The Art of Manliness - March 22, 2021


The Fascinating Secrets of Your Voice


Episode Stats


Length

57 minutes

Words per minute

182.94699

Word count

10,515

Sentence count

7

Harmful content

Misogyny

20

sentences flagged

Hate speech

26

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Unless you re a complete recluse, you probably use your voice many times a day. Whether talking to your spouse, chatting with co-workers, singing along to music in the car, yet you ve probably never thought all that much about something that s literally happening right under your nose. My guest, John Colapinto, says that once you do start thinking about your voice, it reveals fascinating secrets to who you are.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
00:00:10.780 unless you're complete recluse you probably use your voice many times a day whether talking to
00:00:15.080 your spouse chatting with co-workers or singing along to music in the car yet you've probably
00:00:20.140 never thought all that much about something that's literally happening right under your nose
00:00:23.800 my guest day says that once you do start thinking about your voice it reveals fascinating secrets
00:00:28.060 to who you are name is john colapinto and he's the author of this is the voice john and i begin our
00:00:32.900 conversation with what exactly the voice is how the voice develops in babies why men and women speak
00:00:37.660 in lower and higher voices and what each sex finds attractive in the voice of the other we then
00:00:42.060 discuss why people develop accents and how these accents set boundaries as to who is in and who
00:00:46.080 is out of a group we then dig into the modern phenomena of vocal fry and uptalk and how when
00:00:50.720 you end everything in a question it can sound like your submissive supplicant we get into how singing
00:00:55.400 makes us feel super vulnerable and why modern pop music can sound soulless when its inherent
00:00:59.600 imperfections are stripped out we enter conversation with the way our voices degrade as we age and john's
00:01:04.300 call to own and use your voice after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash this is the
00:01:09.900 voice john colapinto welcome to the show thank you so much so you are an author of a new book called
00:01:24.980 this is the voice where you explore the human voice the physiology of it the history of it the
00:01:30.820 culture of the human voice what caused you to take a deep dive into the science and anthropology of our
00:01:37.300 voice yeah it was in some ways a long time coming i think i really needed the initial spur of 20 years
00:01:44.280 ago injuring my voice in a permanent way i was actually at the time a staff writer at rolling stone
00:01:49.920 magazine yawn winner the owner and editor was putting together a rock band i was tapped to be
00:01:55.900 the singer because it got around the offices that i could at least hold a tune but i had never done
00:02:01.780 proper vocal warm-ups i didn't know how to rehearse i oversang horribly like way too loud at rehearsals
00:02:08.640 and the gig itself was scary 2 000 people lots of celebrities in the audience and i sort of overdid it there as
00:02:16.000 well and ended up with this rasp in my voice which was eventually diagnosed by a laryngologist as
00:02:22.420 they're called as a vocal polyp and it's effectively like a bleed in one of your vocal cords from overuse
00:02:28.880 that becomes like a bump of scar tissue on one of your vocal cords so that got me thinking you know
00:02:34.680 all of a sudden i couldn't take my voice for granted couldn't sing anymore but actually 10 years later
00:02:40.460 when i did a story on a vocal surgeon who had saved adele's career she had a polyp much like mine
00:02:47.620 he was the guy that said to me you know this is messing you up more than you're acknowledging like
00:02:52.780 you are limiting your emotional range because we do emotion in voice with pitch changes up and down
00:02:59.480 and he said you're speaking in kind of a one register in order to sound a little smoother you know you're
00:03:06.140 not projecting who you are because you're sort of coming across as this raspy voiced like bourbon
00:03:11.420 swilling cigarette smoker which i'm not anymore and haven't been for years so you know he put it in
00:03:17.580 my head that even something as tiny as a little bump on one vocal cord is changing how you behave
00:03:23.160 how people perceive you how you sound i mean i stopped speaking as much i'm an extrovert i stopped
00:03:29.260 talking as much because i would be extra raspy and this really was the beginning of thinking about
00:03:35.740 writing a book that really looked at the whole wide scope of what our voices are doing that we
00:03:41.060 don't really acknowledge all right so this is going to sound like a really basic question but i actually
00:03:45.180 it's this is really profound what exactly is our voice what is it no that's the that's the sixty
00:03:52.520 four thousand dollar question absolutely because we just assume oh yeah voice i mean it's right under
00:03:58.240 our noses literally but we don't think about the fact that it actually is a signaling and
00:04:04.400 communication system that is transmitting emotion but also of course language you know the linguistic
00:04:10.520 layer it's telling people something about where we come from from accent and so on it can even
00:04:15.800 communicate sexual orientation if someone has a very strongly gay voice as in the guys in whatever
00:04:22.320 it's called queer eye for the straight guy or something but you know it's not enough just to talk
00:04:26.680 about what the signal is doing when you think about how we're doing it you suddenly realize wait
00:04:31.920 there's no single vocal organ i mean the vocal cords just create a buzzing sound uh that we actually
00:04:40.180 then have to sculpt into speech by moving our articulators lips and tongue but we're actually
00:04:46.720 powering the vocal cords with air that we're pushing up from our lungs and you know we take that for
00:04:52.380 granted but chimpanzees can't do it like we do we have to draw out our exhalations we actually hold back 0.97
00:04:58.920 in order to breathe like out for a long time to string words together chimpanzees go because they 0.91
00:05:06.760 can just do little short bursts so we're we're actually it's like all these different body parts
00:05:12.520 are acting to create this signal that is so complex so i mean what is the voice who is it singing is it
00:05:19.660 just talking is it coughing laughing it's all of the above and it's not just physiology it's like it's a
00:05:25.500 it's a cognition it's a mental it's like in the mind as well oh yeah it's it's i mean that's exactly
00:05:31.420 it i mean it's all everything that i just described is of course controlled by our brain and you know
00:05:38.440 we don't think of it this way but speech talking is a physical gesture i mean you're literally moving
00:05:45.320 body parts with exquisite control and precision and hitting targets in your mouth with your tongue tip
00:05:52.200 either to say a t or with the back of your tongue to say a k i mean the stuff that we're doing that's
00:05:58.120 just you know motor control again is all controlled by the brain but then we've got that layer you know
00:06:04.120 that high executive cortical layer that's giving us language too so we're putting together words and
00:06:09.760 you know putting thoughts into words which we then get out through our vocal apparatus so there is so
00:06:15.780 much going on up in that brain of ours with voice so let's go back kind of hash out some more of the
00:06:21.560 physical aspects of voice you know humans are the only animals that can speak with a voice
