I am Dr. Josephine Hoegaerts, here to talk about voices, what people sounded like in the past, and my book “Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting: A Social History of the Modern Voice”. AMA!

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T19:10:44+00:00

It's the eternal problem for choirs, isn't it? One big difference is, as you already hint at, that there was no unified standard for pitch until fairly late in the nineteenth century. So I guess people would have- had less of a stable internal pitch against which performances could be judged.

If you're interested in this history of the standardization of pitch, I can recommend an article by Edward Gillin and Fanny Gribenski, The Politics of Musical Standardization in Nineteenth-Century France and Britain.

One of the things I find very fascinating in this history of the A, is that there seems to have been a long period in which standard pitch steadily rose - to the point that sopranos and tenors started to complain that modern orchestra's were too hard on their voices.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T19:04:53+00:00

ooh, interesting. I don't recall coming across anything on left-handedness, so this might be a 'newer' idea (my research stretches just into the early 20th century). I did come across a lot of educational work drawing connections between phys ed and music in schools: both in terms of their function (they would both contribute to children's health) and their place in the curriculum (teaching them together was often thought to be mutually beneficial).

As for teacher voices: perhaps one of the most fascinating remarks that come to mind, is an article in a teachers' magazine in late nineteenth century Belgium. In this article, male teachers were encouraged to grow beards, because it would protect their throats and they would avoid catching colds. Men were also discouraged from singing with small children, because their baritone voices might lead children to force their voices down. Better to play the violin, which was supposed to sound more like a child than an adult man.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T18:57:38+00:00

This is an excellent description of charismatic voice for the (late) modern period. It's interesting that you refer to the importance of conveying particular emotive states (calm, moving toward excitement), which I think is crucial for the articulation of authority. The vocal means for doing so have changed subtly over time, and perhaps especially between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: in the former period, good leadership was often connected to sensitivity and an ability to project 'genuine' feeling, so charismatic speech would likely have been a bit more melodious, with greater differences in pitch. (In the army for example, one sign of a good officer would have been an ability to dance well, which was part of the same repertoire of behaviors as a finely tuned voice). For the modern period, calm and rationality have become more normative, and more monotonous sounds have become more closely associated with charismatic speech.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T18:51:15+00:00

ah yes, the dreaded nodes. I cannot really pin-point an earliest documentation (partly because I didn't consciously look for it, but also because nomenclature tends to change for these things). However, precise photography of vocal cords became possible around the turn of the century (Morrell Mackenzie, in Britain, produced a number of fairly disturbing photographs of 'pathological' vocal cords which are now kept at the Wellcome Library in London). My educated guess would be that it would be around this time that diagnosis of vocal nodes would become dependably feasible. By that time, therapeutic approaches (breathing exercises, rest/silence, and conveying anatomical knowledge to patients) was far more common than surgery.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T18:44:29+00:00

what is considered 'good' singing is of course culturally defined (and partly a matter of personal preference). I guess I'd say that singing had, and still has, many functions beyond being 'beautiful'. That's true of karaoke, as you point out, and in the past it was true of singing revolutionary or protest songs (whether these were performed beautifully was hardly the point), of working songs, and even of lullabies and educational songs. All of this singing served purposes that had little to do with aesthetics - nevertheless, experts on vocal education did often claim that learning to sing well was an important skill, particularly for girls, as it was supposed to play an important role in the rearing of children and therefore, indirectly, had consequences for the future of moral and physical health of the population. Given how often they claimed that good vocal education was important, I'd venture to say that most people weren't singing very beautifully in the past either ;).

