feedback loop.
- Dr. William Labov published the Atlas of North American English in 2006 in which he found, contrary to popular belief, that regional US accents are actually diverging instead of converging!
Odds and ends:
- You can speak words around five times faster than using sign language!
- After some research done in the 1990s, we now understand dyslexia is a problem of hearing and processing voices. Neat!
- "Prosody" is the word for the patterns of stress and intonation you use when speaking.
- The way adults talk to babies in a high-pitched singsong voices is universal across cultures and languages; the theory is that this helps babies learn to distinguish between words and start figuring out how to make sounds. (One of the other themes of the book is that making all the sounds in a language is quite difficult!)
- Darwin discovered that babies learn how to use prosody before they learn how to say words!
- There's a whole interesting section about how good we are at conversations, and how we can anticipate the timing of what people are going to say. They did an experiment where they asked students "So you're a student?" and "So you're a student at Radboud University?". In both cases the student answered "Yes" with no overlap as soon as the sentence finished, even though one sentence is a subset of the other!
- In English conversation, we speak in roughly three tones - high, mid, and low. Of course, some other languages use those tones for meaning, and we also use it to convey more information. A high pitch means we disagree with something that someone just said to us, a mid pitch (matching the pitch of the other speaker) means that we agree, and a lower pitch means that we agree so strongly that it's a foregone conclusion. Neat!
- From ages one to sixteen, kids learn one new word every two hours, which is insane if you stop and think about it!
- Another thing in the vein of "things that are surprisingly tricky that we do without thinking" is inhaling enough air based on how long we think we're going to speak for. Kids as old as twelve still haven't mastered this and sometime run out of air mid-sentence!
- A researcher (Dr. Nalina Ambady) did a fascinating experiment on the voices of surgeons talking to patients during office visits. She ran the speech through a low-pass filter that removed the language content but preserved the tone and pitch. (i.e. the prosody) She then asked listeners to rate the voices for things like "warmth", "anxiety", "concern", "interest", "hostility", and "dominance". Using only these ratings, Dr. Ambady was able to predict with 100% accuracy which surgeons had been sued! (using a dominant tone was the giveaway) This seems to be independent of the surgeons' actual abilities - the ones with a dominant tone were off-putting enough that when they did do something wrong, people wanted to sue them, I guess!
- I've read this before, but it's still neat: the reason every airline pilot speaks in that same voice you're probably imaging now ("well folks, looks like we're about to begin our descent into Austin International Airport, current weather is clear skies...") is that that was the way Chuck Yeager spoke, and Chuck Yeager was the first to break the sound barrier, so naturally pilots wanted to be like him.
- There's an interesting section with a theory that the "gay voice" starts when toddlers who are biologically predisposed towards being gay identify more closely with opposite-sex parents and caregivers, and learn their speech patterns better. I'm always a little skeptical about theories like this, but...maybe? (there's a whole documentary on the "gay voice" that I haven't watched, to be honest)
- The high-class British accent (in My Fair Lady, say) is known as Received Pronunciation (RP), and when the BBC was started in 1922, they mandated that RP be used because it was the clearest, most intelligible speech. (which is what everyone thinks about their own dialect!) They also hoped to influence everyone in England to use the same accent and erase class differences. This utterly failed; to change your accent after puberty you have to really work at it. (like in My Fair Lady!) But even babies and kids generally don't learn accents from a broadcast; they need a back and forth feedback loop.
- Dr. William Labov published the Atlas of North American English in 2006 in which he found, contrary to popular belief, that regional US accents are actually diverging instead of converging!
February 12, 2025
“Our hunger for, and love of the human voice can never become obsolete or outmoded. It is simply too much a part of us, a part of our neutral circuitry, a primary means by which we make sense of the world, of how we interpret reality.” (p.222)
It was hard to put down the book. If you’ve ever been curious about the structured sound we make – speech – and its roots in biology, the social stratification component to it, how demagogues and good leaders use it to persuade and influence crowds, and, finally, what the peak of excellence of people who have trained their voices to sing sound like - the most beautiful sound we make - you’ll enjoy this book.