00:06:26.200 why can't our you know primate relatives what what is about their physiology that's preventing them to
00:06:32.040 have a voice yeah you know it's it's fascinating it's a combination of exactly as you say their
00:06:38.360 physiology it's literally where their larynx which is the thing that holds our vocal cords it's like the
00:06:43.620 voice box and men can see theirs because it's where the adam's apple is that point is literally where
00:06:49.060 your vocal cords join and then extend backwards towards your spine but anyway ours are about mid
00:06:54.940 neck if you actually look at a chimpanzee if you dissect one you discover that its larynx and vocal
00:07:00.300 cords are right up in the back of its mouth just under the soft palate at the back of the mouth
00:07:06.040 what that does is it eliminates the sort of throat resonating chamber that we have there's that vertical
00:07:13.460 part of our throat that actually is you know acts to amplify sound and to filter it and we actually do
00:07:20.980 that also with our mouth so that's how we do vowels is where i'm going with this and vowels are absolutely
00:07:27.960 critical to speech if like a chimpanzee you can basically only make the vowel sound uh which is about
00:07:34.700 what they can do with the mouth chamber you can't say a sentence like who hid the hat in the hut hud so
00:07:44.040 i mean you know i'm just using an h and d pair of consonants but i'm putting a different vowel inside
00:07:50.480 each one and saying who hid the hat in the hut now that's literally you know a major aspect of how language
00:07:58.240 is even possible so chimps don't have that but they also lack the sort of parts of the brain or at
00:08:05.900 least as far as we know actually this is actually i guess something that we can never know for certain
00:08:10.360 they seem to lack those parts of the brain that comprehend words as sound which they can then try
00:08:17.140 to put out through their vocal apparatus but you know again yes their bodies just aren't outfitted for
00:08:23.520 speech i thought it was interesting you highlight the point that having our larynx down lower actually
00:08:29.120 makes us more susceptible to choking yeah that's an amazing and actually darwin was the first to
00:08:34.620 notice that because our larynx is so low it actually brings the opening to our lungs right beside where
00:08:41.540 the opening to our esophagus or food pipe is so every time we swallow food has to pass across this very
00:08:48.360 dangerous opening to our lungs which is where our vocal cords open and close and so people have been
00:08:54.480 choking to death for centuries you know because of a mistimed swallow the heimlich maneuver has helped 0.99
00:09:00.360 with that but darwin said this is totally against everything i know about natural selection which is
00:09:07.140 supposed to increase our chances of living rather than increasing our chances of dying and he saw that
00:09:13.840 our larynx was lower he just didn't know why it was you know in the 1950s and 60s that people
00:09:19.920 discovered that throat resonance chamber that i mentioned and its importance to creating vowels
00:09:25.340 and a wonderful linguist and scientist at brown university named philip lieberman said hey man the
00:09:31.260 reason that larynx you know is so low is it actually yes it increased the chances of dying but it also
00:09:37.360 improved or created our ability to speak which just outweighed you know the dangers of choking you know
00:09:45.620 evolution being kind of a balance between things that are advantageous and you know disadvantageous being
00:09:52.000 able to speak as a primate that could not run as fast as a leopard or wasn't as strong as a bear or whatever
00:09:58.500 predator was there our ability to speak was critical not only to our surviving but to shooting to the top of the
00:10:06.240 food chain because by speaking to one another we were able to make plans and we could outsmart these
00:10:11.980 bigger faster more lethal predators so the descended larynx this larynx that literally moved down our 0.99
00:10:18.560 neck over the course of evolution was a surprisingly critical thing for our species and do we know about
00:10:26.820 when that happened like when did humans start using their voice and then i guess that would the question
00:10:30.700 be like how did the act of using a voice change our thinking yeah well you know the i guess it's
00:10:37.320 believed about 500 000 years ago what you know we first had to stand upright from being primates that
00:10:43.820 were knuckle dragging knuckle walkers and in standing upright it's theorized that you know that partly is
00:10:49.740 what started to literally pull the larynx down in the neck interestingly though it probably just continued
00:10:56.880 to descend even before we had language and that's because it gave an advantage in making us sound more
00:11:03.140 threatening when we make a a deep voice like growl or or grunt you because we have that throat resonance
00:11:11.120 chamber it actually sounds more threatening and it's a size bluff you sound bigger and more threatening
00:11:16.140 so it probably was offering an advantage to this rather weak and slow creature this primate but as we
00:11:22.920 crossed over about six million years ago when we departed companies from chimps and we started to become 0.99
00:11:28.900 these human species you know it was really a again about four to five hundred thousand years ago it's
00:11:35.100 theorized that the larynx was in a position that permitted vowels and that we had the motor control
00:11:42.000 and speed of tongue and lip movement that gave us the ability to actually say stuff how that affected our
00:11:48.960 our brains is fascinating i mean you know this guy lieberman who i mentioned departs company from
00:11:54.840 almost every other scientist on earth at the moment who follows noam chomsky's idea that language began
00:12:02.080 as thought which in many ways is a bizarre thing to claim thought not communication i mean as you pointed
00:12:08.880 out other animals have been communicating with their voices you know threats and mating calls and so on since
00:12:15.520 time immemorial we were obviously doing that in our primate past the idea that language didn't evolve
00:12:21.780 from from like vocal sounds is sheer insanity and lieberman thought so and he spent 50 years looking
00:12:28.980 at how that descending larynx and various other changes literally to our genetic makeup which they've
00:12:36.020 discovered was actually what created language in a sense language followed the voice in a feedback loop i mean
00:12:44.340 it sounds weird how would that work well we're constantly feeding back into our brains through
00:12:49.340 bodily movements like with our hands and digits that's when we started making fire and making tools
00:12:54.520 our brains got smarter with more sophisticated abilities to move our bodies that includes the vocal
00:13:01.600 cords tongue lips and in lieberman's beautiful conception which has been proved by a lot of genetic evidence
00:13:08.660 lately it's almost certain that language followed the voice i mean talk about not giving the voice enough
00:13:16.180 sort of importance in in the world of science these days it's critical that we change our thinking on
00:13:21.920 this it's interesting it makes thought a very physical act right yes yeah yes and you know and that too
00:13:29.940 lieberman was was kind of obsessed with because he actually discovered that you know he sort of traced
00:13:35.360 thought to the earliest movement of like mollusks and stuff with with particular motor pathways now on
00:13:41.840 the one hand that sounds totally bizarre on the other when you think about thinking there's so much
00:13:47.140 movement involved you feel your thoughts go from a to b to c to d you you navigate through a mental
