How do human voices work? - podcast

What makes our speaking voices so distinctive and so recognisable? How can we transform the way we use our voice?

This podcast was produced at the time of the This Is A Voice exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. This Is A Voice is also a book by Jeremy Fisher and Gillyanne Kayes offering 99 exercises to train, project and harness the power of your voice.

In the podcast, Jeremy and Gillyanne join Nicola Davis in the studio along with Steven Connor, professor of English at the University of Cambridge, who has written extensively on the history of the voice, sound and music.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2016/may/06/how-do-human-voices-work-podcast

Vocal work with Sarah Grundy and her loop pedal

In addition to working with the Drone Ensemble on some audio to my forthcoming exhibition at The Word, I am collaborating with Sarah Grundy. Sarah is an interdisciplinary artist who works in sound, performance, theatre, and music. The majority of her work looks to worldmaking – creating an idealised alternative for living in or dealing with society. She is also part of ‘The Anima Collective’ who explore the potential of the voice through singing. Sarah also performs with Edwin Li as Leroy McSex in the musical, drag duo Shirley Mann and Leroy McSex.

Sarah and I had spoken about the work a few weeks ago, and we both agreed that using the loop pedal with Sarah's voice could be a good way to achieve the layering of voices that I want to create. When we met today I gave her a sheet with words on that she could use to play around with.

In her usual remarkable way, she soon began to thread words together and create some rhythmic patterns and harmonies, exemplified through the use of the loop pedal. We made a great start, and are to continue with developing this piece.

Visit to The Word to discuss forthcoming exhibition

Yesterday Jenny Richards and I went to The Word in South Shields to meet to discuss plans for my solo exhibition and to develop plans for a symposium to be held to coincide with the exhibition. I have been speaking with Jenny Richards, Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at Newcastle University. Her current work is focussed on the physical voice, the fifth part of rhetoric, pronuntiatio or delivery, and the history of reading aloud.

Jennifer invited me to be part of her project, Recovering the Voice.

One of the outputs of the project is to host an event that brings together eminent Voice specialists and academics in order to share research and work towards the development of a large scale funding bid to the AHRC or Wellcome Trust. It is this event that we proposed to host at the the symposium at The Word.

Richard Barber and Pauline Martin at The Word were both very encouraging about hosting the symposium at The Word, and suggested that we actually adjust the dates of my exhibition so that it corresponds with Write Festival which is happening in May, and should attracts lots of people. We looked at possible options of spaces in which the symposium could take place. I'll keep you posted with dates.

Losing a voice through Motor Neurone Disease and gaining a voice through Voicebank

This is a powerful and emotional documentary about Lucy Lintott, the youngest person with motor neurone disease in Scotland.

'Lucy Lintott, is becoming paralysed - she can no longer walk unassisted and she's losing her voice - not great for a chatterbox like Lucy. Even though she's been given only a few years to live, Lucy is determined to do what 22 year olds do - including dating. Over a six-month period, this lover of food and country music reveals how she is struggling to hold on to her personality and her infectious laugh.

Lucy visits Newcastle where she meets a stand-up comedian who can still crack a joke even though he can't speak.

In an emotional photographic sitting with portrait photographer Rankin, Lucy confronts two polarised parts of herself - the perfect Lucy pre-diagnosis, and the broken Lucy three years after diagnosis.'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0904xtm/mnd-and-22yearold-me

Lucy visits Speak:Unique, a research project at the University of Edinburgh, where her voice was recorded in order for a synthetic voice to be made in case she loses her ability to talk.

For the best results, the person would record their voice before there has been any effect on their speech.

But, as is the case for Lucy, if there has already been some impact on the speech of the person, it may be possible to ‘repair’ some of the voice by adding in higher levels of another person's voice (a donor voice). Lucy's sister was a donor voice and also had her voice recorded.

During the recording session they said a selection of 400 sentences that include the various combinations of English speech sounds. While 400 sentences is an ideal number, a synthetic voice can be generated from as little as 100 sentences if people aren’t able to manage the 400. This voice recording is then “banked” and stored ready to create a synthetic voice for a communication aid if, and when, that person needs one. Using software developed by speech scientists, all the parameters of that unique voice can be automatically analysed and synthetically reproduced in a process called “voice cloning”.

During the voice cloning process the synthetically reproduced parameters of a patient’s voice are combined with those of healthy donor voices. Features of donor voices with the same age, sex and regional accent as the patient are pooled together to form an “average voice model”, which acts as a base on which to generate the synthetic voice.