John Colapinto is a fantastic storyteller. His argument that it was the voice that made us the dominant species in the world – as the means through which we were able to cooperate –is persuasive and continues to be the ethos of the book. This interpretation is present even in the common story about whether if a tree fell in the forest, but no one saw it, did it really happen? Now, it didn’t happen because no one heard it fall. While other books provide claims through finding the right interpretation for the story to suit the argument – the status game making everything about status, for instance –John Colapinto makes everything about the voice.
The voice is the peak of evolution. If you think about it, it’s the means through which we make thoughts sound in a structure way. The purpose of education, therefore, could be to
develop greater vocabulary and voice it. Isn’t this what people refer to as someone educated? How they sound? Set aside all the bias and opportunities for discrimination that exist (and the book discusses this). To some extent, you could make the argument your voice does demonstrate who you made yourself up to be. How well-read you are and how you think. By training your voice, you stop relying on other forms of communication, like pointing and hand gestures. Makes sense why babies are taught to “use your words.”
Having a voice, screaming it out, reminds you that you have a place on earth. This last sentence reminds me of the empowering scream of George the Fifth in the King’s speech: “I have a voice!” An edge of our identity is also our voice. It’s a full-on expression of who we are. It’s unique, it’s an identifier. And the number of components it has – pitch, volume, timbre, pace, shape, rhythm, tune, cadence, accent, phonemes, fry, language, and grammar— does make the theme of voice to have even more chapters than the book offers. But I will delve into three: sex and gender, voice in society, and song.
Being the only alive species that experiences or shows voice dimorphism, is the start of explanation why the two biological sexes sound different. Anatomy explains this part: emerging in puberty, in the larynx, the women’s vocal cords do not change completely. However, social expectations, cultural pressures, gender norms, and individual psychology do affect pitch and quality (p. 150). For instance, “the steady drop (of pitch)…(shows the increase of) international women’s social status over the last century.” As if part of the end of education – speech training - was to lower your voice’s pitch (an octave or cycle). This last part demonstrates that – effectively – there are social determinants of voice.
By far, the most interesting chapter for me was “The Voice in Society” as I am interested in this dimension. “Voice and accent the last socially acceptable form of prejudice.” (p. 166) says the book. And claim phoneticians were seen as social reformers in England. This does make you think to what extent voice could work as an equalizer. The opportunities to use voice analytics, to studying accents across class, race, and cultures is fascinating. Codeswitching in social class could be accomplished with the voice. I wanted more on this chapter, studying the rise of English as a lingua franca and its implications for society, identity, and equity.
This book did make me curious at first, and a neophyte second, about the power of the voice in song. The book has good references to authentic, good music: jazz, Beatles, opera. I have come to value music more than ever before. I’ll try to filter more what my ears consume, go to a couple of opera performances, and take up my piano lessons. Always remember that “when you sing, you’re giving voice to your soul” (p. 262).
All in all, as John Colapinto says, “the voice tells the story of your life.” Of where you were born, if you’ve been traumatized and hurt, if you are educated and well-read, the emotion with which you speak words, and a unique aspect of identity. This is a must read, if you want to be more curious when you hear someone else speak or deliberate when you do it.
It was hard to put down the book. If you’ve ever been curious about the structured sound we make – speech – and its roots in biology, the social stratification component to it, how demagogues and good leaders use it to persuade and influence crowds, and, finally, what the peak of excellence of people who have trained their voices to sing sound like - the most beautiful sound we make - you’ll enjoy this book.
John Colapinto is a fantastic storyteller. His argument that it was the voice that made us the dominant species in the world – as the means through which we were able to cooperate –is persuasive and continues to be the ethos of the book. This interpretation is present even in the common story about whether if a tree fell in the forest, but no one saw it, did it really happen? Now, it didn’t happen because no one heard it fall. While other books provide claims through finding the right interpretation for the story to suit the argument – the status game making everything about status, for instance –John Colapinto makes everything about the voice.
The voice is the peak of evolution. If you think about it, it’s the means through which we make thoughts sound in a structure way. The purpose of education, therefore, could be to
develop greater vocabulary and voice it. Isn’t this what people refer to as someone educated? How they sound? Set aside all the bias and opportunities for discrimination that exist (and the book discusses this). To some extent, you could make the argument your voice does demonstrate who you made yourself up to be. How well-read you are and how you think. By training your voice, you stop relying on other forms of communication, like pointing and hand gestures. Makes sense why babies are taught to “use your words.”
