Voice of Influence E-Book

Judy Apps

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 303

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

This inspiring book by leading voice coach Judy Apps shows you how to awaken the energy of your authentic voice to speak from head, heart, gut and soul. Bringing together knowledge from voice training, NLP, Aikido, Alexander Technique, Bioenergetics, Feldenkrais and other mind-body work, Voice of Inf uence gives you the means to reach people at a deeper level where you'll motivate and inspire. Through this journey of discovery, you will literally 'find your own voice' in all senses of the phrase. Judy will show you how to: speak more powerfully and influentially; communicate from the whole of you, and reach people at a deeper level; find your true voice rather than just speaking with expression; understand other people better through the sound of their voice. Your voice is uniquely you and reveals more about you than you might imagine. Your whole history is imprinted in your voice. We have all heard of 'body language' this book reveals the 'body language' of sound - 'voice language'. It uncovers many startling new aspects of the human voice and how we communicate - and fail to communicate! Every sound you make gives information about what is going on inside you, and you can use this information both to become a more skilful listener and to communicate with greater impact.

Leseprobe

Voice of Influence

Voice of Influence

How to get people to love to listen to you

Judy Apps

Illustrations by Helen Clare Brienza

Crown House Publishing Limited

www.crownhouse.co.uk

www.crownhousepublishing.com

First published by Crown House Publishing Ltd Crown Buildings, Bancyfelin, Carmarthen, Wales, SA33 5ND, UKwww.crownhouse.co.uk

and

Crown House Publishing Company LLC 6 Trowbridge Drive, Suite 5, Bethel, CT 06801-2858, USAwww.crownhousepublishing.com

© Judy Apps 2009 Illustrations © Helen Clare Brienza

The right of Judy Apps to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The right of Helen Clare Brienza to be identified as the illustrator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2009. Reprinted 2010.

Page 43-4 Extract from Towards a Poor Theatre © Jerzy Grotowski has been reproduced with permission. Page 109 Come to the Edge © Christopher Logue has been reproduced with kind permission. Page 168 Extract from The Art of Dreaming © 2004 Carlos Castandeda has been printed by kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of materials reproduced in this book. The publishers apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to rectify them at the earliest opportunity.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owners. Enquiries should be addressed to Crown House Publishing Limited.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-184590288-9 eBook ISBN 978-184590386-2 LCCN 2009930316

Printed and bound in the UK byThe Cromwell Press Group, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

To John, Chris and Rosie

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Preface

Part One: Get To Know Your Voice

Chapter One Introduction

Chapter Two Voices, voices

Chapter Three Your voice tells a story

Part Two: What To Do – The Basics

Chapter Four Breathe!

Chapter Five Relax!

Chapter Six Let your voice ring!

Chapter Seven Speak clearly!

Part Three: The How Tos – Common Questions Answered

Chapter Eight How can I get other people to listen to me?

Chapter Nine How can I sound more confident?

Chapter Ten How can I influence other people with my voice?

Part Four: The Heart of the Matter

Chapter Eleven Inspiration

Chapter Twelve When the pressure is on

Chapter Thirteen Two ways of being

Part Five: Your Voice Is You

Chapter Fourteen Energy and intention

Chapter Fifteen Last word

Appendix: Voice troubleshooting

Notes

Index

Praise for Voice of Influence

About the author

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all who have contributed knowingly and unknowingly to the creation of this book, from my parents and family, teachers and other mentors to course participants, clients and people encountered on my way; and then there are all the people who have spoken to me through their writings. Thank you all.

I’m especially grateful to John Apps, Phil Hards and Peter Young for their valuable suggestions after reading the manuscript and to Crown House Publishing for their support.

Prologue

Gavin is in full flow. He excels at meetings. With his robust confident tones he easily takes charge as he numbers off the various problems besetting the company’s publicity department in the current climate.

“There’s the question of time frames,” he explains. “By the time we’ve got everything settled, especially budgets, and launched our campaign, we’re already into a different ball game: three months have gone and the market’s already changed. That’s exactly what Stephen said at the board last month.”

