This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  In 2000, I was invited to participate in a quaint-sounding event in downtown Manhattan run by an organization calling itself The Moth—they wanted me to come and “tell a story,” and they assured me that there would be a decent crowd. And to my surprise there was; easily a hundred people, maybe more, crammed the small bar. The crowds have gotten bigger since. The Moth storytelling events have spread around the world, in venues that hold thousands and according to The Moth’s website their podcast (featuring nothing but single voices telling stories) is downloaded over fifty million times a year, their Moth Radio Hour is broadcast on over five hundred radio stations across the planet. This human voice thing is big!

  Our passion for the sound of the human voice in marathons of performative speech has also led to a boom in the sale of audiobooks, which had never really caught on when first introduced in the 1970s as mail-order boxes of ugly cassette tapes. Digital download and streaming changed all that over a decade ago. Nevertheless, I was resistant (convinced that no narrator could surpass the one I carried around in my head)—until 2009, when I had to master an interview subject’s massive literary oeuvre in a very short time and realized that, to do it, I would have to use every available moment of the day—including those when traditional reading was impossible (jogging; grocery shopping; doing dishes). To my surprise, I learned that the audiobook was a better, and more efficient, and even more pleasurable way to absorb written material than silent reading. The best audiobook narrators made fiction and nonfiction come alive in ways that my own inner voice and ear often could not match. But the truly revelatory realization was that (counterintuitively), listening to a book aided my comprehension and retention. Amazed, I emailed a leading neuroscientist, V. S. Ramachandran, and asked whether there existed some brain-based reason audiobooks are so effective as prose-delivery devices. In response, he pointed out that our language comprehension and production evolved in connection with our hearing, around 150,000 years ago. Writing is only 5,000 to 7,000 years old—“partially going piggyback on the same circuits,” he wrote. “So it’s possible LISTENING to speech (including such things as cadence, rhythm, and intonation) is more spontaneously comprehensible and linked to emotional brain centers—hence more evocative and natural.”33

  I like this explanation, not least because it accords with what I have since learned about how so much of what we find effective, moving, pleasurable, illuminating, and persuasive in written texts had its origins in the spoken rhetoric of Cicero and the other ancient writers on oratory. I also like it because it means that 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 neural circuitry, a primary means by which we make sense of the world, of how we interpret reality. This is why, in democratic societies, the sound of the human voice is so intimately in-wound with how we pick the people we choose to lead us. I would even argue, with Cicero and the other ancient philosophers of rhetoric and oratory, that the voice is the primary means we use to decide for whom to vote.

  When responsibly, honestly—and honorably—deployed, the sound of a single human voice speaking is still the best index to the worthiness of a leader. The best do not talk to us in dumbed-down sound bites or focus-grouped slogans; are not content with tailoring every address to the formats and time constraints of twenty-two-minute “Nightly News” broadcasts, or four-second GIFs posted to Twitter. They do not rail as demagogues. Instead, they address a nation, and world, in language that assumes intelligence, stamina, patience, and reason in their audience. Admittedly, such leaders are rare at any time in human history. People alive today over the age of, say, ten, have the privilege of having heard one of them.

  * * *

  Barack Obama first burst on the global consciousness in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered a keynote speech that expressly addressed the nation’s growing political, racial, and class divisions—and, in the best Ciceronian fashion, sought to bridge them. An Illinois state senator who had begun life as the son of a Black, Kenyan-born father and white mother from Kansas, Obama, then forty-two years old, cast his own improbable rise as proof of how exactly such divisions can be bridged, explaining that his own presence on the stage was proof of the promise that American democracy offers every citizen. “In no other country on earth,” he said, “is my story even possible.” But, he warned, that promise could be fully realized only if the country remembered its motto: e pluribus unum—“out of many one.” No addle-pated optimist, Obama warned his audience that, even as he spoke, “there are those preparing to divide us.” But, he continued, “I say to them tonight”—here, his voice began to swell to a dramatic crescendo, his rhetoric taking on the forms endorsed by Cicero centuries ago, including a rhythmic repetition of a certain word accentuated by a rising volume on each reiteration—“there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America; there’s not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America! There’s the United States of America!”

  There was emotion in Obama’s voice—the ancients had never denied a role for emotion in persuasive oratory, indeed they had said it was crucial to move audiences—but it was not the emotion of the demagogue: it was emotion acting in the service of emphasizing complex, underlying ideas—ideas of equality and unity enshrined in the Constitution, which Obama had taught as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. The stirring “melody” of his voice thus operated in service of the “lyrics,” which reminded his listeners of the fragile ideal upon which the founders had launched the experiment of America.