00:13:54.600 space in order to assemble ideas a lot of it happens unconsciously but a certain amount in fact a lot of it is
00:14:00.800 something that we actually feel as movement in our brains i believe all right so our voice changed the
00:14:06.340 ways we think it gave gave rise to language and allowed us to be you know homo sapiens let's talk
00:14:11.720 about how on an individual level like a baby goes from basically sounding like a chimp they just can 0.95
00:14:18.040 wail wah wah wah that's it exactly to the point where like by year two year three like they're saying
00:14:24.180 full sentences what goes on yeah well stunningly one of the things that goes on maybe i'll start
00:14:30.640 with them actually still in the womb babies are actually learning language from the minute they're
00:14:36.380 hearing is in place and that happens at about 28 weeks gestation as a fetus they can hear their mom
00:14:43.520 through their through her abdominal wall but they also pick up a lot of her voice signal through what's 1.00
00:14:49.300 called bone conduction as she speaks her whole skeleton and her musculature vibrates and it carries it down
00:14:56.480 into that amniotic fluid that surrounds the baby so that that fetus is actually getting its first
00:15:03.700 stimulus from a human voice that is vibrating against its the soles of its feet its legs its its neck its
00:15:11.360 face so if you really think about it we are absorbing language in this like as this captive audience and what
00:15:18.800 babies are picking up at that stage they've learned is um the stress patterns of particular languages we stress
00:15:25.000 either a first or second syllable more often in english than in french and so on so they're born
00:15:31.220 with a basic very basic understanding of how their language sort of sounds it's not great just because
00:15:37.260 it's kind of muffled in there once they're born into the world they're suddenly in a bath of people
00:15:42.940 speaking all around them and they are we've discovered through these incredible scientific experiments
00:15:48.360 actually starting to distinguish what the particular sounds of our native language are
00:15:54.580 we're born science has discovered able to hear every single sound in the world's 6 000 languages
00:16:01.500 that includes the pops and clicks of certain african tongues and they and babies can distinguish between
00:16:07.720 them they can distinguish between r and l sounds which are quite close
00:16:11.580 in certain languages and so they're doing all of this kind of constructing of the of the sounds
00:16:18.440 but then when they move to the part where they have to speak at around one year old when they start to
00:16:25.980 sort of well they start babbling before that the astonishing thing is they're born with a larynx
00:16:31.780 that's in the same position as a chimps as we talked about it's literally up at the back of the mouth
00:16:37.420 because they breastfeed and they have to be able to breathe through their nose without coming up for
00:16:41.780 air and the milk flows around that raised larynx and into the stomach but literally over the first
00:16:47.380 like three to six months of life that larynx inches down the neck they get onto solid food soon they're
00:16:54.500 swallowing over the opening to their you know lungs as well and their larynx moves basically where an
00:17:00.540 adult's is it still has a way to go but they start to be able to make vowels well enough that we can
00:17:06.880 understand them one other thing i can't resist mentioning that they have to do we think we speak
00:17:12.700 with like a little space between each word almost like words on a page we don't it's a constant ribbon
00:17:17.900 of sound babies just hear that ribbon how do they know where words begin and end one way they know is by
00:17:24.760 running a statistical analysis on the sounds that they're hearing so if you're a polish baby you hear 0.63
00:17:31.900 a z and b sound together like zabignu the name zabignu but if you're an english baby you never
00:17:37.880 hear that combination within a word but you do hear it across a word boundary if someone said
00:17:43.540 leaves blow you've got that but it's going across a break in the words babies listen for the statistical
00:17:52.220 kind of preponderance of those sound and sound combinations and they literally realize oh that i
00:17:58.920 should split this because i'm an english baby i'll split the words there that's probably a word
00:18:04.160 and there's other techniques they use science is amazing and having discovered this where they are
00:18:10.040 figuring out what separate words are and then they figure out what those words mean and then they move
00:18:15.380 into learning grammar and eventually they're speaking we're gonna take a quick break for your words
00:18:20.420 from our sponsors and now back to the show and to hit back on this point of how our voice shapes our
00:18:28.460 cognition you highlight there's we have instances where if there's like a certain period of time
00:18:33.260 where a child needs to learn language and if they don't kind of messes them up for the rest of life and
00:18:38.080 there's that movie uh that jodie foster movie nelly right where that happens what happens to
00:18:43.860 children who don't learn how to speak yeah you know what happens is there's what they call a critical
00:18:50.500 period or a window in in earliest childhood where certain behaviors are learned then or they're never
00:18:56.980 learned so what's literally happening is the baby is building a brain that is capable of language by
00:19:04.520 hearing language i mentioned you know that they were that we're hearing the speech sounds of our
00:19:10.240 particular language buh kuh ah a e i o u and so on with repeated hearing the baby actually builds
00:19:18.840 neural pathways i.e links together neurons in the brain that represent those sounds and so they if they
00:19:26.040 keep hearing a puh puh puh sound they literally it's and it's interesting how this works the electrical
00:19:31.840 impulses that flash along the neurons actually build like a layer sort of like on a copper wire the
00:19:38.300 insulation it's called myelin it's like a protein that's built along the nerve which speeds up the
00:19:44.680 way the neurons flash across each other and represent that puh sound but if they don't hear puh that
00:19:52.260 connection dies away they literally don't happen so within that period that critical period you build a
00:20:00.340 language capable brain that both hears the sounds and also builds the neural motor pathways for saying them
00:20:08.020 and also sort of the musical movement of language that links things in grammatical structures
00:20:14.840 and you sort of have this period where if you don't learn that stuff you're not going to and we actually
00:20:21.280 know this in a way because bilingual babies that are raised in bilingual environments they effortlessly
00:20:27.280 know french and english but a baby raised just in english if he like when he goes to high school he's got to
00:20:34.360 sit there and go je suis tu es il est nous sommes he's like learning by rote french and not learning
00:20:41.820 it because it's so damn hard to learn a foreign language when your brain has been sculpted for your 0.99
00:20:47.040 native tongue so that's literally what's happening but i think it's interesting too it kind of raises the
00:20:51.300 point the question like what is the voice because like the children who are born deaf they are still
00:20:55.920 able to get that language thing going if they learn sign language but i imagine like it's the same
00:21:00.420 it follows the same pattern except you're just using your hands well that's it because people do