June chips in with a couple of corrections: detail person June, always ready to put in her oar with a correction or a precise question or complaint: “I don’t think that was exactly what the chair of the board said, was it Gavin? I think you’ll find he mentioned two months, not three. It is the meeting three weeks ago you’re talking about, isn’t it?”

“Thank you June,” says Bob easily, and goes on to the next point.

“It’s all hopeless,” grumbles Angela, “unless Finance stop being so tight-fisted, we’re not going to get things off the ground at all. Someone’s got to tell them they’re standing in the way of this company’s progress.”

“Yes, that’s right,” agrees Raj. “Someone’s got to tell them!”

Jim is sitting there observing them all. They have been around this scenario several times before. Something clearly needs to be done, and fairly fast, but all they do is talk. He’s been thinking about the issue quite a lot himself, and has come to the conclusion that what’s needed is a quicker way of getting to people; that is greater use of the internet and less time and money spent on long publicity campaigns that are out of date by the time they have come to fruition. The time has come for him to explain what he’s been thinking but it’s hard to get a word in edgeways at these meetings. Everyone has so much to say and so little desire to listen to anyone else.

Still, it’s what’s needed, so he takes a grip of himself and waits for a gap to tell the others his idea. At last there’s a brief pause and he takes his chance. “We need to start using the internet more,” he blurts out rapidly. “Other companies have found it really successful. If we start spending money on Google Ads, we can monitor our results and use our budget in a really controlled way.”

Angela glances at him, but June interrupts: “Don’t talk to me about budgets. We’ve been waiting since April for a final confirmation of last year’s figures and we need to speak to Peter about the reasons for the delay. I emailed him about it on the 5th, but he replied on the 7th that more time was needed. If we could just pin Peter down, we would be able to sort it …”

“Right, if I can continue,” announces Gavin. “So, to sum up, the main problems as I see it are …”

Jim slumps back in his chair thinking to himself, “No one listens to me. I sometimes wonder why I bother to turn up at all.”

The meeting proceeds on its erratic course.

Ten minutes later, Angela puts both hands out on the table. “This”, she announces in firm tones, arms out straight, “requires a radical—a radical—rethink. And what is needed”, she continues confidently, “is something really different.” She looks around.

“So I’ve been thinking.” Everyone turns towards her expectantly.

She waits for their attention. “We need to work quickly, be more responsive to the market.”

She pauses for effect, and then pronounces enthusiastically, “What we need is Google Ads!”

“Google Ads! You’re right!” exclaims Gavin. “That’s it! We need to use the internet more.”

“Well, at last we have a really sound suggestion,” approves June. “Great idea, eh, Jim?”

Jim bites his lip.

“This one will work,” agrees Raj. “Good one, Angela.”

“So we’re all decided then,” declares Gavin. “Look into more internet publicity, low budget, responsive, highly effective. Thanks Angela, I really think you’ve hit the jackpot there!”

* * *

I walk through the imposing portals of Sotheby’s, the great auction house of London. I am carrying a violin which used to be my grandfather’s. Its case is heavy and wooden, shaped like a coffin with the handle on the lid. The scuffing suggests much use; it has been played in military academies, in smoke-filled rooms, in the cinema for silent films. I want to know its value. But this building is intimidating and its processes unclear. I approach the reception with its high desk almost taller than I am. An official turns his eyes towards me without interest and gazes impassively.

I clear my throat. “Hmm, excuse me, I’d like …” My voice comes out pinched and high. “Er, that is, I’d like …”

And then I bring to mind for a moment my journey from timid young woman to someone who knows what she is about. I find my voice. It suddenly breaks out, deep and loud, and resonates around the grand hall: “I’d like to have a valuation on this violin, please.”

The official is suddenly all attention and respect: “Certainly, madam! If you’d kindly follow me, I’ll find one of our experts to attend to you! Er … have you come far?” And we enter into the heart of the building side by side.

Preface

There is no index of character so sure as the voice.

Benjamin Disraeli

So, what would you like to be able to do with your voice?

Would you like to sound stronger, be able to speak louder?

Would you like to sound more convincing, with more gravitas?

