This Is the Voice

by John Colapinto

  One of the considerable challenges in writing about the voice is that scientific research on the subject fell off precipitately in the late 1950s when Noam Chomsky convinced the scientific world at large that all the significant action regarding human vocal communication took place up in the highest levels of the brain and that the voice was just an “epiphenomenon”—a secondary consideration, at best. Thus, some of the most salient pioneering research on the voice was relegated to the scrap heap of science history and can, today, only be found in the rare books department of the New York Public Library—and sometimes not even there. Walter Rudolf Hess’s seminal work on the roots of mammalian emotional vocalization in cats was impossible to lay my hands on anywhere until I remembered the rare book collection at the New York Academy of Medicine Library at 103rd Street and Fifth Avenue (a refuge I had discovered back in 2005 when writing about medicinal leeches for The New Yorker). I offer hearty thanks to the collection’s head librarian, Arlene Shaner, who dug up for me piles of criminally forgotten research on the human voice from the first half of the twentieth century: books, monographs, and journal articles—including a yellowing first edition of Negus’s pioneering 1929 tome, The Mechanism of the Larynx.

  One book I could not find anywhere was written by Philip Lieberman’s coinvestigator into the Neanderthal voice: Edmund Crelin, the Yale anatomist who did groundbreaking work on the elevated larynx in newborns. In 1987, Crelin published The Human Vocal Tract: Anatomy, Function, Development and Evolution, a book that expanded on his work with Lieberman and that included photos of the macabre simulated Neanderthal throat, tongue, and mouth that Crelin constructed from silicone and wire to learn how our extinct human relatives sounded (by using a toy noisemaker for phonation). I was determined to see that elusive volume. Crelin died in 2004, but an email to one of his daughters, in Florida, resulted in her sending me a pristine hardcover copy of this rare and fascinating book. Thank you, Sherry Crelin! And thank you, too, to the staff and librarians at the New York Society Library, where I wrote the bulk of this book before the COVID-19 quarantine shut it down as I was writing the final chapter.

  It would not be possible for me to remember, let alone thank, all the many people to whom I spoke in casual conversation about this project and who, in response, offered their own spontaneous reflections on the voice and thus helped to shape my view, or sent me down yet another path of investigation. But three people should be mentioned for the perspicuity of their reflections: my friend, author Bill “Chip” Doyle, who made the funny and honest comment about the dreadful insincerity he detected when hearing his taped voice for the first time (I should add that Chip is anything but insincere—which is what gave his comment its special salience); my friend Charlotte Harvey, an actress and artist who actually attended one of Kristin Linklater’s “Freeing the Natural Voice” workshops in Scotland in 2017, and who supplied the detail that every attendee, at some point, cried about his or her mother. During this same conversation, Charlotte surprised me by asking, “How deep are you going—I mean, are you going to the molecular level? The FOXP2 gene?” This was during one of the many times when I was struggling to find the proper focal length for the book. How deep was too deep? I knew that FOXP2 was central to my argument that our voice made us human and propelled us to the top of the food chain, but I was still trying to decide if descending to the microscopic level of minuscule amino acid substitutions on a single DNA strand was TMI, as the kids would say. Charlotte gave me timely confirmation that it was not. The third “layperson” I must single out for special thanks is New York City doorman Big Ray Hernandez, who comes from a long line of professional wrestlers (and who also moonlights as a wrestling podcaster and occasional voice-over artist). It was Ray, to whom I was jaw-boning about the book in my building’s lobby, who told me about the relevance of Donald Trump’s years as host of Vince McMahon’s WWE wrestling championships to his election as President—comments that sent me down an avenue of investigation that I might otherwise never have pursued.