00:21:04.920 ask that they say hey wait a second if the voice is so important but we have to remember that our
00:21:09.040 species obviously is endowed with a talent a special skill for language if those those sort of standard
00:21:17.140 ways of communicating have been shut down by because of some malfunction in the in the hearing
00:21:22.860 yes then you know you use another i mentioned before that speech is a gesture well hands gesture
00:21:30.260 of course and it's astonishing and wonderful how human beings start to gesture with their hands
00:21:36.820 deaf babies they've discovered babble with their hands they literally in that stage before speech
00:21:43.820 in a hearing baby is in place but they're practicing by saying ga ga ga ba ba ba ba you know deaf babies 0.96
00:21:50.580 are doing something similar with their hands it's it's wonderful right so yeah we there's all there's
00:21:55.300 a voice there even if you can't you don't use your larynx to make a voice you still have a voice i guess
00:21:59.360 that's a good way of putting it absolutely uh so another thing you explore in the book about our voice
00:22:04.560 is the uh the difference between male and female voices and you point out in that in humans are the
00:22:10.440 only pretty much the only species where there's like dysmorphia where there's a big difference between
00:22:14.440 genders and how they they speak in their voice can you tell us a little bit about that yes absolutely we
00:22:20.100 yeah men i should say speak on average about a full octave below women which is actually quite 1.00
00:22:26.860 stunning because think of your dog or your cat or a bear any mammal you care to name they don't you
00:22:34.760 cannot tell them apart sexually the dimorphism is they're they're called monomorphic voices and
00:22:41.540 species we are a dimorphic species and strongly so with our voice and so that raises the question why
00:22:48.480 why on earth would that be why did the male voice go low and the female high and i mean the best that
00:22:56.440 science can tell us at this point it seems highly likely to me is to look at stuff that darwin said
00:23:01.740 actually about mating behaviors and he pointed out brilliantly that i mean we're kind of used to this
00:23:08.360 idea that mating is around this idea of attraction to the way the other the mate looks and sounds and
00:23:15.400 moves and so on so we think of a peacock with its feathers that seduce and we think of a bird with
00:23:20.420 its beautiful bird song now with human beings you know a female might be looking at a male and listening
00:23:28.120 and realizing oh there's sort of a deep voice there now voices are deep because of testosterone it
00:23:33.400 literally makes our vocal cords bigger and thicker and slower vibrating to give a lower voice so over
00:23:40.160 evolutionary time women females kind of figured out oh if he's got a deep voice it means he's got a 1.00
00:23:46.280 good steady shot of testosterone he's probably strong and capable and as aggressive as he might
00:23:52.060 have to be in order to win food for me and the baby and furthermore i'd like to pass that along to
00:23:57.340 my baby all good but it's not the only way that our voices or how mating works because there's also this
00:24:05.820 thing called contest competition that darwin talked about whereby men or the male of the species usually
00:24:12.620 have to fight each other for the favors of the female and that also drove male voices down down
00:24:19.860 down because as i mentioned earlier a deep voice is a threatening sound it can be just a bluff or it can
00:24:26.820 be you know it can really mean business like you know when the voice goes down there people know
00:24:31.680 okay it's serious so one of the things that's super interesting is the it's theorized that
00:24:38.620 you know females like a deep voice in men but not too deep because it means the man is over 1.00
00:24:46.620 androgenized or over testosterone and that might mean that he's kind of let's say you know like kind of
00:24:53.640 rapey maybe he's kind of like trying to find mates on the side maybe he's not going to stick around to
00:24:59.920 raise the baby so it's theorized that human male voices sort of ended up where they are which is
00:25:07.900 low and lots lower than a female but not as low as a gorilla because females did not choose the super 0.94
00:25:16.280 deep voices and so a slightly more mid-range male voice was propagated in our species through reproduction
00:25:24.420 and that's how we have ended up where we are as males with these voices yeah and and you also men
00:25:32.500 you know there's also an attraction like men are listening to the female voices for attraction and
00:25:36.100 i guess the two things are it's breathiness and like a higher pitch yes and i don't want to leave
00:25:40.740 this out i got in trouble on another podcast or possibly interview where i think people said yeah
00:25:45.320 you didn't talk about women's voices and they were right i didn't get that opportunity so i'm glad 1.00
00:25:49.280 you've asked yes i mean it's again theorized we can never know for sure but men through testing
00:25:56.260 like college aged men find the higher voice in a woman more attractive as a mate they statistically
00:26:04.200 say that's more attractive and they also like a slightly whispery edge to the voice or a it's almost
00:26:10.680 hard to describe what this sound is like now the reasons why we believe is that the higher voice
00:26:17.680 suggests that the person is fertile because when women have menopause their voices deepen so a higher 0.78
00:26:24.420 voice is in a woman is suggestive of reproductive health what's that whispery edge well fascinatingly 1.00
00:26:31.540 at puberty women's voices change in a particular way whereby the vocal cords don't quite meet fully at the 0.93
00:26:39.920 back of the vocal cord our vocal cords make sound by vibrating against each other now they have a little
00:26:46.440 gap where some of the air from the lungs sort of whispers through in a slightly breathy kind of whispery sound
00:26:53.380 now if you think of marilyn monroe she exaggerated both of those qualities so she spoke in a cupidol high 1.00
00:27:00.220 voice with a lot of whispery edge to it so the feeling is that men are sort of you know subconsciously
00:27:07.980 unconsciously hearing these things in a female voice and being attracted to it but i just hasten to add
00:27:14.440 that all of this is very very slippery because of course there are women with deep voices that sound 1.00
00:27:21.220 particularly sexy i mean um lauren bacall the actress from the 1940s was sort of famed for her deep 0.99
00:27:28.740 voice so you know you always have to kind of weigh these theories against certain things that contradict
00:27:35.500 them but anyway it's it's her voice actually had some breathiness so who knows so another aspect
00:27:42.080 sort of a cultural influence on our voice and i'm gonna bring this because i've been hearing it
00:27:46.260 a boot the canadian lovely let's talk about yes and so like why do why do we have accents with our
00:27:52.080 voices do we know why that happens yeah you know you know it really is an astonishing thing accents are
00:27:58.820 really like territorial sounds they're almost like ways for groups of people to indicate their
00:28:06.360 membership with each other and their exclusion of like an interloping other and we know that from
00:28:14.680 extraordinary studies by a guy named william labove and he started in the early 1960s studying the
00:28:21.000 fishing people on martha's vineyard a tiny island off of massachusetts and there he discovered that these
00:28:28.180 fishing families were oddly enough starting to speak with an accent that was many generations old it sort