Do you just wish that people would listen to you?

Would you like to be able to express yourself with more light and shade, to engage people more and sound more interesting?

Would you like to know how to inspire people with your passion, influence them with your voice?

Do you want to use your voice to show empathy so that people realise you care?

Do you wish people would stop finding your voice an impediment to appreciating the real you?

You’ll find the answers to these questions and much more in this book.

The book arises from observing and dealing with the problems and questions of voice clients in ten years and more of coaching. Over the years, I built up expertise in diagnosing what was wrong with the way people spoke and was on the whole successful in helping them to speak more effectively. But telling them what was wrong and helping them to know what to do about it did not work every time. As I worked with people, I became aware that when I taught the techniques of what various parts of the body should be doing to improve speaking skills, some people became more selfconscious and awkward, not less, and therefore did not improve as much as they should have.

In the late 1990s I immersed myself in the psychological practice of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and realised how much there is to learn by observing closely people who are successful in any field (what NLP calls “modelling”). NLP takes a holistic approach to learning from successful people, discounting nothing at the outset, and employs a quality of awareness in observing the models that goes far beyond noticing the obvious presenting characteristics.

NLP emerged originally from modelling the practice of successful psychotherapists. The first models—the psychotherapist Fritz Perls, the family therapist Virginia Satir and the hypnotherapist Milton H. Erickson—were observed, imitated and questioned in great detail over a period of time, and from these studies certain patterns emerged which other people could replicate. Thus people could learn, through modelling, how to achieve similar results.

When a top practitioner in any field is modelled, in NLP terms, what emerges very often is that their success is based as much (and usually more) on their internal world—beliefs, values, attitudes and so on—as on their technical skills. Over the years of observing and listening to great speakers, I began to realise that technical vocal skill was not the starting point for their success, but rather the result of something far more important inside the speaker: their beliefs, values and attitudes, and purpose in speaking. This inner world created the voice, not vice versa. Based on this observation, I decided that in order to find out how to speak more effectively I would need to pay close attention to these inner factors too.

After my modelling discoveries, I found in teaching voice that people learned much quicker and also more enjoyably when we included such inner factors as state of mind, beliefs and so on. Far from being a “flaky” addition to proper teaching, it was the principal means by which students found their voice and saved months of physical practice of breathing, voicing and articulation.

So this is a how-to book, but unusual in that it goes beyond the usual remit of such books and investigates the inner connections of the speaker with the outer successful voice. This might seem frustrating at first as the externals of technique are more obvious for your conscious mind to grasp, but stay with it and you will find that it is a highly effective and rapid way to learn. Physical practice has its place as well, but much physical ability emerges quite naturally and instantly as a result of approaching things in this different way.

Be your note I’ll show you how it is enough.

Rumi

Part One

Get To Know Your Voice

Chapter One

Introduction

Your amazing voice

Your voice is an extraordinary tool of enormous potential benefit to you and others around you. Great leaders through history have used the voice to inspire and influence. From the days of Greek orators in the market place to current politicians and leaders at public events, the spoken word has always had the ability to influence an audience in ways that the written word cannot. The vibrations of the voice act on human beings in powerful ways. If you want to have influence you need to be able to speak with passion and determination: you need to know how to use your voice to best effect.

The sounds you make have a story to tell. As soon as you open your mouth your voice says much about you, not only about your state of mind in the here and now, but also about where you come from and how you have met life’s challenges up till now. Your voice is very much tied up with who you are. If you want to develop your voice, you are embarking not only on a journey into different ways of speaking, but also an exploration of who you are at your authentic core and how you interact with the world.

Purpose of this book

Through reading this book, you will discover three powerful secrets:

• How to develop your voice so that you have more options in communicating with other people and the ability to adapt to different situations and exert influence.

• How to express different aspects of yourself, so that your ideas, thoughts and emotions on the inside are expressed authentically on the outside.

• And how to be more discerning in your listening, so that underneath the words and accent you hear more accurately what another person’s voice is really saying and not saying. You’ll acquire the ability to “hear inside” other people, just as some have the ability to “see inside” others. Learning to distinguish the nuances of voice, you will be able to hear the fuller message behind a person’s words and discover much about their psychology, history and truthfulness. This is an effective tool for understanding others and a great defence against being manipulated.