  At a time when the physical (as opposed to virtual) book is so much to be cherished for its increasing rarity, I thank everyone at Simon & Schuster who made this such a beautiful physical object to hold and behold, from the superb cover designer, Jim Tierney, to the person in charge of its page design, Ruth Lee-Mui (to whom I owe added thanks for having accepted my suggestion that to mark line breaks, we use a sound wave sketched by my artist/illustrator wife, Donna.) Fred Chase executed the copyedit, a term that in no way does justice to what he brought to this book. Correcting grammatical slips and bringing a book into conformity with a publisher’s house style is crucial, but Fred also happens to have performed a fact check throughout, eliminating many errors, and also bringing to bear his considerable knowledge of U.S. history and many other subjects that improved this book dramatically. Any lingering mistakes, alas, are on me. For all logistical help, I offer a special salute to Eamon’s unfailingly cheerful and helpful assistant, Tzipora Baitch.

  There remain only a few friends and family to thank. Writer, editor, and musician Mark Rozzo was a great sounding board at all parts of this process. Likewise, writer Joe Hooper and ex-senior editor at Elle Ben Dickinson (drummer and singer for the Sequoias), who caught a few errors that would have truly made me look asinine. Thanks to my friend Chris Deri, who happened to have begun writing his first novel as I was embarking on this book and who was thus always eager to compare notes on how agonizing writing can be, and who listened with amazing patience as I detailed, for the millionth time, why I didn’t want to begin the book with a description of my vocal injury (“The memoir-styled beginning has become such a cliché”—a bit of misguided dogma from which Eamon saved me when he said, one day, “You know, John, I think we need to hear a little something about your own voice, higher up.”). Special thanks go to my son, Johnny, whose life I occasionally ransacked for examples of voice and speech, and whose response, when I told him about the “evolution” angle to this book, was “Hey, cool!” (As a then-college freshman, he’d been reading Sapiens. Sometimes an eighteen-year old’s endorsement is all you need.) Finally, I extend my deepest thanks, and inevitably some apologies, to my wife of thirty years, Donna Mehalko, to whom I will often read aloud a difficult passage or chapter, since I know that any falseness, grandiosity, or evasive “fanciness” that I have introduced into the prose will manifest itself in a fatal, faltering, tinny note in my voice that is instantly audible to her (and thus to me). At which point, it’s back to the drawing board.

  —JC, June 13, 2020

  More from the Author

  Becoming a Neurosurgeon

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © JOHNNY COLAPINTO

  JOHN COLAPINTO is an award-winning longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller As Nature Made Him and the novel About the Author. He lives in New York City.

  SimonandSchuster.com

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/John-Colapinto

  @simonbooks

  ALSO BY JOHN COLAPINTO

  As Nature Made Him

  About the Author

  Undone

  Becoming a Neurosurgeon

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  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: PERSONALLY SPEAKING

  1. John Colapinto, “Giving Voice,” The New Yorker, February 24, 2013.

  2. Johan Sundberg, The Science of the Singing Voice (Dekalb: Illinois University Press, 1987), 2.

  3. Aristotle, De Anima (London: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 89.

&nb
sp; 4. Paralanguage was first described and named by linguist George L. Trager (1906–1992) while he was working for a unit of the US State Department that taught American diplomats how to comport themselves abroad. Focusing on all vocal sounds “not having the structure of language,” Trager created a complicated notation system that represented hundreds of noises (“moaning and groaning, whining and breaking, belching and yawning”). He first published his findings in: George L. Trager, “Paralanguage: A First Approximation,” Studies in Linguistics 13, nos. 1 and 2 (1958): 1–12. He then turned to psychiatry for clues to what these noises might mean. Robert E. Pittenger, a psychiatrist at the State University of New York, was eager to marry paralinguistic and psychoanalytic methods and coauthored, with linguists trained in Trager’s method, an ambitious “microanalysis” of a psychotherapy session between a housewife patient and her therapist, the first (and last) book-length paralinguistic study of its kind. Robert E. Pittenger, Charles F. Hockett, John J. Danehy, The First Five Minutes (Ithaca, NY: Paul Martineau, 1960).

