Powerhouse delves into the science of sound with This is a voice
A fascinating exhibition at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum explores the human voice, in all its variations.
The most memorable line in the musical My Fair Lady — apart from “by George, she’s got it!” — was undoubtedly Professor Higgins’s observation that “as soon as an Englishman opens his mouth, he makes some other Englishman despise him”. Such is the affective power of voice which, especially in English, can so precisely identify the regional, class and educational profile of the speaker.
These factors are not directly aligned: distinctions of class, for example, which in all languages tend to be correlated with more accurate elocution and greater articulacy, largely coincide with levels of education but only partially overlap with differences in regional accent. And on top of all this are the particularities of character that make one voice harmonious and a pleasure to listen to — think of Alistair Cooke’s delivery in his long-running radio series Letter from America — and another emphatic, hectoring, timid or untrustworthy.
There are profound moral and psychological as well as purely vocal factors at play here, too. Why do politicians sound evasive? Because they are generally concealing what they really think and repeating the obfuscations of the party line. And why do academic lecturers so often manage to make even fascinating subjects dull? Because they are more concerned with displaying their professional credentials to other academics than with communicating something they care about to their audience.
All of these vagaries of speech provide inexhaustible raw material to comedians, who make much, as they have since antiquity, of the risibility of regional accents, the ludicrousness of class or professional pretensions, and the manifest hollowness of disingenuous speech.
But there is a deeper level still to our response to voices. The human vocal apparatus is physically capable of producing a wide though definable range of sound effects, but particular languages use only certain parts of this range. As we all know, English speakers regularly struggle to pronounce certain French sounds, if they have not been introduced to them in childhood: the French “r”, for example, is particularly hard, especially at the beginning of a word.
Even harder for many students are the differences between “u” and “ou” (as in “lu” and “loup”). Many English speakers not only find it hard to produce these sounds but can barely hear the crucial distinctions at first.
In other words, the process of learning our native language has trained us to be super sensitive to nuances relevant to our own vocal range but has made it correspondingly hard even to apprehend sounds that may be fundamental to another language. The problem is even greater with Persian or Arabic, full of gutturals and glottal stops that seem outlandish until we realise most of them are akin to sounds that also exist in French or German.
It is worse still with tonal languages such as Chinese or Vietnamese. In extreme cases, monoglots with little experience of other forms of speech can find it hard to believe another language is human speech at all.
The ultimate basis of all these phenomena is explored in a fascinating exhibition from the Wellcome Collection in London, itself part of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s greatest funders of medical research. And while you enjoy it, you can reflect again on the folly of moving the Powerhouse, as the NSW government seems determined to do in the face of almost universal opposition, to Parramatta in western Sydney. Would you travel there to see this show? Probably not.
The exhibition begins by taking us down a corridor lined with sound insulation, as though to mark the transition from the chatter of the outside world to an exhibition that will be full of vocal sounds, although many of them, as it turns out, are pre-linguistic or inarticulate, since the focus is on the voice and its range and effects rather than on language or the arts of the word.
The first room we enter contains scientific objects such as a laryngoscope and a scientifically inspired art video that contrasts the smooth, almost sculptural form of a woman’s lower face with a view inside her mouth and a computer simulation of how tongue, palate and larynx work together to produce a simple sound: clearly schematic and approximate for all its ingenuity, this simulation hints at the far greater complexity of the real thing.
The first section of the exhibition proper ponders the social origin of language and even the evolutionary origin of the physiology of voice production, so much more sophisticated than the sound-making of animals. It turns out the transition from walking on all fours to standing erect on our legs is crucial to this development, allowing for changes in the structure of the larynx and for greater breath control.
Socially speaking, the exhibition points out that voice — which must logically long predate language — probably originated as a form of bonding in proto-human groups, perhaps at first by humming and then singing in pre-verbal rhythmic cadences, no doubt imitating animal sounds.
