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Wednesday, 14 August 2019

Voice Mobility



The other day, I recorded my first podcast. Since I had not been in a recording studio for many years, the sound engineer suggested that I make a sample recording - just a few minutes long - and then listen to the playback before returning to my soundproof booth to do the real thing.

I sat down with the engineer and he pressed Play on my sample. What do you think? he asked at the end. I sound a bit posh is what came out, immediately. He was surprised (maybe he had heard no poshness) and puzzled, Is that a bad thing?

Well, yes and no. Yes, because it may give listeners the wrong idea about me. I didn’t start life with a posh voice; I acquired one as a result of succeeding educationally and thereby becoming socially mobile. But I’ve always liked to think that my voice has not been quite so mobile. I still recall once meeting a university acquaintance from a similar background but a decade after we had both left Oxford. I was appalled by his accent, Oxford and affected. But it probably wasn’t affected at all; it’s likely that he had just assimilated more easily.

Now here am I, someone who hasn’t taught a university seminar or been to a middle class dinner party for twenty years, placing myself in front of a microphone and immediately, to my own ear, sounding posh. Maybe the subject matter explains it: I was reading something I had written about Milan Kundera’s theory of the novel. Maybe if I had been talking in a less scripted way about my childhood or a pet hate I would have sounded different.

I had other criticisms of my first attempt. My voice was too high pitched - first night nerves; I spoke too slowly - I was afraid of stumbling over words, an age-related hazard. And when I listened to the final product, I thought I sounded a bit camp. The editor of Booklaunch (Stephen Games) who had requested the podcast picked up on the last two aspects, asking that in any future recording I should be a bit faster (but not less dramatic)

But there is a case to be made for the poshness. The voice in which I read my piece about the novel was appropriate to the subject matter. It was full of words I never learnt as a child, only much later from teachers and friends. If I had read it in my original accent, it would have sounded false because a listener would realise that those words being spoken in an identifiably lower class accent would never have been spoken in a lower class home. That falseness would have been more distracting than the poshness. In contrast, if someone who had grown up speaking with a Scottish or West Indian accent had read my piece for me, it would be less distracting or not distracting at all because those accents are not in themselves class-related. In middle and upper class Scots and West Indian homes, one also talks about the novel.

To hear the finished podcast, go to

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