  5. Certain monkeys, meerkats, squirrels, chickens, and other avian species emit highly differentiated alarm calls to alert others of specific threats—one cry, for instance, prompts the animals to take shelter in bushes from an aerial attack like that of a hawk, another triggers evasive action from a ground predator like a snake. But these sounds do not name specific predators, nor are the calls learned from parents, as words are. Instead, they are hardwired reflexes. For this reason, evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch rejects the notion that these calls are precursors to language: “They’re more like laughter and crying, which are also calls that are innate. You don’t hear your mother crying to learn how to cry.” Fitch quoted by Christine Keneally, The First Word (New York: Penguin, 2007), 115.

  6. Yuval Noah Hariri, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015).

  7. Author interview with Branka Zei-Pollermann, July 5, 2017.

  8. Helen Blank, Alfred Anwander, Katharina von Kriegstein, “Direct Structural Connections Between Voice- and Face-Recognition Areas,” The Journal of Neuroscience 31, no. 36 (2011): 12906–15, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21900569.

  9. Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2016), 138–39.

  ONE: BABY TALK

  1. A. Pieper, “Sinnesempfindungen des kindes vor seiner geburt,” Monatsschrift Fur Kinde-rheilkunde 29 (1925): 236–41. Cited in Barbara Kisilevsky and J. A. Low, “Human Fetal Behavior: 100 Years of Study,” Developmental Review 18 (1998): 11.

  2. Denis Querleu et al., “Fetal Hearing,” European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology 29 (1988): 191–212.

  3. William P. Fifer and Chris M. Moon, “The Effects of Fetal Experience with Sound,” in Fetal Development: A Psychobiological Perspective, ed. Jean-Pierre Lecanuet (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 351–66.

  4. Anne Karpf, The Human Voice (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007), 81. Karpf cites a paper by Susan Milmoe et al., “The Mother’s Voice: Postdictor of Aspects of Her Baby’s Behaviour,” Proceedings of 76th Conference of the American Psychological Association, 1968. Karpf also cites Suzanne Maiello, “Prenatal Trauma and Autism,” Journal of Child Psychotherapy 27, no. 2 (2001).

  5. “Infants less than two hours old react and orient more to the mother’s voice than to those of other women.” Melanie J. Spence and Anthony J. DeCasper, “Prenatal Experience with Low-Frequency Maternal-Voice Sounds Influence Neonatal Perception of Maternal Voice Samples,” Infant Behavior and Development 10, no. 2 (April–June 1987): 133–42.

  6. Anthony DeCasper and Melanie J. Spence, “Prenatal Maternal Speech Influences Newborn’s Perception of Speech Sounds,” Infant Behavior and Development 9, no. 2 (1986): 133–50.

  7. Anthony DeCasper and Phyllis A. Prescott, “Human Newborns’ Perception of Male Voices: Preference, Discrimination and Reinforcing Value,” Developmental Psychobiology 17, no. 5 (1984): 481–91. Also: Cynthia Ward and Robin Cooper, “A Lack of Evidence in 4-Month-Old Human Infants for Paternal Voice Preference,” Developmental Psychobiology 35, no. 1 (1999): 49–59.

  8. Peter D. Eimas, Einar R. Siqueland, Peter Jusczyk, and James Vigorito, “Speech Perception in Infants,” Science 171, no. 3968 (January 22, 1971): 303–6.

  9. Peter D. Eimas, “Auditory and Phonetic Coding of the Cues for Speech: Discrimination of the /r-l/ Distinction by Young Infants,” Perception and Psychophysics 18 (1975): 341–47; and Lynn A. Streeter, “Language Perception of 2-Month-Old Infants Shows Effects of Both Innate Mechanisms and Experience,” Nature 259 (1976): 39–41.

  10. Patricia Kuhl, “The Linguistic Genius of Babies,” TED Talk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XBIkHW954, uploaded February 18, 2011.

  11. Paula Tallal, “Language Comprehension in Language-Learning Impaired Children Improved with Acoustically Modified Speech,” Science 271, no. 5245 (January 5, 1996): 81–84.

