The Vocal Body: Extract from A Philosophical Encyclopedia of the Body

The following essay previously appeared in French as an entry in a Dictionnaire du corps published by PUF in 2007. The translation below is from the original, unpublished Italian manuscript.

Voice is so inherent to the human body that the body can be considered its instrument. The lungs, trachea, larynx, mouth and other organs of respiration and alimentation transform into organs of phonation (Tomatis 1991). The first cry of the newborn is voice and breath: a sonorous, vital announcement of a singular bodily existence. As each body is always unique, so each voice differs from all the others. And as is typical of a living being, each voice develops along a temporal arc of existence and marks the physiological points on this trajectory. From infancy to maturity to old age, the voice remains unique but changes as the body changes, most conspicuously in the case of male puberty. The development of the body, especially that of the gendered body, manifests itself vocally. Though predisposed to the perception of sound in general, the human ear is, above all, tuned to this vocal emission that reveals singular bodies to one another. In contrast to speech, the voice puts hearing in play even before listening.

Speaking Voice

Auditory perception is so strongly privileged that, in modern as in ancient languages, the terms corresponding to the English voice (Latin: vox, Greek: phōnē) tend to denote a large spectrum of sound phenomena with either animate or inanimate sources. This means that voice is not primarily human and that the “voice of the wind” is not necessarily a metaphor. Most modern dictionaries, however, define “voice” first as human voice, the ensemble of sounds emitted from the larynx and the system of phonation organs. They then specify in greater detail that such sounds are produced by the vocal chords entering into vibration under the effect of a rhythmic nerve excitation (Rey 1996); or that the breathing apparatus together with the nasal cavity and the mouth contribute to the emission of sound (Devoto and Oli 1990); or even that this type of definition applies equally to human and to animal phonation organs (Oxford English Dictionary). The inclusion of the animal is worth noting not only because the connection of the voice to the body ends up underscoring the physiological affinity between man and animal—at least, any animal equipped with a vocal apparatus—but above all, because the entrance of the animal into the primary and principal definition of voice functions as a sign, if not as a symptom, of the problematic and hardly self-evident decision to take voice to mean human voice in the first place.

More than simply anthropocentric, this choice can be defined as logocentric. It goes back to the complex point at which Greek philosophy is seen to privilege the connection between voice and speech, thus imprisoning voice in the realm of logos and in the cluster of questions that characterize the development of the philosophical tradition as a continuous reflection on language (Heidegger 1959). Given that the term logos can mean not only “speech” and “language” but also “discourse,” “number,” and, above all, “reason” and “thought,” in this context voice is consigned to play a role that generates a series of paradoxes. Consider the famous metaphor of the “voice of reason,” a conceptual analogue for the “voice of the soul,” which can be traced as far back as Plato (Sophist 263e), not to mention to the more modern “voice of the conscience” (Desideri 1998). The metaphor illustrates the paradox for which, in the context of a logos taken tendentially as reason, voice is not only deprived of its sonorous physicality but, in its incorporeal form, becomes human voice par excellence inasmuch as the human is likewise defined as a rational animal. The usage dictionaries that make reference to the act of speaking in the primary definition of voice (Grimm 1941; Rey 1993; de Mauro 2000) have their roots in a conceptual history of the voice based on a philosophical stance that holds speaking to be dependent...