00:28:35.140 of lingered in the oldest people but all of a sudden the youngest people were doing it he didn't know
00:28:40.600 why he interviewed him he did a sociological deep dive and discovered that really what they were doing
00:28:46.780 was trying to differentiate themselves from the mainlanders from new york and boston the rich summer
00:28:52.820 folk who would pull into town and it so happened in this time in the 60s the fishing families were going
00:28:59.140 through a terrible economic crisis and they were losing their homes they were having to sell them at fire
00:29:04.320 sale prices to the city folk and they were moving out of these ancestral homes built by their fishing 0.91
00:29:09.800 ancestors and having to move into shacks on the inland what this made them do was a despise those folk
00:29:17.340 and revert to an accent that not only said hey we're part of the storied fishing past of america that's
00:29:25.660 in moby dick for heaven's sake this is this was the economy of america we belong to that special group 0.67
00:29:31.960 furthermore this is our island now this indicates that accents are kind of about pushing people apart
00:29:39.580 from each other and the guy that wrote pygmalion or my fair lady george bernard shaw knew this he
00:29:46.680 actually said an englishman cannot open his mouth without making another englishman hate or despise him
00:29:52.660 here in america i think we pride ourselves on being a democratic society that doesn't have a class
00:29:58.780 structure as much i'm afraid we do you know you have northerners looking down on southern accented
00:30:06.220 people you've got flakes out in california speaking in valley girl sounds you've got midwesterners with
00:30:12.900 their marge gunderson from that coen brothers movie way of talking i mean all of these differentiations
00:30:19.820 are about saying i belong to this crowd or i don't belong to that one no it's true i like so i lived in
00:30:26.680 mexico for a few years and even within mexico there's differences there's like regional accents
00:30:31.680 so you could tell if someone was from mexico city or they're from sinaloa or they're from veracruz
00:30:36.220 and then even within the spanish speaking world there was like there was a lot of like i don't know
00:30:41.520 like sort of you know like in spain they speak with like a lisp oh yes i've heard of that right 0.90
00:30:46.420 so instead of saying like uh sabado be a sabado and like mexicans like does it make they make fun of
00:30:51.680 that and then like the spanish like they make fun of the mexicans they're like you're not speaking true
00:30:55.060 spanish yes well and the amazing thing is that these things do become essentially hardwired in
00:31:01.140 childhood during that window that i talked about that sort of critical period and it's why i say
00:31:06.100 out and a boot or however i do it i can't even imitate it you know because i'm unconscious of doing
00:31:11.900 it but people hear it so yeah these things are get really cemented in very early and you've got to work
00:31:18.240 hard to get rid of an accent and it's weird how like things can develop you talk about the development
00:31:23.660 of that sort of chicago accent right you know what oh incredible yeah the bears the the bulls and like
00:31:29.680 you think that's how they've always spoken chicago but this one guy dug into it was like no it actually
00:31:34.400 wasn't like the 1960s that people started talking like that it's absolutely stunning it was actually
00:31:39.220 that same guy that did the martha's vineyard study he actually then he looked at why people in that
00:31:45.060 entire great lakes region spread out across the sort of northern middle part of the country they've been
00:31:52.100 increasingly saying not fat and the name and fat and they're saying fiat in you know and and like
00:31:59.660 they're speaking in this really distorted way with their vowels so he he looked at why and he literally
00:32:06.780 traced it to the migration of people in the mid to late 1800s from upstate new york area when the erie
00:32:14.080 canal of all things was built they were suddenly able to people that that part of the great lakes
00:32:20.060 region now when they moved in there they encountered another group of people who were upland southerners
00:32:27.580 from places like kentucky now it so happened that these groups had totally different approaches and
00:32:33.180 values to life in almost every respects from drinking to whether or not stores should be open on sunday
00:32:40.120 to whether or not women should have special rights the northerners were kind of like pc millennials 0.74
00:32:45.580 of today they were very sort of liberal now the southerners were kind of they were into capital
00:32:50.880 punishment they were you know they were they were just more loosey-goosey about a lot of stuff so you
00:32:55.560 had this incredible culture clash now how did it manifest as they became more acutely sort of
00:33:04.400 aggressive towards each other the the northerners thought hey i don't want to sound like them at all and
00:33:10.680 they actually began to exaggerate that a sound in the word fat let's say and they started to push it
00:33:16.840 forward in the mouth the tongue went higher fat to fit fiat to fiat and over time literally and into the
00:33:24.720 60s this was still evolving because of course the political divide has gotten no no no less in fact
00:33:31.600 it's gotten probably stronger and you literally had the northerners pushing the vowel forward while the
00:33:37.940 southerners i really believe in response they dropped the tongue back they started to give it
00:33:43.120 a nice drawl you know fiat like you know why i'm not going to say fiat so you have these these literally
00:33:49.860 these americans pushing themselves apart with their voice but also politically socially and in terms of
00:33:56.620 value i mean this is how deep voice goes as an indicator of like mass sort of movements in in american
00:34:05.720 society or in the world it's just fascinating i think well you mentioned one sort of accent that's
00:34:11.260 that's it's new in america and it's the valley girl type thing it's called uptalk most people talk 0.83
00:34:16.460 about uptalk and the other one they typically when you hear people talk about uptalk they are also
00:34:21.220 talking about vocal fry for those who aren't familiar with these concepts can you describe what
00:34:26.280 vocal fry and uptalk is and has anyone studied like why why are younger people in the united states
00:34:31.780 speaking with vocal fry and uptalk yeah well it's interesting now uh you know uptalk is when people
00:34:37.520 and they're even statements with a set with a question as if they're i'm always asking a question
00:34:42.200 and so they uh you know they they say that they're going to go to the store because we're and right now
00:34:47.600 we're talking on a podcast so that's uptalk the vocal fry is this growly sound that you'll notice
00:34:55.580 young women largely you tend to notice it in young women but older and older women are doing it
00:35:01.100 where it's almost a crackly sound of the voice and it's kind of like down down there i wish i could
00:35:06.100 do it better yeah like this yeah exactly it's like kim kardashian talks with a vocal fry totally and
00:35:13.360 you were asking has anyone looked at where it came from why it's become sort of this epidemic
00:35:18.280 amongst american and canadian women and the belief literally is that it can be traced to the popularity 0.74
00:35:25.800 of the kardashians tv show which started in 2007 but peaked in its popularity in 2010 which is exactly
00:35:34.380 when linguists became fascinated they were like why is every young woman talking this way now i wrote