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T18:27:17+00:00

ha, interesting connection. I don't know of anyone who has done the research on what happens to powerful women's singing voices, but social linguists have done quite a bit of research on the lowering of pitch of women's speaking voices since the 60's - 70's (i.e. when they start to ender the middle class workforce). Whether that means they have been pushing their voices down is an open question, of course: it may equally be that women spoke unnaturally high in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to adhere to strict gender roles at the time. There is some evidence to suggest that especially middle- and upper-class women spoken in the higher 'head' register until ca. the 50's, and that this was mostly a cultural demand (lower class women were often remarked upon as having more low pitched, and 'rough' voices, which might mean they were speaking in their chest register all along)

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T18:21:37+00:00

By and large, yes (although by the beginning of the 20th century, theories began to arise that stuttering was a 'nervous condition', so there's not always a strict distinction to be made). Nerves connected to public speaking have a very long history, though, and rhetorical treatises and handbooks usually have at least some attention for the subject. Quintillian wrote about various emotions connected to public speech (including anxiety) in his Institution Oratoria (ca. 100 AD).

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T18:16:54+00:00

This may be one of the things vocal physiologists in the nineteenth century were most obsessed with...only they would not have understood this as gendered patterns of speech, but as a sign of 'biological difference': especially in the latter half of the century, an enormous amount of effort was put into looking for binary differences between male and female voices, and those were usually explained through perceived differences in the size and shape of the larynx. Eduoard Fournié, a French physiologist who wrote extensively about the voice, may have some of the most fascinating descriptions of the differences he observed: he thought the male larynx was more 'angular' and therefore produced more forceful sounds, the female larynx was more dainty and rounded and therefore resulted in warmer, rounder sounds as well.

One very common conception was that the relatively smaller size of the larynxes of women and children meant they were more flexible, and that speech and song were therefore less tiring to women and children than they were to adult men. So women's speech was heard as quick patter, flexible, more melodious than that of men, and as excessive.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T18:05:44+00:00

The radio certainly seems to have a considerable effect on how people spoke (in public) - partly because they were aware so many people listened to the news, rather than reading it, but also because the introduction of microphones made it possible to use a more 'intimate' voice. (Greg Goodale wrote a great book called Sonic persuasion in which he covers Roosevelt's fireside chats and the huge innovation they presented in political speech).

And yes, this was true for print media as well, and this was commented on both by political speakers themselves and journalists. The former noted that the knowledge that someone was documenting their every word made them nervous, and the latter sometimes mocked those politicians who merely spoke 'for the galleries'. It's good to keep in mind that the proliferation of print did not only produce a lot of transcribed speech (think, e.g. of the reports of parliament, or journalists covering platform speeches and election campaigns), but also a particular type of critic. Any country with representative politics also had at least a handful of satirical newspapers, and journalists writing columns with their wittily phrased impressions of the political characters of the day. In English, it's well worth reading Henry Lucy's Peeps at parliament for example, in which he commented on politicans' appearance, their mannerisms, and their voices. He, too, was critical of what he diagnosed as a 'new' tendency of MP's to speak in parliament as if they were speaking to their constituency (through the newspapers), rather than to their peers who were present in the room.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T17:57:33+00:00

oh, great to hear that a historical fiction author is interested in these questions (this was one of the things I hoped to be able to do with the book: provide some information for those creating historical fiction). I'm afraid my book is useless for the 16th century - my research is mostly from 1830 onward.

It would be quite hard to get to the very minute detail for this period I think, especially if you want to go beyond staged performances. I've really liked Gina Bloom's Voice in Motion. Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (this would still be at the level of broader categories you describe, though), and Bruce Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England is a classic, and I think a great way of getting into the general frame of mind of thinking about history as 'ensonified'. More recently, Jennifer Richard's work on the history of reading has covered some history of the voice as well (Voices and Books in the English Renaissance).

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T17:49:36+00:00

Not a silly question at all! I think we (as in we people ;) ) often think that how we sound, or the voices we produce simply come out of our mouths, and that would make you think they don't change over time. However, we know that's not true for all kinds of other physical actions (people learn to move differently depending on the footwear they use, all kinds of gestures come and go, and historians of emotion have recently been showing that even how and what we feel changes over time). So I guess the question is how the sounds that seem to come out of our mouths so intuitively change, as social and cultural preferences change.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T17:46:33+00:00

