‘I heard of a man
Who says words so beautifully
That if he only speaks their name
Women give themselves to him’

Poem
Leonard Cohen, poet, composer, singer
(Cohen, 2006, p. 47)

1The fact that English is, as was pointed out in an earlier chapter, a language of sound means that the quality of this sound plays an important role in the evaluation of the usage of the language. Compare this to French, where it is the ability to manage its rigorous grammar and intricate syntax which, in addition to pronunciation, determines how a speaker of the language is judged.

2What makes for a good, if not necessarily a beautiful, voice? We will not use the adjective “perfect” as the word demands a definition, which, in the case of describing the voice, with its imperfect human origins, cannot be realised. However, there have been others who have not shied away from trying to find the ‘perfect’ voice. A study commissioned by the Post Office Telecoms, as reported by the BBC (2008), claimed to have ‘worked out a mathematical formula to find the perfect human voice’. This formula, the work of the linguist Professor Andrew Linn of Sheffield University in collaboration with the sound engineer Shannon Harris, included data on tone, speed, frequency, words per minute and intonation. The findings, based on the analysis of the results given by a panel of fifty people who were asked to rate voices, were very specific. They concluded that the delivery rate of the ideal voice should be no more than 164 words per minute, and the pauses between sentences should last 0.48 seconds! The male voice that came closest to the ideal was that of the actor Jeremy Irons, with a delivery rate of 200 words a minute and a pause interval between sentences of 1.2 seconds. Unfortunately, the formula for assessing the quality of the voice in this study appears to omit the balance between the voice resonators which, as voice teachers, we believe is one of the most important aspects of a good voice. Of course, assessing the balance between the resonators is a more subjective task and, therefore, more difficult to evaluate.

3In 2005, the BBC carried out a survey in which people were asked to nominate their favourite voices. This was personal with no mathematical formulae! What was surprising in this survey was that a Scottish voice, that of Sean Connery, came out top of the list (BBC, 2005). It said a lot for the quality of Connery’s voice that it was so well appreciated throughout the country, because in Britain there is still a prejudice against voices which are not from the listener’s region. Certain regional voices are still so ill-perceived that it is difficult for anyone speaking those accents or dialects to get a broadcasting job with the BBC. For example, the Brummie accent very often precludes anyone from Birmingham from having professional access to the airwaves; a study carried out in 2008 resulted in the following damming indictment in a Daily Telegraph article—‘People with Birmingham accents are seen as among the least intelligent and imaginative in the country’ (Fleming, 2008). An earlier study carried out by the Aziz Corporation showed that having a strong regional accent, including Welsh, Liverpudlian, West Country and Cockney, significantly impacted a person’s chances of succeeding in business.1

4We cite these various surveys to demonstrate how, in the English-speaking world, and particularly that which is British, social attitudes towards voices still count for so much. More than a century ago, in his preface to Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him’ (Shaw, 1912, p. 1). It was not just regional differences which he was alluding to, but perhaps more importantly, social differences. If regional differences are described as dialects, sociolinguistics have coined the word ‘sociolect’ to describe differences based on socioeconomic class, age, gender, and ethnicity. In Pygmalion, Professor Higgins was able to identify very precisely the geographical location of Eliza Doolittle’s voice, asking her ‘How do you come to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove.’ In Act 1, he also proposes to work on her speech to change her social position:

You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party (p. 16).

Professor Higgin’s task of identification would be much more difficult these days owing to the “diffusion” of different phonetic and phonological elements, ‘where linguistic features begin to be used by groups of speakers that did not use them before’ (Wilhelm 2019, p. 20).

5Movement across the social classes through work on the voice has thus existed for a long time, but today things are further complicated by this movement taking place in both directions. The term “dumbing down”, in which the intellectual level is perceived to be deliberately reduced in education, television, newspapers, etc., has its equivalent in voice. “Voicing down” is how we describe the phenomenon where someone from the upper and upper-middle classes uses features of speech to go downmarket. Mick Jagger may well have been the first to “voice down”. If you listen to the first interviews carried out with him in the 1960s, you will hear a voice which reveals his origins—middle-class, southern England. Within a very short period of time, he had introduced the glottal stop and other linguistic features to bring his voice closer to that of a lot of his fans and to the other members of the Rolling Stones. However, in recent times, perhaps with the conservatism of age (although the passing of the years has not stopped him from continuing to energetically strut the world’s music stages), the glottal stop has disappeared, and his voice has taken on a neutral RP aspect.