One of the most interesting works in the exhibition, Marcus Coates’s film installation Dawn Chorus (2007), is in fact based on human mimicry of birds. Working with ornithological experts, the artist recorded the dawn chorus of birds in Northumberland, then separated out the individual bird calls, slowed them down by about 16 times and filmed 19 volunteers, each sitting in their own home or office environment, imitating those sounds.
The resulting film clips were then speeded up 16 times to reproduce the pitch of the original bird song. This revealed that the participants had done a good job of imitating the bird calls but also, perhaps unexpectedly, made each of the humans much more birdlike. Sitting before and after their performance, their breathing speeded up 16 times, as well as any movements of the head or facial features, they uncannily recall the febrile agitation of birds.
A later section of the exhibition has many more materials related to the physiology of the voice, including a slowed-down film of the vocal cords, which resemble a pair of lips and vibrate 110 times a second to produce the sound “a”. This and other diagrams and illustrations of the larynx, the vocal cords and other parts of the vocal apparatus are sobering reminders of the complexity and refinement, but also the fragility of the physical structures of speech.
A 19th-century manuscript from Thailand has images of monks suffering vocal fatigue from chanting, and several Chinese illustrations deal with a variety of voice pathologies. From the modern West, there are anatomical charts of the throat, a preserved specimen of the larynx of an individual who died of leprosy, and modern devices for helping people who have lost their larynx, mostly because of cancer surgery, speak again. There is the electronic larynx that has been in existence for many years, as well as a new prosthesis, still in development, that could be worn inside the patient’s mouth.
Other sections of the exhibition deal with aspects of communication, such as a pair of videos that record experiments in lip-reading, the second of which shows the process is greatly helped by hearing the rhythm of the interlocutor’s speech, even without the words. There are tables of sign language and the transcript of a talk by Helen Keller in which she speaks of her delight at encountering some of the great sculptures of antiquity, which she was allowed to touch.
Social and political dimensions are prominent, too. There is a surprisingly absorbing video work in which a teacher is trying to communicate simple and pre-verbal sounds to a student. It turns out to be an accent-removal training session in Birmingham, and the young man is a migrant worker in Britain who is learning to produce a phonetic range that is alien to his own original language.
The question of the ambiguity of recorded sound is raised in a nearby exhibit, in which we are invited to listen to a section of an emergency recording in which the caller appears to be confessing to killing a man. For such a recording to be admissible as evidence in court, the interpretation of the message would have to be unambiguous, but here we are faced with a collection of sounds that are barely intelligible at first, although on repeated hearings the content seems clear.
Another interesting work is a video interview with two individuals who have undergone some kind of gender transition — one was a male and has become a woman, while the other has gone in the opposite direction. In each case, not surprisingly, voice has been an important component of the new identity for reasons that are intriguingly physiological and sociocultural.
Thus the male voice tends to be deeper, which is purely physiological, but also more monotonous, which is apparently socially conditioned, because more gravitas is expected of men, while women’s voices are physiologically higher and lighter but also socially more animated and cadenced. It is one of the curious aspects of gender reassignment that individuals are more or less forced to adopt the cultural stereotypes as well as the physical characteristics of their new sex: thus gender transition invites a deconstructive perspective on the charades of sexual identity.
There are many other interesting things in the exhibition, including a section on auditory hallucinations, one on the technology of voice reproduction and even a clip of a ventriloquist, exhibited next to a grinning and typically sinister ventriloquist’s dummy.
Even stranger is an artificial intelligence psychologist application called Talk to Sara, which can be downloaded to your smartphone. Sara will answer your questions with comforting comments and apparently will learn from what you tell her so her advice gradually becomes more personalised.
If the prospect of a psychobot feeding back your own anxieties to you wrapped in soothing truisms doesn’t make you feel better, it is certainly worth having a look at the book that accompanies the exhibition. Although it has the same title, This is a Voice is an introduction to the way the human voice works and a manual for all those who want to train it for different kinds of singing or, indeed, for public speaking. For although it says so much about who we are, our voice, like other aspects of our behaviour, is capable of modification and improvement.
This is a Voice, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, to January 28
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