Using both physical and psychological processes to develop your voice you will:

• Learn various physical techniques and then practise them to build your vocal fitness.

• Discover how to connect body and mind in your voice and get more in touch with yourself. Most vocal problems arise because your voice has been cut off in some way from your body and emotional life, so “finding your voice” becomes a process of reconnecting with yourself.

How to use this book

Everyone should have a voice coach.

Richard Bandler

This book tells the story of your voice, and you may enjoy a first reading without pausing too much for the exercises. There is plenty that you can learn through doing just that. Then go through again, trying the exercises and experimenting with some of the ideas to get your learning “in the muscle”, that is, more instinctive and readily available to you.

The layout of the book mirrors a concept developed by the NLP developer and author, Robert Dilts, called the Neurological Levels. The concept proposes that different levels of learning demand successively deeper commitments of neurological “circuitry”. There are six levels, which broadly work from outside a person to a more and more intimate connection to a person’s core. The first level of learning is on the outside, getting the environment right for learning; the second level deals with what you do, your behaviour; the third with how you do it, your cognitive abilities; the fourth with why, what values and beliefs lend it importance; the fifth with how the learning expresses your identity; and the last with how it connects with your mission and sense of underlying purpose.

Each part of this book deals broadly with one level. So Part 1 starts with information about the voice, how it works, the story it has to tell and why people sound different from each other.

In Part 2 you learn what to do to speak effectively. This gives you the basics of how to produce your voice well, with valuable information on breathing, relaxation, voice resonance and articulation.

Part 3 shows you how to deal with particular voice issues. If, for example, people don’t listen to you, or you lack confidence, or you don’t seem to influence people in the way you would like, this self-help section gives you practical solutions to specific communication issues.

Part 4 gets to the heart of the matter to uncover the magic of the voice: why it is that some speakers influence us powerfully while others with good voices don’t. Here you will find secrets from top influential speakers that are not often shared.

Part 5 brings the strands together to examine how your voice can express who you are. In expressing the real you, you find your true voice and through this the channel to influence others powerfully. This allows you to express the last level: your sense of mission and purpose.

In conclusion, the Appendix offers some advice for caring for your voice and suggests remedies for particular vocal problems such as hoarseness, tiredness and so on.

* * *

A book cannot entirely replace a voice coach for working on your voice, but it can be a helpful guide. There is much you can do alone and many discoveries to be made by trying out the exercises in this book with a playful and curious frame of mind. There’s no set way to do the exercises—it’s about experimenting, experiencing and getting feedback.

Hopefully, the book will also inspire you to find a live coach or a voice coaching course to discover more about the many ways in which you can be more confident, inspiring and influential as a speaker. My website http://www.voiceofinfluence.co.uk would be a good start!

But for now, sit back and enjoy the story of voice.

Chapter Two

Voices, voices

A successful public speaker such as Obama knows exactly how to intonate his voice to excite or calm the crowd. Speaking in just the right tone at the right time and pausing at the correct moments in just the right way, can really rally the audience.

Logan S. Freeth

No one sounds more like everyone’s ex than Hillary when she has that “you’re stepping on my foot” tone.

Journalist Timothy Perry describing Hillary Clinton at the July 2004 Democratic Convention

She sounded like the Book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.

Clive James on Margaret Thatcher

Bush seems to have two separate voices, the “charming Texas frat boy” voice he uses in informal discussions and the “clipped, rapid, sound bite” voice he uses when conducting official business.

Renee Grant-Williams, voice coach from Nashville, Tennessee

She’s been voice-trained to speak to me as though my dog just died.

Keith Waterhouse on Margaret Thatcher

It sounds as if she were consuming a plate of spaghetti with a fork and spoon.

Anonymous critic describing Janet Street-Porter’s voice

His voice, with plummy stutter, is orotund.

