The Range of the Human Voice

I met Jonathan Stancato several years ago when I joined his afternoon singing workshop Inside Voice. The first thing he asked us to do was to roll across the floor. No further instruction. All 10 of us dutifully rolled across the cold wooden floor and then stood, dizzy and confused, wondering what this had to do with singing. 

The human voice contains infinite pleasure, Jonathan told us. But, we live in a culture that values productivity. You all rolled as fast as you could from point A to point B, which meant your hard bones banged across the hardwood floor. We are mostly water, he told us. Try it again. This time, take your time, roll languidly, like the ocean, feel the temperature and texture on your skin. 

I dropped to the ground and relished in the pleasure of a good roll. It is one of the lessons that inspired me to launch The Pleasure Report. 

This week, I interviewed Jonathan about the infinite range of the human voice, what to do next time you are at the grocery store and a how to take more pleasure in our voice. 

TPR: It must feel like a huge loss for you to be interacting with people over zoom.

Jonathan Stancato: We’re getting the tiniest fraction of the human voice transmitted through all of the compression. 98% of the information in a voice is evaporated either by the algorithms or by the actual transmission. It’s like listening to an mp3 if you grew up on vinyl.

TPR: How do you use your voice to create more pleasure in your life? Or in the world? 

JS: Every time I speak, I have a little secret message going in my head saying, “I love my voice. I love the things I'm saying.” And I imagine that this person I'm speaking to loves my voice and loves the things I'm saying. So I kind of force you to love me in my imagination. Of course, there are people who aren't open to that. And there are people who might even resent the fact that I have forcibly cast them in this loving role with me. But most of the time, I find it opens beautiful doors and creates opportunities to go off script. 

TPR: So, do you run experiments to see how this works? And what are you finding?

JS: The checkout line is one of my favorite lab experiments. I watch the people ahead of me have these scripted encounters with this human who's handling their most sacred resource, their food, and everybody's completely detached, and not even in the transaction of it. So I say to myself, “I'm going to have this encounter be the highlight of my day, and the highlight of the day of the person behind the counter.” Hopefully, by doing that, we’ve made the world a little bit of a better place. 

TPR:  It sounds like you're creating your own reality.

JS: If I sound a tuning fork, and let's say it's tuned to 128 hertz, and there's another tuning fork that's tuned to that nearby, it will start ringing when the other one is sounded. 

I like to think if I am sounding these loving parts in me, and, if I do it well enough, and I don't dampen the vibrations with my fear or my insecurity, then it will bring out the resonance of other people around me. 

It doesn't always work. But I'd rather fail at that than fail in another way.

TPR: It’s a lovely way to engage with the world, being present with someone else like that.

JS: Right? Otherwise, it’s like we are leaving pleasure on the table, missing out on this great moment that we could have had. 

I love people's voices and everyone has such magnificent, beautiful voices. If I could do anything in those encounters, I want to let people know that I love their voices.

TPR: You’ve said that you have x-ray hearing. What have you learned about the human voice and what is the range of our voices?

JS: The voice is the audible expression of the self. And the human range is unlimited.

A more precise answer would be that there are tones that are so low and so high that we can't even hear them. 

We have all of these sounds that come out of us — overtones and undertones and subtones and harmonics that we can't perceive are happening. 

I believe that there are all of these harmonic elements that come into play when we're listening deeply to each other, that we're not even aware of these subliminal sounds in a more technical way.

When I asked you how you are, and you say, “I'm doing fine,” maybe the thing that tells me that you're not fine is actually an overtone that neither of us can hear. 

TPR:  What if you don’t love your voice? How does one learn to do that? 

JS: Play! When we're playing with our voice, we're not thinking is it good or bad because in the domain of play, that's not possible.

Start making some sounds you have never made before in your life and maybe those sounds will strike you as the most pleasurable sounds to sing in or the most pleasurable sounds to speak in. And then you'll have this amazing tool of self pleasuring wherever you go in your life.

TPR: It’s hard to create sound without thinking of how it is being heard. I had this experience recently of being on a deserted island and I thought, okay, this is my chance to make any kind of sound that I want, so what might that be? 

JS: So what sounds did you make on your deserted island?

TPR: Well, I did not make the animal sounds we imitate as kids like a lion or bear.  I made something that was more like the animal of me, which included some very low groans. It made me think of a gigantic frog.

JS: Frogs are incredible sound makers.

TPR: I was surprised by the sounds that were coming out of me. They weren’t pleasing but I didn’t care. I was paying more attention to the vibrations in my body.  It felt like I was following the sounds as opposed to making them.

JS: We should think of our voice not like a well-trained dog that we tell to heal, walks perfectly on our leash, but as a cat on the leash, so we're just following where the cat goes. And if we do that, well, then people are going to be delighted because there's a cat on a leash. And that's fun. 

And then to the question of whether your sounds are pleasing, maybe we're thinking, oh, this isn't a sound that people would tune in to hear on the radio. And maybe that's true, but then there are people like Janis Joplin and Screamin’, Jay Hawkins, and people making all sorts of sounds that we do love to hear. At the end of the day, pleasing sounds is one of those constructs that doesn't really hold up under an enhanced scrutiny.

TPR : And what about the pleasure of conversation? There are moments in this interview where one of us says something and I feel it on my skin. It strikes me as a combination of the sound of our voices and the attention we are bringing to the moment. 

JS: In this interview, you and I are making music together. And maybe you're the bass and I'm the lead guitar. There is a humility that can go into saying, “I'm gonna use all of my energy and my instrument to express myself musically and to allow somebody, whether they're singing or shredding, to transcend.” I'm able to fly because you're lifting me up. It becomes exhilarating. And so subtle.

TPR: I’m learning that there are places that you can go, vocally or otherwise, with two or more people that you can't go by yourself. 

JS: Have you ever played a game where you're walking up a hill and you have somebody behind pushing you? That’s what it’s like. It's just a little bit easier to climb the hill. And then, when you get to more advanced levels of play, it's the feeling of one of those pedal assisted bikes where you start to pedal and you're like, wow, I'm the king of the world.

And then when you get a little bit more acrobatic with this sort of musical play, all of a sudden there's a jetpack behind you. It's something we can get high on. 

Jonathan’s next singing journey Inside Voice Lab, an 8-week deep dive into the voice-expanding, voice-healing, voice-loving foundations of his work, begins Jan. 3rd. 

Sounds waves from singing humpback whales.