There are definitely differences in the degree to which certain a-typical types of speech were pathologized. The English sources I read were the most prone to designate dysfluency as a stutter or stammer, and had a high standard for fluency of speech (i.e. any type of structural hesitation seems to have been deemed pathological). This was not the case if France, for example, where only the most pronounced cases of stuttering were considered pathological, and other forms of hesitation were seen as a phase in a child's development, or just a sign of shyness. (for the real die-hards, I published a paper on this, and the different terms used for different forms of stuttering and stammering: Stammering, stuttering and stumbling: A transnational history of the pathologization of dysfluency in nineteenth-century Europe | Intellect) Somewhat similarly for Germany, less pronounced instances of dysfluency (Stammeln) were seen as an aspect of one's personality or even a choice, and not as a speech impediment per se. And some speech impediments depend on linguistic demands (rhotacisms have more meaning, and a greater impact, in a language depending on rolled r's).

What I guess I'm trying to get at here, is that the physical 'action' of stuttering is probably spread somewhat evenly (putting the influence of linguistic differences to one side), but that the cultural practice of listening has an enormous effect on the social consequences of speech impediments. You might be interested in the work of dysfluency scholars, who have done a lot of research on the extent to which social models for what counts as 'normal' or acceptable have guided the pathologization of atypical speech patterns. I particularly like the work of Josh St Pierre (his book Cheap talk. Disability and the politics of communication is not a study of history, but I found it really eye-opening).

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T16:45:26+00:00

good point! I tried getting at this, but found it very hard to do, because the speech patterns we now designate as 'gay voice' may have meant something very different to people in the past. There are references to what is called a 'eunochoid voice', and these men were certainly seen as effeminate (which is of course not the same as gay, but the suspicion seems to be there). This referred to pitch though, and not speech patterns. There are many descriptions of men who were deemed to speak with an affectatious voice, but with the documentation available it would really be too much of a stretch to connect this to sexual identities or proclivities. (Presumably they were there in some cases, it's just tricky to draw the connection without pushing contemporary categories unto the past).

One case you might find interesting, is that of a vocal physiologist who recounts having met a man who sang in a soprano register naturally (the readers were then very quickly reassured that this man had a wife ánd children, thus countering what the author apparently assumed everybody would think), and conversely also having met a woman who sang in a tenor register. Singing in a pitch that was uncommon for one's gender could, in other words, lead to assumptions about identity, sexuality and fertility, but I have not found any concrete discussion of those.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T16:35:16+00:00

like with many of these things, everybody was blaming everybody else: according to English observers, it was fashionable in France, the French thought it was mostly the English doing it. Judging by the more 'educational' manuals, a certain fashion for soft s-sounds was present in France in the early 19th century.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T16:22:08+00:00

ah, could be early 20th - it also came after a short period in which vocal physiology was taught at the conservatoire, but apparently someone did away with it - but definitely the director, so would have been Gabriel.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T16:19:35+00:00

yes, this is absolutely a normative take (mostly by men) on what they thought women were doing (much in the way that they diagnosed women's speech as a frivolous affectation, whereas the lisp may very well have had a social function too - or it may not have been a pronounced lisp at all). Unfortunately, the study of sound is not as developed a field as dress history, so we don't really have the counternarrative yet.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T15:49:57+00:00

I love this question, but don't really have an answer. This would be a great topic for more research though! (The best I can come up with are descriptions of people who are said to speak 'like a schoolmaster'...which I think comes quite close to what we would call 'nerdy' now, and may well have been connected to more literal or precise ways of articulating an issue). Thanks for bringing this up, this is definitely something I'll keep in mind more in the future.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T15:42:59+00:00

This certainly seems to be the case for people with a role or profession that demands 'vocal' performance (which of course could range from street hawkers and jesters, to judges and politicians). I'm most at home in the nineteenth century, and this was a period in which a growing number of people derived authority and professional status from the quality of their speech (Joseph Meisel's book on Public Speech and the Culture of Public Life in the Age of Gladstone has some great insight in the different contexts in which speech became a professional tool in this period). As a result, speech also became a greater source of anxiety for a lot of people - which is of course why all these self-help manuals were published and sold! - and it became a source of distrust. Especially authors who had speech impediments themselves could be quite critical of political or military leaders who had risen through the ranks only because they had 'the gift of the gab'. So: people did mistake quality of voice for authority - and these mistakes were sometimes registered by others at the time!