Journalist Michael Wolff on Boris Johnson, Lord Mayor of London

In every matchup of the last forty years, the candidate who had the most resonant, deeper and more expressive voice won … This clearly favors Sen. Obama, whose voice is unparalleled in modern politics.

Blogger Patrick the Rogue, before Obama won the 2008 Presidential Election

Voices, voices … everywhere voices: radio, TV, DVD, internet, people in shops and pubs, at work, at play; each person a different voice. What can we make of all the different sounds that come from human beings?

Some people talk seemingly just for themselves and their voice never reaches the listener. Some speak right out, almost overwhelming you with the sound of their voice and seemingly only interested in communication as a one-way street. Others speak so carefully and correctly they sound as if they are reading a script. Some seem to have difficulty in dragging their voice out from their inner depths. We talk about warm voices, strong voices, cold voices, weak voices, rich, weighty, bright voices. There are certainly many different ways to communicate!

The voice that people hear is just sounds, but what information those sounds hold! Your voice is a blueprint of you. Your accent tells where you come from and where you have spent periods of your life. And your tone of voice reveals your attitude, your confidence, how comfortable you are in your own skin and other emotions and feelings.

Your voice also tells the story of your past emotional life, revealing in its freedoms and tensions the way you have met life’s ups and downs. It shows your truth and your falsehood, your life energy and intention.

Voice language/body language

Human beings have five senses with which to take in information and communicate, and three of these in particular, sight, sound and touch, come into play when we communicate with each other.

The visual element of communication—body language—has become a popular topic of our times and many books have been written about these non-verbal clues to communication: posture, hand gestures, facial expressions and so on. We have all become quite good at noticing the tics and tags of our leaders: little signs of discomfort in interviews, the subtle pointers to lack of ease when politicians express opinions, the micro-movements that betray lack of sincerity.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his entertaining book, Blink, tells how the psychologist Paul Ekman succeeds in catching on tape the smallest of visual clues that a person is lying. When the spy Kim Philby is asked if he has committed treason, Ekman describes the fleeting millisecond of facial expression that crosses Philby’s face, “like the cat who ate the canary”, before he resumes his serious demeanour. We catch a minute glimpse of the spy’s pleasure at duping his interviewer.1

How people speak—the sound they make—has been investigated much less by researchers into communication. And most of us, apart from perhaps noting a regional or class accent, distinguish very little: high voice, deep voice, squeaky voice, rich voice, we tend to leave it at that. In the Philby episode, nothing is detected from his voice. Philby answers confidently, “in the plummy tones of the English upper class”. Does his voice in fact give nothing away? How much can the sounds someone makes tell us about them? Is sound as accurate an indicator of someone’s inner life as sight?

Well, yes it is. There is a whole world of information to be discovered through the sounds that people make. And if we want to influence others, we need to know what that information is, so that we can use our voices in ways that work for us, and not against us.

The art of listening to the nuances of voice goes back a long way. The sixth century Chinese Buddhist teacher T’ien-T’ai writes that the voice is a subtle mirror of our inner wellbeing, revealing our mental state and our physical health to someone who knows how to read the signs. “How can you tell a fine physician?” he asks. “The inferior physician feels the pulse, the ordinary physician observes the patient’s colour, and the superior physician listens to the patient’s voice.”2

The psychotherapist Fritz Perls also talks about listening to the actual sound of the voice beyond the words: “A good therapist”, he says, “doesn’t listen to the content of the bullshit the patient produces, but to the sound, to the music, to the hesitations.”3

Most of us would not claim to have an auditory sensibility as acute as his. Yet some people do acquire listening skills to an extraordinary degree. I was once discussing voice in a group that included a television producer. She told the group that she felt her voice gave her away too much, and she said it in a voice that had a persistent harsh metallic twang. Members of the group glanced at each other. It was a curious statement to make, as her voice just didn’t seem to vary at all whatever she said. But she explained that if she telephoned her daughter, the young woman knew instantly if her mother was happy or troubled.

