VOICE - Inside and Out

Voice Play workshop at The Center on Colfax, courtesy of @centeroncolfax Instagram

Do you remember the first time you heard a recording of your own voice? What was your reaction?

THAT’S what I sound like?!

It’s weird, right?

We sound very different to ourselves on the inside compared to what others experience of our voice on the outside. I suppose it makes sense. The call is coming from inside the house, so to speak, when we experience our own voice—it resonates and ricochets against our bones, our chest, abdomen, and other parts of the body. But not all those vibrations make it to the outside world.

Let’s try a short experiment. Inhale slowly, and then hum on a comfortable, low pitch. Where do you feel it? Many say they feel vibrations in their chest or sternum, maybe also on the lips. It usually feels soothing, like a massage on the inside. This feeling is conductive resonance—when vibrations travel through bones, muscle, and other parts of the body. It feels fantastic, and a lot of that resonance stays inside the house of your body.

The sound that other people hear when you speak or sing or hum is free resonance. Air passes through your vocal folds (which spark the sound) and your vocal tract and finally escapes your body. The vocal tract is a series of cavities—like a winding cave with several pathways. When you open and close paths in this cave, it changes the sounds that come out of your mouth.

Professional singers spend entire careers exploring the cavities of the vocal tract, not to mention the power source of the diaphragm and lungs, and various body parts that provide amplification—all in pursuit of taking the human voice to its limit, physically and artistically.

Take a look at this clip from the National Geographic special The Incredible Human Machine. It features the almost super-human vocal cords of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and you will see how his vocal cords stretch for those high notes in “Dream On.” Tyler truly took his voice to the limit, to the point where he was finally forced to retire in 2024, due to vocal cord injury.

Appreciation for various vocal sounds varies considerably around the world. An opera singer in Italy strives for tall, round tones, as Lucia Aliberti demonstrates in this video performance of “Care Compagne” from Bellini’s La Sonnambula. An opera singer in China pursues what may sound like the exact opposite in this video excerpt from the classic Peking Opera Drunken Concubine—short, pure, straight tones. When I play this excerpt in class, students often think the performer is lip syncing, because their mouth hardly moves at all. Your musical ear may be tuned to prefer one or the other, depending on where you grew up and what you’re used to hearing. If you watch each performer closely, you can see how they manipulate their faces in different ways to produce quite different sounds. The Chinese opera singer’s jaw and mouth remain mostly closed, and they have a slight smile through their cheekbones. The Italian opera singer drops her jaw to create a more vertical opening.

If you really want to geek out on vocal production, here is a wonderful short clip from the National Institutes of Health that provides a nice visualization and description of how sound is produced.

The complex process of creating sound in the body has always fascinated me. So many things happen before even the tiniest peep escapes your lips.

Your vocal cords are small and very delicate, but in conjunction with the rest of your body, the sound waves amplify by the time they leave you. It is miraculous to walk through the coordination of sound through the body and out into the world.

But what if the sound you release is not authentic to who you are on the inside? What do you do with that mismatch?

I have had the honor of working with many trans students over the past 15 years or so, and they have taught me so much about the connection between the voice and perception. I’ve heard heartbreaking stories about how devastating it can be to be to a trans person who is misgendered over the phone. What happens when your inside voice is vastly different from your outside voice? What can be done to better synchronize the two?

The most important point I have learned from working with trans individuals is it is not just about pitch. If a person is trans female, they do not find their authentic voice simply by raising their pitch. That would be like painting in black and white. We want to broaden the palette.

If you were to describe someone’s voice, maybe your best friend, what words would you use? In addition to pitch, you may consider tone, cadence, volume, and inflection. Here are a few more words that may help you describe a person’s voice: breathy, strident, smooth, velvety, rhythmic, rich, clear, commanding, ethereal.

Trans students that I have worked with are tuned in to these descriptors and many more. They know the qualities that would best describe them on the inside, but they’re not always sure how to produce them. Neither am I, if I’m totally honest! But the most rewarding voice work I’ve ever done is collaborating with these students to see what we can discover. We call it “voice play” to take the edge off. And it is play! There is a lot of laughter. Every single person on this planet has a unique instrument. It is a gift to explore that instrument with someone. Here are some pictures from a 2024 Voice Play workshop at The Center on Colfax.

Last question (for now) . . . when has the sound of a human voice cut straight to your heart? Do you know what I’m talking about? Maybe it’s the way your favorite singer hits a particular note on a specific word in a song that makes you cry every time you hear it. Or maybe it’s the endearing way your friend mimics a cartoon character. There is a student at Red Rocks, Logan, who makes me laugh out loud every time he says, “CHEEZE IT!” in a unique character voice he created.

Sound is vibration, and this vibration cuts into us in ways that other physical traits do not. Sound waves sent through the human body and out into the world connect us, and they are key to theater and storytelling in general. When we tell stories in community, our goal is to connect and to find meaning together. This is why I will continue play with voice and discover its mysteries for the rest of my life.