The programme helped me realise how voice is such an important aspect of a person's individuality.

One participant of the Voicebank Research Project clinical pilot states:

“…I would far prefer to use it (their own personalised digital voice) than the annoyingly bland off the shelf version. The voice identifies the person and to a large extent its tone expresses both personality and character so to capture this is in a synthesised version is an important development for many of us who have speech issues.

To be able to communicate in a way in which sounds like my voice and therefore all that it portrays beyond the words themselves is a huge advance. Another important step towards maintaining personal dignity in the face of severe handicap which is an essential ingredient of compassionate care in my view. ”

For more information please visit

http://lucysfight.com/index.html

http://www.mndscotland.org.uk/

http://www.speakunique.org/

The Race to Fingerprint the Human Voice - Radio 4

A fascinating programme investigating the role of the human voice in forensic phonetics.

'Forensic phonetics - or voice identification - has long been used in legal proceedings to help determine if the voice on a recording is that of the defendant. But with the electronic age enabling the recording and storage of more data than ever before, its role in criminal investigations is changing rapidly and the race is on to "fingerprint the human voice".

Rory Bremner looks at some of the new research in this growing area of forensics - its applications in the fields of law enforcement and counterterrorism, and why there is such resistance to it in the UK, where we still prefer to rely on the human voice analyst than on an automated system. He hears about high profile cases involving speaker identification - including Michael Stone's conviction for the murder and Lin and Megan Russell and the conviction of John Humble as the hoax caller claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper.

Rory also talks to Francis Nolan, Professor of Phonetics, about how the way we think of people as having "a voice" oversimplifies matters. Compared to a fingerprint pattern, which is always a constant, physical characteristic, the voice is the product of two mechanisms which vary considerably - the speech organs and language. Fingerprints are identified through literal analysis; voices are identified through comparative voiceprints. Your voice as your password is now becoming an everyday reality rather than a SciFi cliche. But can it really be said that every voice is unique, as some have claimed?

The development of increasingly sophisticated automated speaker recognition systems is now bringing the prospect of a "voiceprint" enticingly close. But how accurate are these systems? Can they differentiate between 'real' Trump and Rory's impression of Trump...?'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b090293g

Contributors:
Professor Peter French
Professor Hugh McLachlan
Dr Helen Fraser
Dr Kirsty McDougall
Professor Francis Nolan
Erica Thomson

Presented by Rory Bremner

Talking to ourselves

I recently discovered the BBC World Service podcast called 'The Why Factor' in which "Mike Williams searches for the extraordinary and hidden histories behind everyday objects and actions to inform us about the way we live in the 21st Century and questions why we do the things we do". Through my research into 'the voice', I was directed to the episode titled 'Talking to ourselves'.

There are a number of reasons why people talk to themselves, for instance

- to provide some company

- as a tool of survival

- to make us feel comfortable

- to help organise thoughts

- to go through instructions out aloud

- as a way of making us feel calmer

- as a form of therapy

- to be a source of reassurrance

- to process feelings and thoughts by speaking out loud

- to help us when we need to concentrate

- to aid memory

- as a way to drown out the chatter of the various other parts of the brain


Talking to ourselves does not mean that we have a mental illness!

When we remember something in public and make a sound e.g. "oops!", it may be a way of trying to demonstrate to others around that one is sane, but have just forgotten something.

In the 1970s, the American psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed that humans stored information in the right side of the brain. He thought that the left and right side of the brain were more independent than we now think, and that the information in the right side of the brain needed to be transferred to the left side of the brain via the bundle of nerves called the corpus callosum.

According to Jaynes, the message was transmitted in the form of language, and people tended to perceive this as a voice coming from outside of themselves, as an auditory hallucination. These external voices were often attributed to leaders, the monarchy or the gods.

Jaynes later acknowledged that the voices were not always from outside of the self, but could come from within ones self in the form of an inner critic.

When we are young, the people around us give us lots of rules to follow and they influence our perception of who we are and who we think we ought to be.

When someone is traumatised, they may try to protect themselves by disassociating themselves from their inner critic or internal voice, and instead believe that it is the voice of an other. This is otherwise known as an auditory hallucination. The difference between someone who experiences inner speech and someone who is mentally ill and has auditory hallucinations is that those with mental health issues believe the voices they hear are outside of themselves as opposed to from within. To complicate matters, not all inner critics are heard as though they are coming from the head. There are some people who hear their inner voice from their stomachs or elsewhere in the body.