I later discovered that it was a skill she had learned very young. As the daughter was growing up they had lived through unstable times as a single parent family, with many house moves and different confusing relationships. The child had felt fearfully responsible for their joint safety and happiness. As a consequence she had at a young age acquired an acute auditory sensibility to her mother’s voice to be able to know her state of mind and judge how things stood. She was aware of its every nuance even though its timbre varied so little. Necessity had allowed her to develop a listening skill that most of us never develop.

Our senses can certainly be tuned to greater awareness. A few people have a highly developed sense of taste and smell and are able to tell you exactly where a wine comes from. They sniff the glass, look at the colour, take a sip and roll the wine around in the mouth for a moment, then announce, “Mmm … it’s definitely Montepulciano. I think it comes from one of those fields on the left as you take the road down from Pienza …” The rest of us can only gape in amazement and admiration.

There are people who can do something similar with an accent— “Mmm … Cambridge … south Cambridge … the Shelfords, I should think”—though this may be an increasingly rare skill. We now all move around so much and encounter such a variety of accents that our own accents tend to be less distinctive than once they were.

Accents

Your accent is one aspect of the sound you make. We might call the accent the surface structure of the voice. Across the world people speak in different languages, and across the English speaking world they speak in different accents. Accents are an integral part of the glorious variety of human sound. In many countries, people are proud of their regional accent. In Italy, for example, people love to speak in their local accent if there is anyone around to recognise it. People can be fiercely loyal to where they come from and show this loyalty through love for their local way of speaking.

In England, the reverse is often true. Accent is still so tied up with class that it can feel like a handicap to people who originate from certain regions. We see the funny side when a comedian like Bill Bailey does an imitation of James Bond in a West Country accent. Mix up a film track of a well-known politician speaking in “received pronunciation” with a voice with a strong regional accent, and comedy is not far away. Received pronunciation: the very term sums up a closed way of thinking. Many people seek to change their accents in order to advance their prospects and career. Others perpetrate a kind of vocal racism in their attitude to those with different accents.

But accent is for a different book. Accent alone does not reveal the personality in the way that the vibration of the voice does. Beneath the surface structure of accent we all express common energies, such as love and anger, openness and inhibition, wanting, generosity and empathy. The deep structure of voice is the vibration through head and body that gives life to the sound; that is, not accent, but the inner life of timbre, pitch, tone, speed and rhythm. Those are the sounds we are going to learn to identify and understand better.

When you are in tune with what you want to say, your voice will naturally express your emotions and intentions in its sound. Projecting the full richness of expression in the vibration of your sounds, you become influential and others respond. But when you guard your communication, your voice fails to respond freely and you become cut off from true expression. The voice becomes a dull instrument or a mask. As you learn to become a voice “connoisseur” and can discern the nuances of the vibrations in the voice as accurately as the wine buff can appraise a wine, you have a wealth of information about the other person. You will also hear when that information is missing because the voice is inhibited.

What do you sound like?

Attempting to develop your voice by concentrating on the actual sound you make is a thankless task because you never really know what sound you are making and no recording equipment ever quite captures the entirety of your voice.

Have you sometimes heard your voice in a recording and been disappointed? Very often it sounds higher and thinner than you are expecting. This can certainly be partly due to shortcomings in the recording apparatus, but it is partly that we cannot recognise what we sound like as we never hear ourselves as others hear us. The sound we hear ourselves when we speak is a sound felt and heard internally through our own bone vibrations more than heard through the air from the outside. This internally heard sound can be deceptively resonant and full compared to the sound others hear. We are also influenced by how we want to sound, so our ability to hear ourselves is remarkably subjective.

To get a rough idea of what you really sound like, experiment with the following.

Listen to yourself

With one hand, bend one ear gently forward and cup the hand behind the ear. Hold the other hand in front of your face a few centimetres away from your mouth, gently rounded with the fingers pointing towards and almost touching the other cupped hand. Then speak into the rounded hand in front of your face. Experiment with moving the hand in front of you a little closer or further away. You will hear a sound that approximates to the sound others hear when you speak.

It’s just sound, isn’t it?

