The Colors And Textures Of Your Voice

Both vocal color and texture modulate to varying degrees of intensity as the voice rises, falls, and vibrates in specific ways. The typical ways in which your voice behaves and expresses emotions during word production, along with your unique vocal colors and textures, gives your voice and speech a consistent and persistent identity. Vocal color and texture are the essence of vocal identity. Let's look at this more closely.

Consider your voice in normal speech.  Say aloud, for instance, "I think that singing is a beautiful form of expression." In this voiced phrase, one can clearly hear your distinctive identity shine through, one that points to a one-of-a-kind person. Now, repeat the same phrase, but this time, just whisper it. You'll notice that, although your pitch and volume fluctuations, personal phrasing patterns, and even your emotional expressions are very close to those in your original spoken utterance, "you" are, nonetheless, conspicuously absent. What was most essential about the identity of the voice has vanished.

Consider a child's coloring book, one with empty figures to be colored in with crayons. On one page you could see the simple sketch of a popular vista in Yellowstone National Park, with the outlines of mountains, valleys, clouds, and a lake in the distance. Although the bare-bone figures and landscapes are recognizable for what they are individually, the viewer has a difficult time seeing them as a necessary and integral part of the national park. But the difference is even deeper.

If we casually gaze at such a denuded picture, we will notice that the vacuous configurations effectively shut down our imagination and emotions. On the other hand, simply add a few wistful strokes of white texture to the clouds, glistening aqua blue to the lake, verdant hues to the valleys, and then you will begin to know, recognize, and imaginatively experience the vital life portrayed in the picture.

Similarly, one's vocal colors and textures fill in and give identifiable substance to one's voice. Words, phrases, pitch, volume fluctuations, and breathing patterns are general structures of vocal communication that have no necessary connection to individual people. But when a person's uniquely colored vocal tones and textures are heard, then personal emotional states of mind, attitudes, and intentions come into existence for the listener to experience. One's vocal sound, in other words, contains the essential person.

Image source: Krzysztof Wiktor/Shutterstock