Vexed by my voice
The first time I heard my voice on a recording, I was horrified.
I was probably 8 or 9, and our dad had brought home a tape recorder, the kind with the actual brown tape that travels between two plastic wheels. My sisters and I took turns turning the lever, pushing the red button, and then holding the microphone too close to our faces as we spoke a few words. Probably something eloquent, like Hi!
Is that really what I sound like?
Years later, I’ve gotten over the cringe – sort of. I often narrate the documentaries I produce for public television, not because I have the best voice in town (far from it), but because my boss thinks it’s a good idea for me to narrate the words I write. It’s nice of him, because others in the business here have much better voices.
My speaking voice is lowish, and often a bit nasal. When I go into the audio booth to record my scripts, I take a cup of hot tea with lemon and honey. I don’t know that it makes much of a difference in the quality or timbre, but the sound coming through the headphones is better.
It’s only through recordings that we ever really learn how we sound to other people. The difference between what I hear when I speak and what comes back to me in a recording is the result of physiology. When I speak, I’m hearing my voice as it bounces through my brain and the bones in my head and ears. On recording playback, I’m hearing the sound as it approaches from a different angle, through the air outside and around my head.
Each time I’m ready to send one of my documentaries out into the world, I visit Jim Cunningham in the WQED-FM studio, to do a podcast about the project. I was in there with Jim this week as he interviewed me about my new documentary about social isolation. There is no kinder person, no better interviewer than Jim. During the 15-minute chat, our topics meander a bit as he and I follow the ideas that run between his microphone and mine.
When I listen back, I don’t like what I hear. The experience of hearing my voice sends me back those 50 years to when I first cringed at my voice. By now, I’m used to the sound of my voice, but I’ve become aware of some verbal habits that annoy me, and probably annoy others. I’ve managed to get rid of the more common verbal spacers of “like” and “um.” I’ve replaced them with a strange “and” that I tend to use to begin every thought. And I pronounce it all drawn out, like I’m trying to form a thought.
Which is exactly what happens, at least when I’m off script.
When watching documentary films of other people, I pay attention to the narration. Peter Coyote has long narrated Ken Burns’ work, and he nails it every time, as did David McCullough. Sally Kellerman had the best among the female narrators. You’d recognize her voice from the Hidden Valley dressing commercials: smooth as honey mustard. Makes me wonder whether she was born with that delivery, or if she built it as she went along.
And I’m wondering what the great narrators thought back in the day of reel-to-reel tape recorders, when they first held a microphone and played it back to listen. That moment when they heard themselves the way the rest of the world did, and couldn’t believe the sound of it.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.