Voice

Hello Everyone,

A few weeks ago, my family celebrated my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary partly by listening to a cassette recording of the speeches made at their reception. The best man spoke first, offering encouragement and congratulations. My uncle spoke next, seeing the occasion as a chance not only to offer wisdom and his best wishes, but also to share some of his favorite jokes regardless of whether he could think of an appropriate segue. Then it was time for the speech my brother and I had been waiting a lifetime to hear. Ever since I can remember, people have been telling me what a good speech my dad gave. “A classic,” they’d say. “I will remember it for the rest of my life.”

So we were ready to be amazed, and amazed we certainly were. A man with a rather high pitched and vaguely sibilant voice started talking and Matthew and I assumed he was introducing our father. It took us about a minute of context clues and assurance from our parents to realize that it was our father. It was a great speech, but though the content was quintessential Daddy with a sustained comic theme, a hilarious impression of the then president of South Africa, P.W. Botha, and a brilliantly placed pun to cap it all off, the voice was incongruous. He proceeded to speak this way for maybe ten minutes. His intonation and inflection were the same, but that voice! We thought maybe the tape had warped after three decades, but the other two speakers had sounded normal. There was only one explanation: his voice has changed significantly.

This incident threw into turmoil an analogy I adopted several years ago to help me understand the difference between artistic “style” and “voice.” I heard from an illustrator that one’s style is more superficial or at least more controllable than one’s voice. Just as you can change fashion styles by putting on a different set of clothes, you can change artistic styles by choosing to draw differently, for example by including significantly more or less detail, by using a very different medium, or by relying more or less on value or textures. I think that accents are the vocal equivalent of style. My brother can change between accents faster than an experienced shopaholic goes through outfits in the Nordstrom changing rooms on Black Friday. Even people who aren’t training to be actors sometimes find themselves involuntarily imitating those exotic foreigners who pronounce “been” as “bean,” and who say things like “I need to go to the loo.”

One’s voice, though, is much harder to change. We think that essentially once we’ve braved our way through the murky waters of puberty, our voices remain relatively constant. I had a childhood friend who was always trying to make her voice less nasal. And though her attempts provided me many a good laugh, she never succeeded in modifying her voice at all. And perhaps because of this apparent permanence, it seems that people sometimes listen more to our voices than to our accents or even to the words we say. Although my mom’s accent has softened a bit and mine has always been slightly more British-sounding than my peers’, we have distinctly different accents. And yet I can’t count the number of times I answer the phone by saying, “Hi, this is Sarah,” only to have the person on the other end respond by saying, “Hi Sue, this is so-and-so.” It gets confusing when they ask for me:
“Oh hi, Carrie. Actually, this is Sarah.”
“How are you doing? Are you having a good summer?”
“Yeah, it’s been good. You?”
“Very good, thank you. Well, could you tell Sarah that she needs to set up an appointment at the dentist?”
“Um . . . well, this IS Sarah.”
“She could come in any time next week.”
“Uh . . . actually, this is -- oh nevermind. Yeah, I’ll have her call you back.”

So it was all the more strange to me that it was my dad’s voice -- not just his accent -- that had changed so dramatically. The analogy the illustrator had given me was in danger of either exploding or expanding. If my physical voice doesn’t remain constant throughout life, does that meant that my artistic voice will also change? Of course, I want to grow and develop, but shouldn’t there be a definitive Mouse-ish-ness to all my work? I don’t know, and I don’t suppose it is terribly helpful or healthy to be constantly examining my work wondering, “Is this drawing the real me? . . . What about this one?” So many things are better understood in retrospect.

Some voices do change over time, and so they should. They subconsciously react to new experiences and other people’s voices. Come to think of it, this sounds a lot like the job description of an artist. The past thirty years have been incredibly rich for my parents, and if the next thirty are similarly varied, who knows what my dad will sound like in 2040!

Have a good week,
Sarah/Mouse