Sound of your own voice may help you understand your emotions - New Scientist

By Katharine Sharpe

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28753-sound-of-your-own-voice-may-help-you-understand-your-emotions/

Like the sound of your own voice? You may be more emotionally in tune than the rest of us. This is the upshot of a study that suggests people use their voice to help them understand their own emotions.

You’d be forgiven for assuming that feelings come first, followed by their outward expression, but in the past few years it has become clear that it’s more of a two-way street. Our bodies play an active role in shaping our thoughts and emotions. For example, you may think that you smile because you are happy, but the physical sensation of smiling can create happy feelings. Now it seems our voice has similar powers.

A team led by Jean-Julien Aucouturier at the CNRS, the French national centre for scientific research, created a computer programme that allowed them to electronically manipulate the emotional content of people’s voices. They asked 109 participants to read a short story about buying bread, and then used the programme to modify each voice to sound either happy, sad or fearful.

When they listened to the altered recording, most people did not realise their voices had been altered in any way. “Everyone else around could tell their voice had been changed to happy or sad, but they couldn’t. They believed that how they were hearing it was really how they’d said it,” says Aucouturier.

Vocal emotions

Not only were the volunteers unaware of how they sounded, when asked how they felt 85 per cent gave answers that aligned with how their voices had been modified. Skin conductance tests confirmed that they did indeed feel this way.

“It is really a striking result that participants ended up updating their emotional state in response to whether their own voices were made to sound happy, sad or anxious,” says Aucouturier.

It makes sense to process the emotional expression in others’ voices, he says. “If you’re angry, I need to know about it because I could be in danger, but there does not seem to be any point in becoming afraid of the sound of a voice when you know it is your own. You could call it a bug in the system, like an auto-immune reaction.”

A more likely explanation, says Aucouturier, is that the volunteers used their voice to provide information about themselves: I sound happy so I probably am. “This is a completely novel finding – think about what you may infer about yourself the next time you have a sore throat and start sounding like Darth Vader.”

Therapy boost

“We infer our own emotions in much the same way as we infer them for other people,” says psychologist Simone Schnall from the University of Cambridge. “This study suggests that even subtle changes in vocal expression carry subjective meaning in the context of emotion regulation.”

It’s unclear how big a part voice plays in our emotional awareness since facial muscles, heart rate, breathing, all play a part in how we feel, says Aucouturier. “How all of these interact, and what prevails in case of conflicting evidence is still largely unknown. But voice is such a powerful and ubiquitous medium in daily expression of emotion that it’s bound to play an important role.”

Mark Huckvale at University College London treats people with schizophrenia via an avatar. He says that the technique could be applied in mental health therapy. “Feeding back the client’s voice sounding more cheerful could possibly boost the benefit of therapy.” It could help build the client’s self-confidence, he says.

Storytelling: how reading aloud is back in fashion

Following my blog post yesterday about Jenny Richard's lecture, 'Voices and books: a new history of reading', I came across this article in The Observer, published in 2013.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/06/storytelling-back-in-fashion

At a weekly book club, Elizabeth Day has found that even in an age of social networking, the direct, oral tradition can still reach out to a new audience


"The last time someone told Thomas Yeomans a story, he was a child. Last week he wandered into a storytelling session for adults without quite knowing what lay in store. "For me, reading has become more formal over the years; it's something I do on my own," explained Yeomans, a 26-year-old artist. "So I swept into this at the last minute, not knowing what to expect."

Yeomans happened to find himself in one of the weekly storytelling sessions that I have been running over the past month in an art gallery in central London. When I developed the idea with gallerist Simon Oldfield, the premise was simple: we both felt that the tradition of reading aloud and sharing stories with each other was something that had been lost in modern times. In an era of social networking and electronic gadgetry, when friendships are conducted via computer screen and culture is increasingly savoured in isolation through a pair of noise-reducing headphones, we have neglected the pleasures of direct experience.

Many of us used to be told stories as children. But as we grow older, we seem to lose the knack. Yet there is undoubtedly an appetite for it: revenue from downloaded audiobooks has risen by 32.7% since last year, while The Reader Organisation, a charity that aims to engage people through the shared reading of great literature, now has 350 weekly shared reading groups across the country.

