All four authors are invested, implicitly or explicitly, in specific sound traveling from one mouth to another listening ear, as well as how a listener perceives a speaker’s vocalization. Barthes and Knight are arguably more generally concerned with the issue of inscribing vocality, describing, dissecting, and, in Knight’s case, teaching specific vocal sounds. Rodenburg and Cavarero focus their attention more on the individually embodied voice and, in Cavarero’s case, putting logos in its place. But the importance of a given listener’s perception of a voice informs all of the arguments made here, showing up in Knight’s description of Tilly’s groupies on the “beautiful” sounds his method demanded; Barthes’ subjective response to the voice of Panzera versus that of Fischer-Dieskau; Part One of Rodenburg’s argument in which she details the wide range of speaking habits that develop as a result of listeners’ judgments; and Cavarero’s belief that to consider vocal expression without considering the reciprocity of speech and listening is untenable. At the same time, the dual emphasis on speaking and listening in these texts contains curious floating assumptions about vocal truthfulness, or the question of what the distinctive voice reveals to the listening ear, and how the voice can be termed (as these authors variously do) “neutral,” “inauthentic,” “false,” or “true.” I’m interested in these claims, their points of overlap and divergence. When, for example, Cavarero refers to a “simple sonorous truth” (2), what does that mean? What could possibly be simple about the idea of truth or authenticity in vocal expression?
Cavarero provides an account of the entrenched hierarchy in philosophy between speech (semantics) and voice (phonics), placing an emphasis on the embodied singularity of the voice, and offering “a vocal ontology of uniqueness,” which is apparently new to philosophy. It’s not new to anyone who works in voice from a practical standpoint, as is clear from Knight’s approach to actors’ existing vocal histories and Rodenburg’s basic premise that an individual’s background and self is exposed in his or her voice. Not unlike Cavarero, Barthes embraces the geno-song (phonic) over the pheno-song (semantic), although he also makes Cavarero’s point for her about theory’s traditional rejection of the individual body in several ways, none more entertaining than his dismissal of the universally stupid lung. The idea of the “grain” even seems in part a way to bypass the question of the body in addressing the voice; or at least the grain of the voice cannot be reduced to the body, or to specific bodies.
Theoretically and practically, it seems to me straightforward that voices are unique, embodied, and rely on specific listeners, real or imagined. Rodenburg, who attends to the rights of the speaking person to be heard for who they are, stresses that there are no bad voices, only bad habits. According to Rodenburg, a person’s voice is always true to who he or she is, whether that voice is remarkably “free” of repressive habits or a complicated reflection of various forces that have adversely affected it. Knight is similarly interested in preventing the obfuscation or neutralization of sounds any one speaker instinctively wants to make or could potentially make. Both criticize the alleged “beautiful” or “neutral” sounds of a BBC or aristocratic voice (Rodenburg) or World or Standard English (Knight). Both are primarily concerned with opening up vocal potential, beginning with the body and the possibilities of expressive sound and moving toward comprehensible speech.
But when Cavarero wants to establish the primacy of embodied phonics, she does so in part by contrasting the deceptiveness of language with the truth of the voice. Moreover, the singular voice, unlike speech, “plays no trick…but rather unmasks the speech that masks it” (24). This sounds like a lot of work for the voice. And why if a voice is singular may it not also deceive? Why does the first preclude the second? Is singularity synonymous with truthfulness in this argument, and if so, could the opposite also be true? Like Tolstoy’s families (all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way), do all false voices sound the same whereas every true voice sounds distinctive?
This is the case in Cavarero’s first example, Calvino’s story “A King Listens,” in which all the voices of the court are heard by the King as a wash of false sounds, before the sole voice of an unseen woman singing registers what Cavarero describes as the “simple sonorous truth.” Indeed, almost all of the examples of the truth-telling power of the voice in Cavarero—from the pivotal character in Calvino to the Sirens to opera singers—are female singers. While the speaking voice is revealing, as Rodenburg would affirm, for Cavarero the singing voice attests definitively “to the truth of the vocal” (6). The power of singing is so far privileged here that Cavarero claims, “no woman is more mute than a woman who loses her singing voice” (119). This distinction between speaking and singing truthfulness is similar to the way in which speech, song, and dance in musical theatre often function in a hierarchy of authentic affect. A character becomes most articulate and emotionally truthful in song and dance (and characters are not necessarily in charge of their revealing, intuitive singing and dancing selves). This truth-telling narrative convention also dovetails with the exposure of a performer’s ability, which is revealed principally in song.
I don’t think there’s a question that aspects of who we are as individuals are revealed in our voices, and even in our breathing, but whether that information can be read clearly or accurately by anyone else is another story entirely, so the question of truth and the truth of what is revealed vocally seems nebulous at best. With all her listening experience, Rodenburg, for example, perhaps would have greater powers of perception than most. Yet, as Barthes puts it, emphasizing the singularity of the listener at least: “This phonetics—am I alone in perceiving it?... isn’t the truth of the voice to be hallucinated?” (184). Certainly the ear that hears is every bit as individual as the voice that speaks.
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