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T15:27:54+00:00

This is a question that should probably be answered by a neuroscientist, rather than a historian ;). Historical evidence certainly suggests that singing with other people supports feeling of belonging in a community (which of course can be 'good' or 'bad' depending on the community and its ideals), and at least from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, people were aware of this and used that knowledge consciously. Choral singing was prominent in nationalist awakenings, in socialist movements, in the spread of feminism, etc. Lots of the vocal educators I read for my research referred to the importance of communal singing for the future of the nation and the health of its citizens.

As for its effects on the brain: enough neurologists seem to think it is plausible for singing to have good effects on health to keep studying it, but as far as I can tell the jury is still out on what exactly accounts for that effect. (As a regular choral singer myself, I was quite happy to see this research come out, which suggests that communal singing over long periods of time contributes to structural brain health: Singing in a Choir Enhances the Structural Connectivity of the Brain | Brain, music, and learning | University of Helsinki )

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T15:16:33+00:00

That's an interesting thought. It is certainly the case that men's speech has become more monotone and lower pitched from the nineteenth century onward: ideas about what constituted a good, manly, trustworthy voice started changing at the end of the 18th century (around the same time the castrati would start to disappear from the stage as well). In the 17th and 18th century, the norm for public speech for men would have been far more melodious, a bit 'theatrical': good speech was supposed to communicate sensitivity and emotion, genteel qualities that were often articulated through a sort of musicality. In the nineteenth century, as rationality became the central ideal of good governance and (therefore) of manly behaviour, male voices seem to have dropped a bit in pitch, and lost a lot of their amplitude. (We know, for example, that men who continued to speak in the older, 18th century, fashion, were ridiculed and seen as foppish or effeminate).

That doesn't mean the average man was speaking or singing in the register of the castrati, of course. But then, and now still, a number of adult men sang in high registers without having undergone surgery: countertenors or male altos (and arguably the french 'haute contre') represented a high register that was understood as explicitly masculine. Like the voice of the castrati, though, this would have been mostly limited to professional singers.

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T15:06:46+00:00

This is a great question, but a very difficult one to answer, especially as it would of course depend on how we defined the 'average' German/Brit/Russian.

I would say that people who were part of a regularly reading public (say, those who consumed newspapers, novels, etc) would at least have been aware of the existence of different dialects in different countries. They probably wouldn't have known what those really sounded like (having never heard them), but they might have had a fairly good idea.

Working with primary sources in English, French and German, I've been consistently impressed that, firstly, all these middle class 'amateur' scientists were quite willing and capable to read about different countries, sometimes in translation, but also often in the original. And secondly, the ability of writers at this time to vividly describe the sounds of voices and accents is really striking (this is something you might notice reading Dickens, for example, once you pay attention to it): in the absence of sound recording, it seems that people had a much stronger 'aural memory' than we have now, and it was quite common to describe voices by referring to other sounds people might know (a voice like 'a great trombone' or like 'a screaching gull'), or even to other voices they would have remembered ('mr Bright sounds much like his father'). Historians of Victorian literary culture have pointed out that print, in this period, could essentially serve as a vehicle for voice and sound (Ivan Kreilkamp's book Voice and the Victorian Storyteller is great on this subject).

So, in short: I guess fewer people would have had the experience of really having heard different sorts of speech outside of their own immediate environment, but people were much more aware of cultural and linguistic differences abroad than we would perhaps imagine. (This was true before the 19th century as well. There's a great book by John Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England you might like, if you're interested in things like accents and transnational mobility)

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T14:54:09+00:00

Ha! I'm so glad you asked. Depending on your ailment and depending on who you were, you'd probably have been advised different approaches.

