Tinelli's "Sing with Me" is now vying for the ratings of "The Voice Argentina," the other singing competition show watched by millions of viewers. The contestants—selected through meticulously designed auditions—repeatedly emphasize the importance of singing in their lives. We were discussing with cultural critic Pablo Gianera the halting oral expression of some writers, prodigies of the written word. He gave the example of Juan José Saer's disjointed speech, despite his exceptionally rich, subtle, and fluid prose.
I'm much more of a writer than a speaker (a colleague even tells me I'm better at writing). When I started teaching at the National University of La Plata, I clung to the handwritten script. I told my students that, in reality, I "wrote" the classes in the air. Over time, I developed more skill in telling stories aloud, trying to illuminate an idea or concept with them (without much success, I must say). The difficulty with my voice always remained.
I recently received a message that said, “If my voice sounds like the one I just heard in this WhatsApp audio, I apologize to everyone I’ve ever spoken to.” I feel the same way. I’ve always connected our lack of awareness of our own voices with our general difficulty in understanding others, and in understanding ourselves in particular. We don’t know what lies beyond the walls of the room we’re in. Therefore, we can’t be too confident in grasping more complex truths. And perhaps one of the most complex truths is, precisely, knowing oneself.
There's an anthropological lesson in human anatomy: we need others (or technological advances) to know ourselves. We can't see our own backs, not even in a mirror. The same is true of the voice, which demonstrates that it's an instrument of communication. A vehicle designed primarily to convey the meaning we're giving to words to another person. Because in spoken language, meaning depends largely on the voice.
Until 2020, I would lose my voice a couple of times a year. Then, a friend suggested I see a vocal coach to improve my diction and train my voice. I found the right person on LinkedIn for this need, someone who uses their voice as a means of communication and wanted to improve it. When I started voice coaching, I didn't realize I would need it so much that year because of the pandemic. In the Zoom classes, vocal consistency became even more important. I even recorded several podcasts to complement my lessons.
The voice has this ability to travel through space and reach beyond distance, to connect us, to unite us. This explains the enduring relevance of radio and a new golden age of sound media. Since then, I've also started singing more. When I was younger, I sang quite a bit, but lately I haven't been doing it as much. Around that time, my sister asked me if I usually sang in the shower. I said no, and I realized I was putting very little musicality into my voice.
The voice is a fundamental tool for anyone involved in communication—that is, for almost everyone: teachers, politicians, leaders, actors, businesspeople. Sometimes, we place far more emphasis on written communication skills than on oral ones. And then it turns out that, in professional life, for every five times we use the spoken word in conversations or meetings, we only use the written word once.
Strictly speaking, both forms of communication complement each other because, for example, for the voice to flow naturally and harmoniously, it's necessary to have a script, a well-thought-out outline of what we're going to say. Nothing is more carefully crafted than a conversation that seems spontaneous, like in the theater. Quevedo said that for texts to be clean, for writing to flow like water, drafts need to be very dark. The same is true for spoken language. The clearer we are about what we want to say, the more naturally it unfolds.
The voice connects us to our bodies even more than writing. The performance of the voice is more physical than that of the written word. When I'm improvising in public, speaking into a microphone, my hesitations, my searches, or the emotion that uttering a word awakens in me, are quickly reflected in my voice. There is no more expressive means of personal, bodily communication. This leads us to consider the need to incorporate emotion into our conversations, in addition to discourse, rational structure, and argumentation. And emotion appears in the voice when it is authentic.
In written text, there is always a safeguard, a protection (although the written text also contains a person compressed within it). With the voice, the emotional connection is more direct, among other things because the reception of the voice recovers the register, the tone, which incorporates emotion, and which is a vehicle for transmitting physicality. This is something that young people are losing because they have fewer and fewer real-time phone calls and listen more to recorded and delayed audio. The advantage of real-time oral communication is immediate feedback. With the timbre of their voice, the listener conveys the emotional reaction they experience upon hearing what we have just said.
There are people with beautiful eyes but an unpleasant gaze, and people whose voice clashes with their eloquence. We shouldn't neglect voice training, a vital instrument of communication.