  The music of Obama’s voice also embodied the very ideal of oneness-from-diversity that he was describing in his keynote speech, since that voice, first shaped in its basic prosodic stress patterns from the acoustic signal that reached him, in the womb, from his white Kansan mother, was overlaid with linguistic influences absorbed during an astonishingly diverse childhood and youth, which included years spent in Seattle, Jakarta, Honolulu, Los Angeles, and New York. The result was a voice that was, at once, as General American in accent as the most familiar TV news anchor, but with the subtlest African American touches (or “frills”) on some vowels—particularly the long ee sound at the ends of multisyllabic words like “history” or “presidency”34—as well as clear echoes of the fiery Black gospel church oratory, the “tonal semantics,” that he had heard, and internalized, as a regular attendee of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a Baptist congregation of which he had been a member for twenty years. The echo of Black church oratory was especially audible in the peroration of his 2004 DNC speech, when he hit an MLK-like crescendo after a (very MLK-styled, and Cicero-derived) repetition of the word America—which he pronounced with an unusual emphasis on the final syllable—“AmeriCAH”—an artful oratorical choice which forced his listeners to, as it were, hear the word anew.

  Four years later, during his run for the presidency, Obama revealed a virtuosic control of his vocal instrument that that masterful 2004 keynote speech barely hinted at—both on, and off, stage. In diners and churches, veterans halls and country fairs, debate stages and large rallies—speaking to crowds of every racial background, age, sex, educational level, and class—he demonstrated an ability to code-switch seamlessly between his various vocal registers: that of the crisply enunciating, all-business Chicago Law School professor, but also that of the easygoin’, g-droppin’ Everyman (a study by Labov revealed that, counterintuitively enough, Obama dropped his g’s as often as rootin’ tootin’ Sarah Palin),35 as well as the Columbia University undergrad who had lived on West 109th Street and, upon graduation, moved to East 94th Street, which he described in Dreams from My Father as “that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan.” There, he absorbed the intonations, accent features, and grammar of the inner city’s Black population. “Nah—we straight,” he famously called out at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C., when the B
lack counterman tried to hand him his change—a pitch-perfect use of Black English, from the fronted o vowel that turned “No” into “Nah,” to the omitted copula in “we straight,” to the street lingo for “even” (“straight”).36

  Obama’s skill at code-switching was, political analysts agreed, essential to his negotiating an electorate at once suspicious that he might, as Obama himself put it, be too Black, or not Black enough. While critics suggested that this vocal shape-shifting marked Obama as a fake, David Remnick, in his 2010 biography of Obama, The Bridge, pointed out that this was not a “cynical gift,” but instead the legitimate legacy of Obama’s rich and varied life background, as well as a talent he shared with Martin Luther King Jr.37 Obama himself said that he really didn’t give much thought to how he slipped “into a slightly different dialect” with Black and white audiences. “There’s a level of self-consciousness about these issues that a previous generation had to negotiate that I don’t feel I have to,” he said.38 In short, the sounds that sprang to his lips in spontaneous speech, conversation, or in the heat-of-the-moment at the podium originated, like everyone else’s, in myelinated brain circuitry over which he had little control—or felt no special need to exert control.

  In his 2008 presidential primary campaign, Obama made history when, in defeating fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, he became the first African American to win a major party’s nomination—but not before he was obliged to jump a final, perilous, oratorical hurdle. Impolitic utterances by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Trinity United, led to charges, by political opponents, of a Black nationalist extremism hiding behind Obama’s affable exterior. At first ignoring the preposterous charge, Obama finally had to address it when repeated airings of Wright’s comments on twenty-four-hour cable news channels threatened to capsize his candidacy. The speech that he delivered, “A More Perfect Union,” on March 18, 2008, at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, is second only to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, of which it was a kind of bookend, and a masterpiece of American oratory on a par, I would contend, with the greatest of Lincoln’s addresses. By reminding the nation of its founding principles, it showed that the only path forward, as a democracy, was to adhere to those principles. And this is to say nothing of the impossibly high demands on Obama’s vocal performance, on his oratorical delivery, that might be unmatched in the history of American electoral politics. A single overemphasis on a syllable by a too-taught tension on the vocal cords—a single misjudgment on how much lung power to use in driving up the volume in a phrase—could have, would have, convicted him of the charge of being the dangerously angry Black man that had occasioned the speech in the first place. That Obama turned the moment into so much more than a defense of his own candidacy is where the speech’s true greatness lies.

  Cicero said that great oratory draws on deep knowledge of language, literature, history, politics, and psychology. He also said that it cannot help but reveal the speaker’s true self, the content of his character (if you will), even as it unites an audience with a sense of shared purpose. Obama’s speech in Philadelphia did all of those things as he explained to America, in tones both resigned and passionate, the original sin it had committed against not only the Africans it had kidnapped and placed into slavery, but against the foundational ideal that so inspired Abraham Lincoln: that all people are created equal—and how that sin echoed down the years to the present moment. Obama did not let racists off the hook, but he also did not demonize all white Americans. He denounced the “incendiary language” of his former pastor, whose views threatened “to widen the racial divide,” and “rightly offend white and Black alike,” but he refused to renounce altogether the pastor who had strengthened Obama’s faith and worked to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and sick. Obama even spoke to the legitimacy of the anger within those “working- and middle-class white Americans” who do not feel “particularly privileged by their race,” who “see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor,” and who have “come to see opportunity as a zero-sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.”

