Josephine Hoegaerts Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting: A Social History of the Modern Voice University of Pennsylvania Press 280 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 9781512827736
Josephine Hoegaerts
On Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting: A Social History of the Modern Voice
Interview of
September 29, 2025
Photograph by Kirsten van Santen
In a nutshell
Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting is about what people sounded like in the nineteenth century. It doesn’t spotlight the brilliant voices of the stage or the famous voices of public figures. Instead, it focuses on the everyday vocal interactions of ‘normal’ people. To establish what was considered ‘normal’ for a modern European voice, the book offers a deep dive into the norms for speech and song, how these norms were set, and how people learned to adhere to them.
The nineteenth century produced a surprisingly wide array of publications by experts in search of the healthy, pleasant, normal voice. For my research, I drew on this impressive stream of scientific essays, educational manuals, therapeutic methods and auto-biographical self-help books that came out of the increasingly professionalized field of vocal knowledge. The book features French physiologist Édouard Fournié, for example, whose research on the human larynx or voice-box prompted him to offer a stringent, almost mathematical explanation for gendered vocal norms: a man’s voice-box was “more developed and more prominent”, with cartilage forming “acute angles” that resulted in the robust masculine voice. Women’s cartilage was “rounded,” which reflected their general softness and curves—and produced similarly feminine sounds.
The book shows how experts like Fournié articulated social and cultural ideals for vocal sounds, like the expectation that men’s voices were more prominent and women’s more rounded, in the language of anatomical, physiological or educational objectivity. As both social expectations and technological possibilities changed throughout the century, what Europeans sounded like when they opened their mouths, changed as well.
The book’s narrative centers on a key turning point: the invention of the laryngoscope and the discovery of the brain’s language center, both around 1860. These breakthroughs revealed what had always been deeply mysterious: the production of voice within the body. The laryngoscope allowed doctors and singers alike to peer into a living, moving throat to see the vocal folds at work. The identification of an area for speech in the brain allowed them to precisely locate where all the sounds produced in the throat initially originated. These discoveries fundamentally changed the status of the human voice. For centuries, it had been imagined as an eerie, invisible force. But now, locatable in particular parts of the body, the voice became a tangible, material ‘thing’ to be observed, manipulated and perfected. The voice therefore became one of the many tools individuals had at their disposal to achieve social propriety. It also became one of the many bodily features that could lead them to social failure, if they did not manage to exert control over them.
The wide angle
My interest in the sounds of historical voices grew out of my earlier research on masculinity in the nineteenth century. Rooting through the archives of schools, military barracks and legislative chambers, I noticed something striking. These places were built around sound—and especially vocal sound. People gave orders by shouting. They expressed joy through exclamations and song. Dissent was marked by noise and obedience by silence. Most of all, people expressed individuality through speech – not (or not exclusively) by what they said, but by their tone, the warmth of their timbre, the rhythm of their consonants. Generals were remembered for their fatherly tones, politicians ridiculed for their flutey voices. While historians had almost entirely ignored the vocal sounds that carried modern discourse, historical actors in the nineteenth century clearly cared about what their contemporaries sounded like.
Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting brings these vocal sounds back into focus. It also demonstrates that it is possible to write histories that recognize the cultural work of vocality, even when all the documents we have left are silent. One of the things I found important to show, by writing such a history, is the inherently political nature of talk. No matter how much effort educators put into encouraging the development of a natural voice (and in the nineteenth century, that effort was significant), the resulting norms and expectations for vocal health and normality reflect the social and political distinctions of their time.
Seeing the definition of the natural voice develop and change over time also places significant question marks around notions of natural talent – whether that is a talent for fluency, song, or even simply a pleasant tone. Talent is thereby revealed as, ultimately, a practice of assimilation that is intimately connected to social status and power.
Work in disability studies, especially around dysfluency, has shaped my thinking here. Joshua St. Pierre’s Cheap Talk, for example, puts the stammerer at the center of a critique of capitalism’s demand for fluent speech. His work helped shape one of the key arguments of this book. The shift from the polished, trained voice of the eighteenth century to the ‘natural’ voice of the modern era didn’t make vocal norms more flexible. It simply disguised their rigidity in new language.
Lithograph of Ninad’Aubigny von Engelbrunner (est. 1806), courtesy of Gallica, Bibliothèquenationale de France.
A close-up
The book attempts to give equal billing to scientific debates and educational practice in music and oracy. Different parts of the narrative are therefore likely to appeal to readers interested in voice education, speech therapy, the history of science, or cultural history. For me, however, all these elements are intrinsically interwoven in the social history of voice: aesthetic ideals and scientific norms for vocal health worked together to produce the expectations for different individuals to produce ‘proper’ vocal sounds, that matched their identity and social status.
It’s the sections that highlight the less conventional of these individuals that I have enjoyed writing the most. For all its rigidity and aspirations of rationality and propriety, the nineteenth century excelled at producing eccentrics. The then still highly unregulated field of expertise on vocal health and beauty does not disappoint in this regard. Interspersed between the more analytical chapters on changes in how the voice was made visible, how it was cultivated for social and professional use, and how it was located in the brain, are brief intermezzi highlighting the experiences of pioneering laryngoscopists, voice teachers, stammerers and even talking monkeys.
One of these remarkable figures is the now largely forgotten Nina d’Aubigny. In her own time, around the turn of the nineteenth century, she was a rare female authority on vocal education – a precursor perhaps to the now heavily female dominated fields of speech therapy and vocal pedagogy. Miss d’Aubigny was a woman of strong opinions, one of which was that women were not only not inferior to men when it came to cultivating young voices, but that they were in fact especially suited to the task. She advocated for a vocal pedagogy founded on principles of both modern science and good taste, which she believed would be “influential for the physical and moral education of the female sex”, and ultimately of benefit for society at large. Anticipating the professionalization of vocal expertise later in the century, d’Aubigny happily blurred any divisions between the musical and the scientific, or the experimental and the pedagogical. In pursuit of the proper voice, questions of taste, authority and health were intertwined.
Lastly
In writing this book, I wanted to do two things. On the one hand, I wanted to provide current professionals in fields related to vocal health and education with a nuanced history of their fields of expertise. The stories of speech therapy, vocal pedagogy, speech language pathology, and other specializations related to speech and song tend to be told as stories of linear progress. Consecutive discoveries and inventions can easily be read as signs of ongoing improvement, but such interpretations often ignore the significant cultural and social work that has informed the ideals and norms that drove those discoveries in the first place. This book also tells the story of the failed experiments, the over-hyped cures, and the forgotten practitioners of now long-lost methods that also shaped these fields of expertise.
On the other hand, the book also aims to be a call to action for social, cultural and political historians to engage in more archival eavesdropping. My research demonstrates that the human voice was central to everyday life and history. Voices influenced decisions, shaped relationships, and expressed emotions, whether through a political speech, a lullaby, a heated argument, or a whispered secret. Even in the nineteenth century, often seen as dominated by print, people were deeply invested in how they spoke, as is obvious in the popularity of vocal training books and guides to healthy speech. The book’s wider aim is therefore to inspire researchers to include voices in discussions about a large variety of histories, on topics ranging widely from childhood and sexuality to nationalism, fear, and death.
