The Human Voice: How This Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues About Who We Are

About this book

Dazzling and groundbreaking the first book to explore something so fundamental that most of us take it for granted. What is more amazing about the voice: its central importance to human society or our widespread disregard for it? From an early age we are taught to think about what we say what we do what we wearnot about how we sound. In fact Karpf points out we are overlooking one of the primary things people notice about us. The voice is more than a conduit for language: the moment you open your mouth and start to speak even if its only to read from the phone book your voice reveals with remarkable accuracy not only your sex but your size height weight and physique and your health education mood and social status. It tells your listener whether you are to be trusted respected or dismissed. And only the modulation of your voice makes you comprehensible at all: transgress the normal codes of volume pause and pitch and you can entirely sabotage conversations turning sense into nonsense. The culmination of years of research by acclaimed journalist sociologist and radio broadcaster Anne Karpf The Human Voice is an utterly fascinating book on a universal subject. Karpfs groundbreaking investigation uncovers the powerful messages that lie not just in what we say but how we say it and will make you hear the voices around you as if with new ears.