00:35:41.400 about this in the book and i theorized it first that women were doing it particularly at that period 0.72
00:35:47.240 2010 shortly after the big sort of economic crash of the subprime mortgage meltdown where all of a
00:35:53.640 sudden millennials lives didn't look too easy it was a fearful time kim however was a pampered beverly 0.99
00:36:01.020 hills billionaires or whatever she was millionaires who had not a care in the world and she spoke in this
00:36:07.760 way that kind of erased all emotion from her voice because because vocal fry you can't go up and down 1.00
00:36:14.060 you always sound like you're kind of bland and blase and in control so my initial theory was that women 1.00
00:36:22.460 were quite understandably kind of disguising any anxieties they felt about the future and about life
00:36:29.880 in this imitation of kim but the thing is it's gone on way too long it's still accelerating in the world 0.81
00:36:36.720 my new belief is that that initial use my sort of morphed into something else after the 2016 election
00:36:45.240 where you had the rise of the me too movement and you had women now with a sort of new newly energized
00:36:52.200 feminism that really derived from a feeling that the the government was being run by people that were
00:36:58.600 inimical to women and their rights so suddenly the vocal fry became really an assertion a growl a 1.00
00:37:06.700 way of women to say to men i really mean business and in the book i point out that in the 70s we had
00:37:12.960 you know i am woman hear me roar but but that roars are kind of theatrical but a growl a growl is
00:37:21.000 actually something that's kind of it's across the animal kingdom and it's produced exactly like the
00:37:25.900 vocal fry it's the same set of laryngeal muscles you you actually tighten and stiffen the vocal cords
00:37:32.000 so the air moves through them in these crackling sort of bubbles and so when a woman my theory is 0.98
00:37:39.420 is doing that i think she's sending a signal that i i demand to be taken not just seriously but as a
00:37:46.460 legitimate threat to you if you abuse me and i think that's might be why we're hearing the fry as
00:37:53.000 much as we do in women men also do it though which is not often pointed out yeah dudes do it and i've
00:37:58.820 talked to a vocal coach and about this and he said when you see guys doing vocal fry they're usually
00:38:04.920 trying to make their voice deeper because they don't have yeah but he says like it's not great for
00:38:10.140 your voice it's not the best thing to do because actually can it just yeah they say it's hard on the
00:38:14.280 vocal cords i think right yeah yeah but then the uptalk i mean why do you think these like drive
00:38:19.200 people's nuts like so like oh wow i mean just i mean to me it just bugs the crap out of me because
00:38:23.960 like i don't know are you like making a statement are you making a question like what's going on oh i can't
00:38:28.240 believe that brett why does it bother you brett no it's so annoying i mean it's it's well you know
00:38:32.900 what it is it sounds defensive because interestingly you know i mentioned before that we deepen our
00:38:38.560 voice in order to sound threatening but we raise our voice in order to sound submissive and loving and
00:38:43.560 and so and we speak this way to babies and to pets just very naturally we just do that it's a reverse
00:38:49.480 size bluff we're trying to sound small now a wonderful linguist named john ohala from stanford
00:38:55.200 years ago said that's literally why almost every language has a raised pitch at the end for a
00:39:02.320 question because when you ask a question you are literally becoming submissive to you're giving up
00:39:08.980 control and authority to the person you're asking the question of so your voice goes up is it nice out
00:39:15.100 so you're you don't know so you're becoming submissive the person says yes it's really nice and they
00:39:20.100 deliberately answer in a voice that does not go up but down so when someone is doing up talk you
00:39:27.960 really get the feeling that they're constantly asserting sort of a non-threatening submissive
00:39:34.000 oh i'm just like you know i don't know anything i'm just totally at your mercy and you know everything
00:39:39.040 and that starts to grate no you might you might sort of think oh gee i guess i would kind of like
00:39:45.000 someone that sort of makes me feel dominant and no i think we prefer to try to work with people as
00:39:51.700 equals if we're sane and normal so someone that's constantly putting themselves in a position of
00:39:57.820 sort of supplicating questioning submissiveness you know you want to slap them one of the places it
00:40:03.960 might have become so popular and labov said this as well incredibly enough was the song by moon unit
00:40:11.280 zappa back in the very early 80s whose name is going to elude me that song oh i can't believe it
00:40:17.580 it's in my book where she raps in it too oh well she also does a little bit of vocal fry but it goes 1.00
00:40:23.300 way way back to then possibly and then the movie clueless picked it up and that was a very popular movie
00:40:29.680 the girls there did it now and that suggests too that like things in our culture are highly 1.00
00:40:36.460 sort of contagious the things about voice are very easily picked up as kind of fads kind of short-lived
00:40:45.200 fads but then they can become like almost permanent aspects of of accent as they get passed down to
00:40:52.520 children when they're in the you know crib so that might also be why we're hearing so much up speak and
00:40:59.020 vocal fry so we talked about too when you speak you're not just conveying information with words and
00:41:03.980 language your voice itself can carry information about your emotional state and it can be very
00:41:09.660 subtle it's not just like i think everyone knows what a happy voice sounds like a sad voice but
00:41:14.580 there's like these like really subtle ones like annoyed you know disdain contempt that you can pick
00:41:20.120 up on in a voice so how do we know like have scientists kind of like figured out like put an
00:41:25.980 algorithm like they know if they hear this voice this is contempt like do we know about that yeah
00:41:30.200 great question i mean for for years decades one particular scientist in the sort of i don't know
00:41:36.920 how many years 40 years he devoted to it trying to you know study emotion in voice and think of how
00:41:43.940 hard that is to do because you know science you want someone to be able to repeat a particular behavior
00:41:50.580 so that you can be sure you weren't getting a one-off sound so how do you make someone make a jealous
00:41:56.740 statement that sounds jealous or envious or hostile or happy or sad or some weird blend
00:42:02.980 of those emotions so he figured out ways of doing that he started using method actors and actually
00:42:09.640 that worked pretty well and he you know scrupulously dissected the acoustic signal using instruments
00:42:16.900 called a spectrograph and oscilloscopes and this guy drew up these huge charts with like decimal
00:42:23.740 pointed measurements of volume versus pitch versus the speed now you can imagine how incredibly
00:42:31.360 complex that was because it's literally those tiny adjustments now the thing is that his work ended up
00:42:39.180 being essentially worthless because it was just like who could do anything with this but you mentioned
00:42:44.440 a really interesting thing when you say is there an algorithm because what the big tech companies are
00:42:50.540 doing now is trying to imbue computer voices with convincing sounding human emotion and the way
00:42:57.500 they're actually doing it is not by using all those little micro measurements like this guy did because