We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What happens when someone speaks to you? They make sounds, and you make meaning from those sounds. The meaning you make comes from two elements: the sense of the word in terms of language and the actual sound of the word. As most people tend to value the rational brain more than emotional responses, you might assume that you lend more importance to the sense of the language; after all, that’s what the word is really about, isn’t it? But in actual fact, you are probably influenced more by the sound than by the sense, as will become clear.

Historically, language started with sound. Animals make sounds: mating sounds, alarm sounds and contented sounds. The sound of human language is often closely connected to the sense. Onomatopoeic words such as “murmur”, “click”, “pop” and “whirr” imitate the sounds they describe.

There are other examples of phonaesthesia which connect to meaning in looser ways. For example, words such as “beaten”, “battered”, “bruised” and “bashed”, associated with hitting, begin with “b”, a satisfyingly plosive consonant. Other sounds are expressive because of the way we use our physiology to produce them. For example, the sound /sn/ is created most easily by wrinkling the nose, a gesture associated with disgust or disapproval. When you investigate words that begin with /sn/, many contain within the sound that negative connotation: “snarl”, “snide”, “snatch”, “snitch”, “sneak”, “sneer”, “snivel”, “snob”. The consonants help the transmission of meaning. The long soft sound /m/, on the other hand, which encourages the mouth to smile, is associated in many languages with gentle meaning: “mother”, “maternal”, “mmm” (sound of appreciation) and so on. It is obvious in such words that sound connects directly with what we want to express.

This connection between sound and sense is in fact true with every word. The expression we give to the word—the actual sound we make—plays a part in determining the meaning. Each word can be spoken in infinitely different ways. If the dictionary definition of the word were all that counted we would listen to each other’s words for meaning only. But we all know that the same words can be convincing when spoken by one voice and weak or hollow when spoken by another. It’s the actual sound that gives us the biggest clue to what the speaker intends.

Try shouting ”I love you” in a loud harsh voice. What does such an utterance mean? Maybe something like, “Don’t you dare leave me. You’re mine. You’ll be sorry if you abandon me.” Now say “I love you” in a whining, needy voice. This time the meaning might be closer to, “Don’t leave me! I need you. I’m lost without you.” Now think of someone you truly love, conjure a picture of them smiling at you, and say the words again, “I love you”. Different again, isn’t it?

The sound is created by an inner energy and movement of your breath and parts of your body. This is vitally important when you start to work on your voice, because a highly effective way of developing a more expressive voice is through working on this inner energy and movement, rather than concentrating on the actual techniques of the sound you make. Your expression is created by the motion of thoughts and feelings from the inside to the outside world. The word emotion shares the same derivation.

Vibrations

Music is feeling, then, not sound.

Wallace Stevens

Looking at the three senses, sight, sound and touch, sound and touch have something in common that sight lacks. When you look at someone, your eyes do not produce a physical connection between you—even when you feel electricity across a crowded room! But when you hear the words of another person, the vibrations of their voice—the actual waves of sound—enter your body as inner touch. When you speak yourself, you also produce your own body vibrations. You are “moved” or “touched” by sound in a literal way.

As sound has this ability to connect intimately through touch, the language of sound is often used to describe our relationships with other people. You find that you are on the same wavelength. You are in tune with each other. They say things that resonate with you. You want your relationships to be harmonious.

Hearing and feeling refer to two different senses: sound and touch. But in some languages, the same word is used for both without distinction (Italian sentire for example). The remarkable deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie makes brilliant use of this connection between hearing and feeling. She feels sounds in her body with such a degree of sensitivity that she can perform successfully as a professional musician. Most of us understand the connection between sound and feeling when we hear/feel the low vibrations of a large truck passing by, but unlike most of us she has acquired sufficient sensitivity of touch to feel tones through a large pitch range.

The kinaesthetic effect of sound may be why we are all particularly affected by people’s voices. Another person might impact on you visually and arouse a feeling in you by what they wear or how they present themselves. But when you meet someone who opens their mouth and screeches—or speaks with a whining, moaning, nasal, metallic or harsh voice—that vibration disturbs your being in a literal way and creates an instant change in your state. You can shut your eyes to stop seeing but you cannot so easily shut your ears. There are times when some of us wish we had ear-lids!