"What happens with shared reading is that people experience a very intense thing together, but everybody has their own personal, private, inner response to it," says Jane Davis, founder of The Reader Organisation. "A lot of people don't understand how poor literacy is in our country. For many, reading aloud gives you access to things you would simply never read otherwise."

Like Davis, it struck me that, while there had been a welcome resurgence of book groups and literary festivals over the past decade, there was little chance for adults to engage in group reading without some sort of self-improving literary discussion at the end of it, or a nagging sense that one should really be buying the author's newest work as part of an unspoken commercial transaction. Which is how I came to be reading Anne Enright's short story, Here's To Love, in the week before Christmas when Yeomans wandered through the door. "What I liked about it was that this was an informal setting and a gentle, welcoming environment where my defences were down," Yeomans said after the session. "It really pulled at my heart strings. I felt like a defenceless child again."

Helen Ervin, a 38-year-old marketing executive from New York, agreed: "There's an intimacy that happens when you get a whole bunch of people together… There was a moment in today's story where I thought I might cry. There's an emotion brought to the surface when you're reading aloud because it's being performed."

Another attendee said he had come because "the idea of reading is hard work to me. I'm dyslexic, so I prefer to listen to radio plays and things like that. I was completely sucked in today. It was really engaging."

For Doris Julian, 70, the experience "took me right back to being a child and being read to in the library. I like to listen to le Carré audiobooks and things like that, but there's nothing better than the real version. It's very descriptive and I love it. I can't think of a nicer way to spend an afternoon."

By this time I'd been running the storytelling sessions for a month and had been bowled over by the response. More and more people came in each week to listen to short stories by authors as diverse as Dorothy Whipple and Jon McGregor in a room hung with striking works of contemporary art. Local businesses were keen to get involved: Majestic gave us free wine to serve and a rug company, Bazaar Velvet, loaned us a beautiful Anatolian carpet for everyone to sit on, engendering a real community feel and invoking the true childhood spirit of Jackanory.

A handful of regulars came to every session. It seemed to tap into something – a kind of long-forgotten tradition that we still felt in our bones. Reading aloud has a noble history. Before the invention of the movable-type printing press in the 1430s, oral storytelling was a means of cementing community bonds and passing folk narratives on to the next generation. In medieval times, storytellers were honoured members of royal courts. From 1500 storytelling continued to be popular in an era of widespread illiteracy, when books were still too expensive for the common man.

"Often a neighbour would have a Bible and would read aloud from it," says Jennifer Richards, a professor of early modern literature and culture at Newcastle University. "Or there would be rhetorical training for boys at grammar school, [but] the appeal of reading aloud is not about education; it's about being social, part of a community."

In the 18th and 19th centuries, reading aloud continued to be a form of entertainment. "People didn't have recorded music or films or television, so books had to be everything; they needed to be dramatic, entertaining, comic and sentimental," explains Dr Abigail Williams, a lecturer in English at Oxford University. "One of the things about reading aloud is that you have to do it in small bits. You can't just do it for hours on end, so that brings out qualities in the text you might otherwise miss. People become the characters in a way they don't if you are reading flatly for yourself. You get more of the comedy and the dialogue works differently because it becomes the spoken voice, rather than a transcription of the spoken voice."

But none of this can entirely convey the intensity and intimacy of the experience. I was surprised by how many people who came to the storytelling sessions were visibly moved by the experience – I would glance up from the text and see someone's eyes gleaming, on the brink of tears. Others would look away, lost in their own private universe. One man came up to me afterwards and admitted that he thought a character in one of the stories was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – a condition that he too had been diagnosed with.

It is a sensation familiar to Davis, who runs reading groups for a cross-section of society – from young doctors without the time to read, to prisoners or groups of pensioners in economically deprived areas. "These little private bombs go off in your head, something strikes a chord [because] with the shared reading experience you are not an observer or discusser; you're going through the experience with everyone else," she says.

"There are a lot of people out there whose connection to the world is through TV and things like I'm A Celebrity. Lots of people don't have a chance to have a serious, intellectual, meaningful experience, and that's what humans are for. We need that… A book provides a wonderful anonymity for personal feelings and responses."

The Reader Organisation has case studies on its website that pay testament to the power of shared reading. A woman in her 60s from Birkenhead is quoted as saying: "For many years I have had a lot of pain in my body, but when I am in the group the reading and sharing of stories helps me to focus my mind away from the physical pain and forget about it for a couple of hours... It kind of lifts you out of the pain."