00:43:03.900 you could never input all of that into a computer they're using machine learning they write an algorithm
00:43:09.920 where the computer can teach itself and then they play emotional speech into the computer with the emotions
00:43:16.840 labeled and the computer literally learns them itself it's an astounding thing and actually not a little bit
00:43:25.520 scary i have to say because we've suddenly got computers kind of learning the way babies do you know i talked
00:43:32.580 about how we sort of inculcate babies with speech by them hearing speech well that's how our computers are getting
00:43:39.560 so good at doing language but now they're getting good at the secret ingredient of language that really
00:43:46.000 makes us sound human which is that emotional what they call it prosody it's the song-like part of our voice
00:43:53.240 and if you don't use prosody you become unlistenable that was horrible what i just did and if i kept it up
00:44:01.880 you'd have ended the podcast so you've got to have the music and and yeah i mean you know really we don't
00:44:08.800 know to now here's the short answer we don't really know what all those variables are but computers are
00:44:15.000 learning them anyway it's amazing yeah next time you ask your alexa what the weather is it's gonna
00:44:20.080 ask john you sound kind of annoyed did i correct right yeah that's exactly what they say or are you
00:44:25.380 lying you know they could they might call you out on a line this is free this is where the nightmare
00:44:29.520 could go that's creepy yeah that's why i don't have an alexa god no don't do that well and those alexas
00:44:34.900 are going to start learning from your voice i mentioned that because they're going to start putting
00:44:38.300 that learning software into these devices that we use series and alexas and so on and so every time
00:44:44.820 we speak when we you know when we call it up to say hey when's justin bieber's birthday something we all
00:44:49.600 are curious about you know it's literally going to be learning some of the prosody of our language
00:44:54.360 and speech from that well another aspect of voice that you hit is singing right this kind of that's
00:44:59.880 kind of kick-started the whole project you were a singer you're gonna pop on your voice on your
00:45:04.220 your vocal cords what is it about singing that makes people feel really vulnerable like why don't
00:45:10.000 we like to sing it's so weird it strips us naked you know it's it's this way in which i you know i
00:45:17.100 mentioned in the book that if you you could say to someone in a work environment hey you know could
00:45:22.160 you get up and like deliver this report and they even if they don't like public speaking they could
00:45:26.640 fumble their way through it try asking them to sing a solo song to all their co-workers the minute
00:45:32.820 you lift your voice out of normal speech and launch it into melody and rhythm it strips you
00:45:41.360 us to our our human core in a way that science doesn't really understand we just know it when
00:45:48.760 it happens and it touches on emotions deep in us that are maybe it goes back to our moms singing to
00:45:55.920 us when we were babies but i think it goes further back than that darwin thought that our language itself
00:46:01.780 emerged out of the singing cadences of early primates so it's almost as if funnily enough
00:46:10.260 even though we exalt our linguistic capability which i believe brought us to the top of the food chain
00:46:16.020 in a funny way it's finally though that music where we find our most human kind of universal emotional
00:46:24.700 salience and and to sing is to just totally bear ourselves bear ourselves kind of nakedly and
00:46:32.740 you know and that works in certain ways that can be so beautiful and i do point this out in the book
00:46:38.440 that when president obama was addressing the charleston church where there'd been a horrible shooting many
00:46:44.280 people killed he he started to speak and then he fell silent for 12 seconds which is an infinitely long
00:46:51.420 period of time to be silent and when he next made a vocal noise it was to start singing amazing grace
00:46:58.700 and he actually someone just recently told me that i was correct because he recently said that
00:47:04.260 he had run out of words there was no words for how horrible this was and the only recourse was to this
00:47:11.780 to singing now in the world's one of the world's greatest orators
00:47:15.820 obama that's quite an admission so i can't really answer what that mysterious sort of soulfulness is
00:47:25.700 except to just say it's real it's true and it's it's a beautiful mystery well and going on to that
00:47:32.700 you talk about pop music today one of the complaints like it's some of it's like really complex and
00:47:37.760 sophisticated but one of the complaints that people have and music critics have is that
00:47:41.180 it's too perfect because they have we have this technology that allows us to take a singer's voice
00:47:46.580 and auto-tune it make it sound differently put them back in pitch and like put things on beat
00:47:50.940 and when you hear it you're like that doesn't sound right doesn't doesn't stir me like what is it about
00:47:56.060 the imperfection that started we have you figured that out yeah you know it's fascinating a guy actually
00:48:01.260 back in the 20s in the 1920s studied singing voices and was actually amazed to discover that all singers
00:48:07.900 even highly trained classical singers are singing off pitch very often or starting off the pitch
00:48:14.300 and then moving into the correct pitch and then moving out again they're jumping on beats a little bit
00:48:19.840 in advance or lagging behind in order to create like emotional effects there's something called vibrato
00:48:26.540 where you're literally going between two notes but it sounds like you're sort of on the pitch of one note
00:48:32.860 but if you think about it you're not you're wobbling and and these create emotion
00:48:37.240 now why on earth is that is you know it's sort of like if you look at a painting like a beautiful impressionist
00:48:44.660 painting by monet you're going to see his brush strokes and if you get close to the canvas you'll suddenly realize
00:48:51.080 wow that's kind of messy and that kind of looks wrong you step back from it and it all assembles
00:48:56.680 into something beautiful and alive japanese calligraphers with ink and brush pen they love the little mistakes
00:49:04.920 they actually they would put in mistakes into things that they made because that's where we find our
00:49:10.180 humanness now the sort of quote-unquote mistakes in the human voice are absolutely real in singing we
00:49:17.340 almost can't we can't really control them these these emerge as part of the emotional expression of a
00:49:24.840 singing voice the voice trying to find a note it's got a yearning quality of seeking the note of seeking
00:49:31.300 the thing that's going to unlock our emotion and it's beautiful to hear the voice get there
00:49:35.920 now when you use pro tools to just center the the person right on pitch and right on the beat
00:49:44.720 you're in you're necessarily draining off a whole bunch of the humanity and it's just you know it's
00:49:52.600 just for real and you can hear that you know listen to bob dylan who's not auto-tuned and he's not even a
00:49:58.040 great like singer in terms of pitch and stuff but he'll break your heart with certain songs
00:50:03.440 taylor swift who was you know i think when she first broke you know i remember with the album
00:50:07.920 fearless i saw her on letterman and she was very touching and i remember thinking it was because