  From a moment that seemed designed to force Obama into a divisive stance, he somehow turned the occasion into his most eloquent and passionate appeal for unity, understanding, and tolerance. Whatever else can be said of him and his presidency, Obama is indisputably an exemplary person: decent, upright, intelligent, and honest in his desire to solve class divisions and foster the racial unity inscribed in his own DNA—virtues made audible that day in Philadelphia, in both his words and the voice that carried them, and which helped to earn him, finally and historically, the office of president of the United States.

  * * *

  In neuroscientific terms, Obama put the emotional channel of his voice—the paralinguistic, prosodic signals that emerge from the brain’s limbic centers—in the service of his higher, executive brain: the cortex, where ideas, reason, and language are generated. Everyone communicates, vocally, from these layers of the brain, blending “music” and “lyrics” in a manner that most persuasively conveys an idea or emotion. It is the demagogue (in public speech) or the abusive bully (in private) who privileges the limbic brain above the cortex, who tunes his voice to atavistic roars and growls, gasps and shrieks, who weaponizes the voice in ways that appeal primarily to the listener’s emotion centers thereby activating her primal, irrational, animal instincts of fear, envy, anger, resentment, vengeance. This is how the demagogue, although unfit for office, attains electoral victory and, as leader, assumes the role of tyrant or dictator, eradicating the institutions of democracy that would rein in his power, while continuing to prey on the fears and anger of the populace with his vocal attack—to move them, in the worst-case scenario, to acts of barbarity that strain credulity. This is what occurred in Germany with the rise of Adolf Hitler, the most destructive demagogue in human history.

  * * *

  Hitler himself recognized the essential role that his voice played in propelling him to power. A failed artist and chronically unemployed tramp, he was a thirty-year-old First World War army veteran—a disaffected loner inwardly seething with anti-Semitic and anticommunist fervor—when he attended a meeting on September 12, 1919, of the German Workers Party, one of countless antigovernment groups in desolated postwar Germany. Unimpressed by the collection of twenty or so shabby discontents he found in the murky basement of Munich’s Sterneckerbräu beer cellar, Hitler was making a hasty exit when he became incensed by the comments of a “professor” who dared to air an opinion that contradicted Hitler’s own. Despite his usual diffidence among strangers, Hitler found himself roaring a torrent of abuse so violent and sustained that the professor fled, as Hitler later wrote in Mein Kampf, “like a wet poodle.”39 Meanwhile, the group’s leaders looked on with “astonished faces,” riveted by the annihilating force of Hitler’s voice. They immediately invited him to start giving public speeches on behalf of the group. He agreed and joined the armies of disenfranchised cranks who railed from soapboxes, flophouses, beer cellars, soup kitchens, and street corners across Germany. The difference with Hitler was that he had a voice people could not ignore—a voice infused with a ferocious passion that was both a calculated oratorical choice, and something beyond Hitler’s control: his real and true, poisonously paranoid, racist self escaping into the open.

  That Hitler was acutely conscious of the power of a single voice to foment mass political movements is clear from Mein Kampf:

  The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses.40

  Hitler’s first chance to hurl his own voice among the masses came one month after that meeting in th
e Munich beer cellar, when he made his debut speech on behalf of the German Workers Party (soon to be renamed the National Socialist, or Nazi, party). He spoke for thirty minutes to 107 people, but he tore into his text with a spittle-spewing, arm-flailing, larynx-ripping, fist-shaking passion, stunning his audience, and providing, for Hitler, an epiphany: “what before I had simply felt within me, without in any way knowing it, was now proved by reality: I could speak!”41

  What he spoke about were ideas that had been festering within him ever since Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended the First World War and mandated that Germany hand back the territories it had seized, dismantle its army, and pay massive war reparations. Many Germans, guilt-ridden, demoralized, and humiliated by the country’s abject defeat, were prepared to accept the terms. Hitler was not. Animated by a militaristic mania born in the trenches, and the conviction that Germany not only had nothing to apologize for but still deserved world domination, he blamed the country’s “humiliation” on the weakness of its leaders, and found a scapegoat for Germany’s financial woes in a group he had long demonized: Jewish bankers and, by extension, the Jews at large.

  Over the next two years, Hitler shrieked, wailed, growled, wept, whimpered, and bellowed his way through speeches that, rhetorically, were almost devoid of logical argument—save for their simple, slogan-like appeals to hatred, anger, recrimination, self-pity, and a fervid German nationalism and Aryan “racial purity.” When a collection of Hitler’s speeches, My New Order, was translated into English by Raoul de Roussy de Sales, in 1941, it carried a preface in which de Sales emphasized the crudity and awkwardness of Hitler’s language, and the peculiar violence with which he put it across. “Hitler’s speeches are weapons,” he wrote, “as much a part of his strategy of conquest as more direct instruments of warfare.” Filled with lies and contradictions, they nevertheless produced “the effect of a psychological pincer-movement which crushes the best defenses of logic and ordinary morality.”42 They did this, de Sales said, through the raging power of Hitler’s voice, and his brutal repetitiveness. Like a mortar dispelling round after round of ear- and will-shattering shells, Hitler exploded the same simple, deranged, ideas, over and over and over again, pounding “into the heads of his listeners the same formulas.”