Your Singular Voice 

When you hear someone speak, what information are you inferring from the sound of their voice?  Certainly, an idea of where they are from given their dialect, but also perhaps how they are feeling physically and/or emotionally; maybe even something about their age or level of education.  Perhaps you can hear whether they are excited, bored, nervous, angry, sad, apathetic, stressed, etc..  Or you can tell if they are sick, if they have been a smoker or otherwise abused their voice, and on and on.  You receive a lot of information not just from what someone is saying to you, but also from how they sound.  The same is true for others as they listen to you.   Your voice is unique to you, a sort of aural fingerprint,  and there are two overarching factors which contribute to what makes your voice uniquely, singularly, yours:  First, Resonance:  Every time you open your mouth to speak or sing, something truly amazing happens;  the sound waves that are produced through the action of the vocal folds combined with the movement of breath (more on that another time) are being filtered and enhanced through all of the nooks and crannies, i.e., open spaces (free resonators) of your body. These internal spaces are unique in shape from person to person (and vary on any given day depending on a million, “ga-jillion”, if I’m being precise,  factors-   but again, more on that later).  The supra-glottal (above the vocal folds) spaces in the vocal tract, combined with the placement of your tongue, shape of your mouth, shape of your sinuses, etc.  all play a part in how your voice sounds by the time it exits your lips.  This helps us to begin to understand why family members often sound alike (although not identical); they are similarly shaped human beings.The second factor is Prosody (Greek origins) “pro” meaning towards, and “sody”meaning song Prosody is  “the natural variation in pitch and volumes that people use to give color, animation, expression and personality to their utterances… the melody of everyday speech.”  (Colapinto, 2021, p.10)  Prosody is affected by regional dialect, mood, energy level, and even sometimes by vocal health.  Your prosody gives others a ton of information about you on any given day and in any given moment.  Your voice is always representing you. It is singularly yours.   What do you want the world to understand and recognize about you? How might you shift the sound of your voice to make your true self more evident to others?  There are so many conscious choices we can make about our voices.  We just need to know what the choices are and how to execute them.