00:50:14.080 she was kind of a lousy singer she was a little off pitch but she was singing about her first you know
00:50:20.240 emotional affair as a young woman and my god like her being sort of not quite on the beat and a little
00:50:26.380 uncertain in her pitches it absolutely contributed to this entire beautiful emotional effect of
00:50:32.600 vulnerability now she's a big stadium dance you know edm singer you know with like propulsive beats 1.00
00:50:39.520 and robotic sounds and they're centering her voice on pitch you know with pro tool and it's all gone
00:50:45.380 the emotion's gone so she's a different singer now a successful one but she's not going to break your
00:50:51.200 heart as readily do you know are there musicians who are kind of rebelling against the pro the pro tools
00:50:56.040 i believe there i believe they are yes there are there are but you know i say that because they
00:51:01.940 say it i wish a name would come to mind but you know they kind of like to boast you know that they
00:51:07.260 didn't but to be honest you know people do slide off pitch on like take 35 of the song that they're
00:51:13.420 singing and sometimes the engineer just nudges them you know onto the pitch i mean it's sort of
00:51:19.260 irresistible i guess the point is that it's irresistible you know with all of our computers now you just
00:51:24.380 know you can hit that button and get rid of the zit before you put the photograph of yourself up or
00:51:29.360 whatever i mean do you really lay off that you know zit remover click um so i don't know it's it's
00:51:36.840 a really actually i should have asked some engineers this i mean whether or not anybody sings in their
00:51:42.460 naked i would imagine dylan but i don't know who else no that's weird yeah that's funny how we have
00:51:46.420 that propensity to like want to remove our humanity but then yeah and but like once you do that with
00:51:51.000 like photoshop or like the audio tools like you enter that uncanny valley you're like this doesn't
00:51:55.460 correct this is not right but like you still have the compulsion i need to do it i know i know exactly
00:52:00.880 i know i want to be perfect right so you in the book i thought it was interesting about how what
00:52:06.080 happens to our voice when we get old and i never really thought about that like oh i thought about
00:52:09.780 going gray i thought about getting wrinkly but i never thought my voice would age as well but it does
00:52:14.020 yes yes it does i mean our you know sort of every component of voice that we talked about earlier
00:52:19.940 like everything from your lungs to your vocal cords to the articulators lips and tongue all of
00:52:25.940 them basically degrade they get weaker they get less powerful they get less precise so you sort of
00:52:32.140 hit the wrong tongue targets you know so your speech starts to sound a little blurry but one of the
00:52:36.600 biggest things that happen is that your vocal cords it's sort of like your knee ligaments or something
00:52:41.920 they tighten up they stiffen they get arthritic and so a young voice has a ripple a beautiful
00:52:48.360 almost liquid ripple to the way the vocal cords vibrate and move that goes away they really
00:52:54.020 become stiff and kind of crystalline and kind of hard and you start to hear that in a croaky old
00:52:59.700 person's voice you know the voices get more quiet because you don't have as much lung power as an old 1.00
00:53:04.440 person all of a sudden the muscles are weakening and you're we sound loud by pushing that diaphragm it's a
00:53:09.840 big muscle so all sorts of stuff happens i mean fat collects around the neck and literally makes the
00:53:16.700 resonance chamber of the throat kind of smaller women's voices lower with age because their vocal 1.00
00:53:23.660 cords gets kind of thicker and and stuff and men's kind of raise so they men and women we talked about
00:53:30.480 the dimorphism of male and female voices for mating well when mating is no longer an option
00:53:35.960 you know the voices actually move together they start to sound more and more the same men and women
00:53:41.560 so you're sort of de-sexed your you know your power goes away i mean it's not pretty and you know
00:53:47.700 you really hear that in aged voices so what do you hope people walk away after reading your books 0.96
00:53:54.440 it's like you said in the very beginning like this isn't a this is not a how-to book how to how to sound
00:53:59.080 like james earl jones or frank sinatra or whatever yeah what do you what do you hope people walk away
00:54:03.960 with yeah you know i hope they end up with an impression of i guess maybe two things just how important
00:54:09.080 our voice was to us as a species i really do think it drove us to the top of the food chain
00:54:13.540 but i also do by by talking about all the different things that control and make our voice i hope that
00:54:20.520 people will glory in their own voices weirdly enough a little bit because you know it is an instrument
00:54:26.620 you know you watch a wonderful clarinet player or saxophone player and you're impressed with what
00:54:31.540 they're doing when you just say pass the salt you're doing something more remarkable in terms of
00:54:36.600 of speed of movement and precision of movement and so on and even tune and pitches so i would love to
00:54:43.860 see people kind of you know push their voice out there project it you know use your articulate
00:54:49.020 animate your voice you know get excited sound enthusiastic you know possess the air around
00:54:55.300 you with these vibrations because we're not here that long so i guess my feeling is i do sort of end
00:55:01.440 with the with a little bit of uplift because our voices are one of the main ways that we kind of
00:55:07.960 imprint ourselves on the world that we occupy it's it's part of the web that we extend in order to
00:55:14.660 connect to everybody else and you might as well give it some you know give it some power give it some
00:55:21.020 style you know speak up don't don't be shy so i guess that's where i would go with that well john this
00:55:26.660 has been a great conversation where can people go to learn more about the book in your work
00:55:29.700 yeah well you know you can you can definitely look at my twitter because i'm always tweeting
00:55:35.140 jay colopinto i'm always tweeting about it but i mean just read the book i mean it's on amazon you
00:55:40.820 can get it at bookstores if you can go in them at this point with a mask on and i actually do think i
00:55:45.880 have to sort of rather hubristically say that my book actually pulls together all of these different
00:55:53.040 strands and and sort of disciplines to look at the voice in kind of this global way
00:55:58.600 that frankly no other book really does or has done that was actually one of the great challenges
00:56:05.000 of doing it you got books on linguistics phonetics singing oratory accents but they're all separate
00:56:12.920 books and separate fields of study so for a book that i mean i really am selling it here but for a book
00:56:18.940 that kind of pulls it all together in a narrative way you might just go to my book this is the voice i
00:56:24.900 don't know where else to point you well john it's been a great conversation thanks for your time it's
00:56:28.340 been a pleasure brett likewise my guest today was john colopinto he's the author of the book this is
00:56:34.440 the voice it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere make sure to check out our show notes
00:56:38.200 at awm.is slash this is the voice where you can find links to resources where you delve deeper into this
00:56:42.560 topic well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast check out our website at art of manliness.com
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