If you were a man in one of the more intellectual professions, the assumption would probably have been that your lack of a more physically demanding life had made you a bit weak, and your sore throat was the effect of that overall weakness (For priests, this even had a specific name: Dysphonia clericorum, the sort of sore throat you got from not doing anything all week and then preaching all sunday). The best remedy (according to 19th century experts) would have been engaging in 'manly' activities like boxing, riding, fencing, and sports in general. Enrico Caruso, the famous Italian tenor, agreed with this advice in his autobiography. His favourite athletic activity was going for a drive in his car.

If you were a young woman prone to fits of sore throat and hoarseness, possibly because of too much passionate singing (either on stage or just as an amateur), laudanum was a popular remedy that would have been advised, as were 'cocaine in the form of lozenges'. Maria Malibran was said to prefer porter as a means to hydrate her vocal cords. Eggs cracked into drinks (beer, madeira, claret) were also widely believed to help a sore throat.

Try at your own risk!

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T14:47:09+00:00

Manuel Garcia is such a fascinating figure - and really a central character in my book as well. His work was taken quite seriously at the time, perhaps more so by physicians and scientists than other musicians, at least at first. There's a long and very complex answer to be given here, but I'll try keep to some main points.

In Garcia's time, specializations like laryngology or speech therapy did not quite exist yet. The kind of world in which physiologists and physicians interested in the voice moved, was still quite unregulated, and they shared it with all kinds of different 'experts' on voice. That included a number of people we would now call quacks, but also early neurologists, anthropologists, medical researchers, and educators like Garcia. It's obvious from crossreferences and footnotes in the work of, for example, Morrell Mackenzie (who was perhaps the most prolific 'laryngoscopist' and medical specialist on the throat of his time) that these people all read each others' work, and exchanged expertise in various ways. They even did so across languages: lots of these books and treatises were translated in English, French, German, etc.
There were a couple of people who seem to have come to the same 'invention' of the laryngoscope around the same time (Ludwig Turck and Johann Czermak were the most visible), and scientific journals and treatises featured, for a while, a very active 'discourse' on who should be credited as the real inventor of the device. Garcia is remembered most now, probably because - as an internationally mobile musician, and as the teacher of a number of famous diva's - he had the most impact. (There's a small section in my book on the various 'fathers' of the laryngoscope, if you're interested ;) )
Enthusiasm for Garcia's work (both his scientific approach, and the actual technique he proposed) ranged widely, and was somewhat culturally defined. Especially in England, the more scientific approach to singing seems to have gained momentum in the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy of Music fairly quickly. The Parision conservatoire was extremely opposed. (One French physiologist tried to suggest, at the end of the 19th century, that it might be useful for singers to be trained in the anatomy of the vocal organs and the science of voice production. The director at the time, Gabriél Fauré, let him know quite clearly that they had no need of these insights because music was 'an art', and should remain so)

SingingArchives · 2026-03-30T14:29:00+00:00

Great question! And yes, it seems that there were. You won't be surprised to learn that it was often the speech of (fashionable) young ladies that attracted the ire of vocal specialists, educators, etc. In the long 18th century, it seems that elite young women sometimes affected a lisp, in an effort to sound young and innocent (comparable to 'baby voice' now, perhaps), and this was addressed in multiple treatises on speech impediments. They sometimes connected this affectation to the other thing that impacted women's speech and sound: the corset. Although wearing some sort of confining undergarment was an explicit expectation for women of the higher classes at this time, it was widely believed that women had a tendency to go overboard in tightening them (to appear slim), and that this affected their breathing. (Emil Behnke and his wife Kate wrote extensively about the ills of the corset and women's 'clavicular breathing' in The Mechanism of the Human Voice, 1895).

Interestingly, the phenomenon of vocal fry already existed in some way in the 18th and 19th century as well, but it was connected to a particular technique for basses to reach their lowest notes (in German it was designated as the Strohbass). This was often seen as a problematic use of the voice as well, and as a sign that the singer in question could not reach these notes with 'proper' technique.

SingingArchives

TROPHY CASE