What's in a voice?

I was listening to a speaker, whom i often listen to, just this morning. While listening, i observed that his voice had become familiar to me.

I started to reflect on the power of a person's voice. In a way, it is their identity. I remember only a few months ago, suffering with a sore throat that eventually led to me losing my voice temporarily. I sounded so strange to lots of people. I had to go back to work - which involves meeting with and speaking with lots of people in any working day. I could tell that the people i spoke with beyond feeling sorry for me, instantly recognised that there was something wrong with my voice. This included people who knew what my voice normally sounded like, and those who were meeting me for the first time.

In this present world, i think about why a person's voice matters. It is a common avenue through which people express their essence. So whether they are making cooing sounds to a new-born baby, or delivering a key-note address at a high-stakes conference, a person's voice allows them to demonstrate their personality and their beliefs. This is why i think about the way that our voices change throughout our lives.

Does out essence then change throughout our lives? I think so. When i think about how my voice sounded when i was a child and then an adolescent and how it sounds now, there is an obvious difference. It might be something with the actual anatomy of the vocal cords throughout our lives. But there is something else that has changed my voice. When i moved to the United Kingdom, my already soft tone of voice became even softer as i aimed to speak in a similar way as the locals so as to be able to communicate effectively with them. I now wonder if i changed my essence by making that change?

I suggest in this write-up that our voices change, so that we can adapt.

Perhaps, we need to adapt to our growing body mass when our voices change as adolescents, or we need to adapt to the changing world around us, involving such astronomical development in information technology. The way that we express ourselves by voice has certainly changed by the bombardment of information we get on a daily basis, through constant news cycles mostly just constantly pinging on our phones and mobile devices. I find that our voices now mostly have an undertone of fear. This fear can be demonstrated by anxiety, worry, hate, division, hopelessness. Therefore people can start to speak through these emotional states and it is often clear in the voice when this happens.

The other aspect of the rise in information technology that can affect our voice (and i have certainly noticed this in myself), is that we can start to lose our individuality. We are afraid of being different or thinking differently than the general population (or gen pop - if you watched Prison break series back in the day 😊). I was once i a meeting where one of the attendees had very different views from the norm, which he was able to express respectfully and clearly. He made a point to say that because he has differing views from most people on this issue, he often felt that he should be quiet and not express his views. I thought this was a sad reality. A world in which everyone sounds the same and has the same views, is not a world i think would foster growth and personal/corporate growth.

I hope that i can continue to think and speak with my own voice, in a way that i can understand and be at peace with.