Having a voice, screaming it out, reminds you that you have a place on earth. This last sentence reminds me of the empowering scream of George the Fifth in the King’s speech: “I have a voice!” An edge of our identity is also our voice. It’s a full-on expression of who we are. It’s unique, it’s an identifier. And the number of components it has – pitch, volume, timbre, pace, shape, rhythm, tune, cadence, accent, phonemes, fry, language, and grammar— does make the theme of voice to have even more chapters than the book offers. But I will delve into three: sex and gender, voice in society, and song.
Being the only alive species that experiences or shows voice dimorphism, is the start of explanation why the two biological sexes sound different. Anatomy explains this part: emerging in puberty, in the larynx, the women’s vocal cords do not change completely. However, social expectations, cultural pressures, gender norms, and individual psychology do affect pitch and quality (p. 150). For instance, “the steady drop (of pitch)…(shows the increase of) international women’s social status over the last century.” As if part of the end of education – speech training - was to lower your voice’s pitch (an octave or cycle). This last part demonstrates that – effectively – there are social determinants of voice.
By far, the most interesting chapter for me was “The Voice in Society” as I am interested in this dimension. “Voice and accent the last socially acceptable form of prejudice.” (p. 166) says the book. And claim phoneticians were seen as social reformers in England. This does make you think to what extent voice could work as an equalizer. The opportunities to use voice analytics, to studying accents across class, race, and cultures is fascinating. Codeswitching in social class could be accomplished with the voice. I wanted more on this chapter, studying the rise of English as a lingua franca and its implications for society, identity, and equity.
This book did make me curious at first, and a neophyte second, about the power of the voice in song. The book has good references to authentic, good music: jazz, Beatles, opera. I have come to value music more than ever before. I’ll try to filter more what my ears consume, go to a couple of opera performances, and take up my piano lessons. Always remember that “when you sing, you’re giving voice to your soul” (p. 262).
All in all, as John Colapinto says, “the voice tells the story of your life.” Of where you were born, if you’ve been traumatized and hurt, if you are educated and well-read, the emotion with which you speak words, and a unique aspect of identity. This is a must read, if you want to be more curious when you hear someone else speak or deliberate when you do it.
March 6, 2022
“This Is The Voice” is a book about our voice, how we talk, why we speak, and the differences in how we communicate. Author John Colapinto explains that we are the planet's dominant species because we can talk. As a New York Times reporter, he knows how to research a topic, and in this book, he takes us from the first words of an infant to those of rock stars and opera divas. But it starts with his own story. He overused his voice while singing in a rock band.
From there, we learn that humans begin to learn language even before they are born.
We are lucky that our ability to speak has moved us to the top of the species ladder, whereas our closest species relative, the chimpanzee, misses out because of a lower placement of the larynx.
We also can thank lungfish whose lungs evolved from their swim bladder — the internal pool float that helps them hold to a certain depth. The walls of lungfish bladders, in particular, are so thin that oxygen can pass through them into the blood. Vocal cords evolved as a valve to keep water out of these proto-lungs.
Our vocal cords, tongue, and lips work with our lungs and brain to produce the sounds we need to speak.
When our larynx is compared, for example, to that of the Neanderthal man, we see that theirs sat higher than our own. That’s why they couldn’t make more complex sounds, and they never learned to talk and only grunt.
Fast forward to the more recent time, we learn that some of the most famous world leaders, including Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Barack Obama, became successful because they knew how to use their voice effectively.
Colapinto also shares lots of interesting information on how babies learn to talk. The larynx in babies is tucked up into the back of the mouth, making nonstop sucking possible. It also means that babies can swallow and breathe at the same time. But because of this, infants can’t develop speech during those early months. He notes that “with no resonating chamber in the throat, they can manage little beyond mama, dada, ga-ga. As babies transition to solid food — and the risk of choking increases — the larynx begins to drop to a safer and less vocally limiting position.”