6Going downmarket can sometimes make the speaker look ridiculous. This was the case with George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the coalition government which came into office in Britain in 2010, who decided that his Eton schooling was something which was not working in his favour with a lot of voters and chose to ‘voice down’ with the glottal stop and the occasional dropped ‘h’. After one meeting where he spoke to workers in a supermarket warehouse, The Times reported that ‘George Osborne appeared to “descend” from Received Pronunciation into Estuary English yesterday with a series of slurring vowels and glottal stops’ (Sanderson, 2023). Estuary English is a form of speech which has been described as sub-Cockney, originating in the south east of England (around the Thames estuary) but which is now to be found throughout much of the UK.

7Voicing “up”, on the other hand, has been heard with the footballer David Beckham who, according to the tabloid newspapers, used a voice coach both to lower the pitch of his voice—the high pitch of which was often lampooned by comedians and sports commentators alike—and also to bring it closer in diction to that of the British Royal princes with whom Beckham had become pally. Paradoxically, some years earlier, just before her death, the mother of Prince William and Prince Harry had been accused of having an accent that showed Estuary English influence.2

8All this just goes to show what a real brouhaha the whole subject of what is a “good” voice in English can elicit. The surveys cited above focus on regional and sociolect features, but in the USA, it is the acoustics of the voice which have received much attention in recent times. The acoustic phenomenon is known as ‘creaky voice’ or ‘vocal fry’ and has been the subject of much debate between linguists, feminists and other social commentators, inciting descriptions ranging from ‘abomination’, and ‘vulgar’ to ‘sexy’.3 This voice is a low-frequency, rasping or gravelly sound produced by compressing the vocal folds, thus reducing the airflow and the frequency of vibrations through them. Another vocal aspect that has received a lot of attention is the intonation feature known as the high rising terminal, upspeak, or uptalk, where the final syllable in a statement has a rising intonation, making it sound like a question.4

9The evolution of the spoken language is always impossible to predict, and in an age where there is so much cross-voicing, it would be a brave linguist to predict in what directions the sounds of English, American and British will be going in twenty years’ time. Nevertheless, the English teacher needs to be as aware of the changes that are taking place vocally in native English as they are of the changes and additions to vocabulary. For example, girls who hear uptalk and may be inclined to imitate it should be reminded that it has yet another appellation: the term ‘moronic interrogative’, the invention of which is widely attributed to the British stand-up comedian Rory McGrath. When and where McGrath first came up with this less-than-beautiful description is difficult to identify, but it is constantly repeated in any talk of, or writing on, the subject of upspeak (Vine, 2014).

Cricketing voices

14A ‘weathered Wessexey growl’. ‘Remarkably low rumbling’. ‘Golden modulation’. Such were the terms used to describe the voice of John Arlott, a famous BBC cricket commentator in the latter half of the twentieth century.5 His knowledge of the game, combined with his vocal qualities, led him to be described as the voice of cricket. Given the potential 5-day, 6 hours-a-day duration of an international cricket match and thus the amount of time a commentator, albeit working as one of a small team, might spend at the microphone, the importance of the voice could not be underestimated. The ‘voice of cricket’ description was also given to another commentator, Richie Benaud, a former international cricketer who played for Australia. His voice, which was very different from that of John Arlott, was described as being ‘crisp’ (Haynes, 2015) and as having an Australian twang. It seems that this word, which is used to describe a distinctive characteristic of speech often associated with a country or region, is used most often to describe the Australian accent. Whether the voice has its origins in the south of England or Down Under, it seems that cricket, with its variable tempo, which is probably more noticeable than in any other sport, is the catalyst for producing agreeable, interesting voices.