Half-heard truths

If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple having a blank-faced argument in Tesco or a mother remonstrating with her toddler even though you couldn’t hear the words exchanged, then you understand the importance of the human voice. Command of tone, timbre, pitch — the how, not the what, of communication — is at once the most natural and instinctive of skills, common to every infant and its parent, and the most fetishised, finessed and, of course, monetised. A whole industry, and a lucrative one at that, exists to transform the human voice from tool to product, from nature to nurture, from prose to poetry.

Nick Coleman’s Voices aims to analyse that process, to ask why some singers set the emotional truths stored away within us vibrating, teach us who we are and change us even as they do, while others merely dazzle and divert, their songs slipping through us without ever touching the sides.