The book answers vocal changes during puberty and “ sexual dimorphism.” Receptors on the male larynx cause men’s vocal cords to thicken, lowering the voice. He covers the unique and shifting vocal patterns of women, gay men, Black people, transmen, and transwomen (whose lack of androgen receptors complicates their vocal transition).
Another fascinating section of the book analyzes the accents and speech patterns worldwide. This includes stories of how English boarding schools taught “standard English” elocution — or R.P., for “received pronunciation.” R.P. was the accent of the upper class and, by mandate, of all BBC announcers. English citizens were urged to adopt the accent only to have it later mocked by the Beatles and Monty Python.
I never thought that I would find a 300-page book on the larynx to be this fascinating.
April 8, 2021
This book provides an intriguing perspective on a faculty most of us take for granted: our voice. Author John Colapinto quickly dives into not only the voice and its uses, but how it has been considered in both historical and current research in a diverse set of areas which include both human and non-human communication, the role of voice in evolution and much more.
Colapinto kicks off the book with a story about his own voice and how a singing role in a rock band impacted his voice not only for music but other aspects of his life. His own story is a good hook on exploring the many uses of our voices. I could easily relate, since I use my own voice for casual conversation, singing, teaching and for many other aspects of my life. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the role prosody plays in how we learn our own language skills as a child, but also can limit our ability to extend our learning in other ways such as developing second language skills as an adult. Prosody is a kind of sing-song rhythm which all languages have. The characteristics of prosody affect not only our learning, but how effective our speaking may be for uses such as public speaking, communicating with our friends and family and speaking other languages. Here he uses Barack Obama as an example of a public figure who has had several speeches that reached people in a powerful way, but in which he used approaches that are often found in the expression of preachers and even poets (think Amanda Gorham).
I love hearing about connections between different parts of our lives and this book is chock full of them. The concept of motherese, which is a way that mothers help to instill language skills in their children through constant use, simplification and repetition, brought back memories of how I talked with my own children during their infant days and also how we often will speak in this direct but effective way in communicating with our pets.
Parts of this book have the feeling of reviewing a survey of research on language and communications, but Colapinto is a skilled writer and knows how to create multiple narratives and keep the momentum going. I recommend this book to anybody who wants to learn more about the connections between our voices, the rest of our amazing bodies and how we have evolved to have the unique communication skills we possess as humans. Our voices are a gift and this book can help us appreciate that point and perhaps encourage us to take better care of this bounty.
Colapinto kicks off the book with a story about his own voice and how a singing role in a rock band impacted his voice not only for music but other aspects of his life. His own story is a good hook on exploring the many uses of our voices. I could easily relate, since I use my own voice for casual conversation, singing, teaching and for many other aspects of my life. I particularly enjoyed hearing about the role prosody plays in how we learn our own language skills as a child, but also can limit our ability to extend our learning in other ways such as developing second language skills as an adult. Prosody is a kind of sing-song rhythm which all languages have. The characteristics of prosody affect not only our learning, but how effective our speaking may be for uses such as public speaking, communicating with our friends and family and speaking other languages. Here he uses Barack Obama as an example of a public figure who has had several speeches that reached people in a powerful way, but in which he used approaches that are often found in the expression of preachers and even poets (think Amanda Gorham).
I love hearing about connections between different parts of our lives and this book is chock full of them. The concept of motherese, which is a way that mothers help to instill language skills in their children through constant use, simplification and repetition, brought back memories of how I talked with my own children during their infant days and also how we often will speak in this direct but effective way in communicating with our pets.
Parts of this book have the feeling of reviewing a survey of research on language and communications, but Colapinto is a skilled writer and knows how to create multiple narratives and keep the momentum going. I recommend this book to anybody who wants to learn more about the connections between our voices, the rest of our amazing bodies and how we have evolved to have the unique communication skills we possess as humans. Our voices are a gift and this book can help us appreciate that point and perhaps encourage us to take better care of this bounty.
