Inside Voice: My Obsession with How We Sound

"Inside Voice is strictly audio, as far as I know. It’s more like a program that you might hear as an extended podcast or a documentary series. Lake Bell’s interest is in the voice: how we hear our own voice and also how we hear others’ voices. She’s fun to listen to and you can take Inside Voice on a couple of different levels. As a voice actress, she goes over the things that she did to her voice to clean it up, to get rid of regionalisms and speech patterns. Then she comes around to saying this was not a good thing, because we should all have those things that tell people little bits about our culture and our background and where we’re from. If we grew up in Tennessee, then there should be a hint of that in our speaking voice. It’s part of who we are. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She also talks about how every time we hear a voice, we judge it in a certain way. That’s pretty much innate, so how do you resist that or get beyond it? How do you hear a voice and not make a judgement about something that you think because you hear it? Another angle on Inside Voice is that if you think about it as an audiobook listener, every time you listen to an audiobook, you’re hearing and judging a voice. That voice has to connect with the right characters or it does not engage you. I think I loved this program because of that, because you can take it on several levels. Yes. She makes it sort of a game she’s playing. She’s very funny. She’s snarky. She’s smart. The publisher is Pushkin Industries, which is Malcolm Gladwell’s company. Their whole objective is to push the boundaries of audiobook programming with new ideas. It’s very forward-thinking. She makes a comment about breaking away or ‘blooming’ from the origins of a traditional audiobook. She uses clips from voicemail messages and old answering machine messages, she has clips of other actors with very distinctive voices. She uses all of this material and puts it into this complex program that is her Inside Voice audio."