A survey by the same charity of 214 people who had attended storytelling groups found that 96% enjoyed meeting people they wouldn't normally meet, while 80% left feeling "more positive" about life.

I can't speak for all those who came to our sessions, but I certainly left feeling more positive about lots of things – about the power of literature to engage, the special kind of intimacy gained from a communal experience and the ability to communicate with so many different people without any kind of ulterior motive.

We weren't trying to sell anything. We weren't pretending to improve anyone's mind. All we wanted to do was to share a story. And in the end, it was not just about reading out loud, but also about reading ourselves."

Everything Will Be Alright (Scouring pads) animation is now on vimeo

The Scouring pad stop motion animation that forms part of my current exhibition, Everything Will Be Alright can now be seen online on vimeo. 

Check it out!

Everything Will Be Alright (Scouring pads)

Everything Will Be Alright (Scouring pads) from Helen Shaddock on Vimeo.

My work featured on the Listening Booth

Today is the launch of my audio track 'Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger' on the Listening Booth.

http://thelisteningbooth.co.uk/latest-submission/

It is available for free streaming and downloading so you can listen to it anytime and anywhere!

It will remain on the Listening Booth from today.

While you are there, check out some of the other tracks by other artists/musicians/audio folk!

Front Row reviews 'This is a voice'

Wednesday's edition of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 features a review of 'This is a Voice', a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London which has brought together a number of works by artists who have been inspired by the voice. 

It examines how tone, pitch and tempo can communicate meaning and emotion so effectively that words become unnecessary. Joan La Barbara, a composer known for her explorations of "extended" vocal techniques, and Imogen Stidworthy, whose video work explores how our voice affects our sense of self, respond to the exhibition and discuss why the voice is such an inspiration for them.

http://bbc.in/1MuorRO

THIS IS A VOICE

Wellcome Collection
183 Euston Road
London NW1 2BE

14th April - 31st July 2016

THIS IS A VOICE creates an acoustic journey through art, sound and film to capture the elusive nature of the human voice. From its origins within the body, to the sounds ringing in our heads, this exhibition celebrates the oral and the aural, with live performances in the gallery each day.

The exhibition features the work of artists and vocalists including Joan La Barbara, Imogen Stidworthy, Sam Belinfante, Enrico David, Meredith Monk, Marcus Coates, Anna Barham and Emma Smith, and visitors can add their own voices to the mix as part of an interactive new commission by electronic musician Matthew Herbert.

http://wellcomecollection.org

It will be alright setup in Project Space

Recently I have been working on a sound piece called It will be alright. It features my voice and consists of 6 vocal tracks that are layered over each other. A few short sentences are repeated throughout, but the tone and volume of the voice varies.

Over the past few days I have been working in the project space to try different set ups of the installation. I used 4 speakers and connected these to a sound card which was connected to my laptop. There were 6 channels going into the speakers, so 2 of the speakers had 2 voices at once.

Working in the space, I edited the audio so that the audio came from different directions. I made stands for the speakers to be placed on so that the sound comes from head height as opposed to the floor or the room in general. I composed the sound to produce tension between the speakers, rather like two voices were arguing with each other from different side of the room. My intention is that the audience are surrounded by the sound, and immersed in the situation. In order to minimise the distractions and focus attention on the audio, the blinds were drawn so as to make the room as dark as possible.

Following my crit on Tuesday, I made a few changes to the audio (removing a few of the phrases from the work, adding more pauses etc), and then invited people to come to listen to the work on Wednesday. 

It is important to me that the audience listen to the whole of the work, as opposed to being able to enter at any point and leave before the end. I therefore chose not to show it on a loop, but instead allowed the viewer/s into the space, told them the work would last about 6 minutes and that I would leave and close the door. 

I waited outside the space until the audio had ended, and then opened the door, allowing the viewer to leave. 

I talked to many people about the work once they had experienced it, and received some very useful and positive responses. 

It became obvious that the work has a powerful impact, and in a couple of circumstances, people were moved to tears.

I want to make a few adjustments to the setup of the installation, such as finding a way to hide the speakers, the laptop and equipment. People commented that the light from the devices was off-putting, and that the speakers had too much of a presence in the space, and became like figures due to their height. In order to overcome these issues, I would need to build a darkened room, and position the speakers and equipment behind the walls.

I am considering whether there should be a limit to the number of people who can experience the work at the same time. One of the people who was brought to tears by the work told me afterwards that she would not have been able to respond so emotionally if there had been another person in the room with her.