March 23, 2021
“This is the Voice,” by John Colapinto (Simon and Schuster, 2021). Colapinto (who is basically a writer, not a scientist) argues that it is the presence of the voice that made humans the dominant species on earth. No other animal comes close to being able to communicate the way we do. Even the Neanderthal, with their larger brains, did not have the anatomy to speak. They couldn’t control pitch the way we do; their larynx, Colapinto says, had not descended from just below the jaw, and thus didn’t have the power and versatility of ours. Colapinto also examines accents and dialects; code-switching; the evolution of language. Noam Chomsky gained fame and influence because of his theory of language: we are all born with a sense of grammar and how language should be constructed. Colapinto demolishes that argument. He says language is learned, and learned by imitation and observation, by the way babies pay such close attention to the sounds around them, especially the way their mothers speak to them. He explains why baby-talk is high-pitched: babies can’t hear the lower pitches yet. He examines the remarkable ways we can understand words and sentences. After all, speech is a constant flow; there is no break between words. How do we know when one word stops and another begins? Through millisecond observations of nuances in pitch and pause. He explains why Black English is a true language even if its rules are not those of standard American English. There is a difference between “he be workin’” and “he workin.” The first means he has a job; the second means he is at work at this moment. He talks about upspeak (beginning with Moon Zappa’s 1982 hit “Valley Girl”). He talks about the origins of that snooty English accent known as Received Pronunciation. He describes the importance of accent in signifying social class: Saleswomen at Saks, Macy’s, and S. Klein have different accents betokening the status of their customers. He talks about how language is used for leadership, starting with Cicero’s catalog of rhetorical devices. It goes on and on, revelation after revelation. Colapinto is an excellent writer; his language is precise and elegant. I may buy this book.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/book...
April 17, 2024
This book was all over the place. At times it’s about linguistics, other times science, and at times it’s about Hitler, Trump, and demagoguery. In the end, this author is all about rock ‘n roll.
The book only starts to get interesting about halfway through when we learn why pilots all have the same way of talking, which personally I’ve always wondered about. Then the author writes about the origins of “vocal fry” and why it continues to spread among young men and women, although I wonder why my 5-year-old granddaughter does this, too. He invokes Germaine Greer and feminism but doesn’t spend nearly enough time exploring why people are more likely to pay attention to men’s voices rather than women’s voices. Using sexism as an excuse doesn’t really explain anything. And he quotes Darwin ad nauseum, even unbelievably when addressing the human origins of singing.
It's hard to forgive a couple of glaring inaccuracies even though the author is not American, but what about his editors??? Canadians may not know that people from New York and people from New Jersey have (or used to have) different pronunciations for the word ‘coffee’. I worked with a woman who insisted she was from New York but every time she opened her mouth to say ‘coffee’ it was obvious which side of the state line she came from. Also, the young, black people of Washington, DC notwithstanding, young black students at the college where I work speak English exactly the same way as their white counterparts. Are people really still talking about Ebonics? And confusing “secession” with “succession” when applied to the Civil War is not a minor error.
This author falls back on old, and some very old, concepts about language mostly out of laziness it seems, while trying to adhere to contemporary social dogma. I expected more.
The book only starts to get interesting about halfway through when we learn why pilots all have the same way of talking, which personally I’ve always wondered about. Then the author writes about the origins of “vocal fry” and why it continues to spread among young men and women, although I wonder why my 5-year-old granddaughter does this, too. He invokes Germaine Greer and feminism but doesn’t spend nearly enough time exploring why people are more likely to pay attention to men’s voices rather than women’s voices. Using sexism as an excuse doesn’t really explain anything. And he quotes Darwin ad nauseum, even unbelievably when addressing the human origins of singing.
It's hard to forgive a couple of glaring inaccuracies even though the author is not American, but what about his editors??? Canadians may not know that people from New York and people from New Jersey have (or used to have) different pronunciations for the word ‘coffee’. I worked with a woman who insisted she was from New York but every time she opened her mouth to say ‘coffee’ it was obvious which side of the state line she came from. Also, the young, black people of Washington, DC notwithstanding, young black students at the college where I work speak English exactly the same way as their white counterparts. Are people really still talking about Ebonics? And confusing “secession” with “succession” when applied to the Civil War is not a minor error.
This author falls back on old, and some very old, concepts about language mostly out of laziness it seems, while trying to adhere to contemporary social dogma. I expected more.
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