  12. Anne Cutler and Sally Butterfield, “Rhythmic Cues to Speech Segmentation: Evidence from Juncture Misperception,” Journal of Memory and Language 31, no. 2 (1992): 218–36.

  13. Patricia Kuhl, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 110.

  14. Charles A. Ferguson, “Baby Talk in Six Languages,” American Anthropologist, New Series 66, no. 6, part 2 (1964): 103–14.

  15. Noam Chomsky, Syntatic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), 116.

  16. Noam Chomsky, “Things No Amount of Learning Can Teach,” Omni 6, no. 11 (1983), https://chomsky.info/198311__/.

  17. This account of how Catherine Snow entered the field of language acquisition is from Snow’s account in Current Contents’ “Citation Classics,” no. 1 (January 1985): 18.

  18. Catherine E. Snow, “Mothers’ Speech to Children Learning Language,” Child Development 43, no. 2 (June 1972): 549–65.

  19. Olga Garnica, “Some Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features of Speech to Young Children,” in Talking to Children: Language Input and Acquisition, eds. C. E. Snow and C. A. Ferguson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

  20. Anne Fernald, “Four-Month-Old Infants Prefer to Listen to Motherese,” Infant Behavior and Development 8 (1985): 181–95.

  21. Hojin I. Kim and Scott P. Johnson, “Infant Perception,” Encyclopaedia Britannica online, https://www.britannica.com/topic/infant-perception.

  22. Peter F. Ostwald, “The Sounds of Infancy,” Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 14 (1972): 350–61.

  23. Roberta M. Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, How Babies Talk (New York: Plume, 2000), 20.

  24. Donald H. Owings and Debra M. Zeifman, “Human Infant Crying as an Animal Communication System,” in Evolution of Communication Systems: A Comparative Approach, eds. D. K. Oller and U. Griebel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 160.

  25. Peter F. Ostwald, “The Sounds of Emotional Disturbance,” Archives of General Psychiatry 5 (1961): 587–92.

  26. Arthur Janov, The Primal Scream (Venice, CA: Dr. Arthur Janov’s Primal Center, 1999), 9–11.

  27. Janov, The Primal Scream, 55.

  28. Conversation with Charlotte Harvey, December 31, 2018.

  29. Donald Eisner, The Death of Psychotherapy: From Freud to Alien Abductions (New York: Praeger, 2000), 51–52.

  30. Philip Norman, John Lennon: The Life (New York: Ecco, 2009).

  31. Peter Doggett, You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup (London: The Bodley Head, 2009), 220.

  32. “John Lennon Talks About ‘Mother’ and Primal Scream Therapy, 1970,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5irvO7vzx8.

  33. Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe, and Kathleen Wermke, “Newborns’ Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language,” Current Biology 19 (December 15, 2009): 1994–97.

  34. Owings and Zeifman, “Human Infant Crying as an Animal Communication System,” 10.

  35. Mary Carmichael, “Health Matters: Making Medical
Decisions for Kids,” Newsweek, January 30, 2009, https://www.newsweek.com/health-matters-making-medical-decisions-kids-77773.

  36. Daniel Lieberman, Robert McCarthy and Jeffrey Bruce Palmer, “Ontogeny of Hyoid and Larynx Descent in Humans,” Archives of Oral Biology 46 (2001): 117–28.

  37. James Booth et al., “The Role of the Basal Ganglia and Cerebellum in Language Processing,” Brain Research 1133, no. 1 (2007): 136–44; and Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007), 269.

  38. Soo-Eun Chang and Frank H. Guenther, “Involvement of the Cortico-Basal Ganglia-Thalamacortical Loop in Developmental Stuttering,” Frontiers in Psychology, 10 (January 28, 2007), 3088.

  39. John Updike, Self-Consciousness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf: 1989), 79-111.

  40. Katharine Davis, “VOT Development in Hindi and in English,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 87 (1990), posted August 13, 2005, https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.2027880.

  41. Eric H. Lenneberg, Biological Foundations of Language (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), 146.