In this short book, I have set myself the difficult task of writing about the human voice, with the eventual goal of answering the question in my title. Why do people sing? It is a personal book, based on my academic life’s work, but not written primarily for the academic community. It is also a book intended to appeal to a broader nonacademic readership. My starting point is my own historical work on British broadcast radio and the gradual recognition that it consisted wholly of people talking and singing at the microphone. Television is an extension of radio, not of cinema, and it too depends on talk for its effect.

From this I came, much later, to two things: first, that underpinning all talk is the largely invisible and very much neglected topic of voice. I have only recently come to the conclusion that talk is a thing in itself, and should not be thought of as spoken language or oral communication. Talk, as my first chapter attempts to show, depends on a native language. It would be odd to suppose that talk is nonlinguistic, but that is not all it is. I now think that talk (which I think of as “first language”) is primarily about communication and, as such, is the entry point into human society. This means that talk is primarily a sociable phenomenon, and as such is (humanly) universal. The sociability of talk was (for me) revealed through radio and then television. In today’s noisy world there is much talk that is aggressive, egoistic, and confrontational, and this forced me to wonder whether this is the context in which we learn to talk.

It struck me as important that talk is learned intergenerationally: from one generation to the next. And it strikes me as equally important that this is a caring, reciprocal process, one on one, between adult and child, child and adult, and also – if it is to work – a multilayered process involving desire, love, and more besides, that all come together not just or only in language, but in looks and gestures, facework and close proximity between two people who jointly, and with gladness of countenance, share in this process. I simply could not imagine that talk began otherwise, as a form of aggression or human egotism.

These tentative thoughts led me to an even more tentative conclusion: that communication (talk) and language are nonidentical. It seemed obvious to me (eventually) that writing is the medium of language and its primary function has nothing to do with communication and talk. Writing is, I think, a system of record with primary economic and financial functions that have developed over many centuries. It is also (but accidentally) a primary historical resource – in fact, our only one, until sound recordings were invented in the nineteenth century. The very new digital age that we live in depends entirely on language – not the analog language of broadcasting, but the digital language of social media and the internet. This fact is hidden from us, largely because the binary digital numeric code of computers and much more are all reconverted into alphabetic, analog code with which we have long been familiar.

These, I think, are the wider, tentative implications of this little book. I start with the communicative musicality of the voices of parent and child as a baby learns to talk. I consider the beautiful sound medium of radio – its impact on voice, talk, music, and singing, and its crucial role in making them public in quite new ways. Recording technologies developed for broadcasting put voice on record, making it a radically new historical resource for historians, hitherto almost wholly reliant on written archives. In written fiction, readers cannot hear the voices of the characters or of their author. Or can they? I explore the voices in the text, including the voice of the text in one of the Mapp and Lucia novels of E. F. Benson. Finally, I attempt the impossible task of putting into words on paper the inexpressible experience of listening to singing, wherein the glory of the human voice finds its purest expression.

In writing this book, I have drawn extensively on my own academic writings over the last forty or so years. Historical details on the early BBC may be found in the work I co-wrote with David Cardiff, A Social History of Broadcasting (1991). Further information on particular programs may be found in later work. Detailed accounts of Harry Hopeful and The Brains Trust may be found in my Radio, Television and Modern Life (1996) and Television and the Meaning of “Live” (2014), respectively.

For information on unreferenced talk and language, I have used the invaluable Wiki extensively, and likewise for the historical context of singing, along with the equally invaluable multivolume Groves History of Music.

I have tried to think of similar academic writing on talk, but none comes to mind.

As a background to everything about communication and language in this book, I would recommend Chapters 6 and 7 in my Media and Communication (2007).

Well-known works, for instance Roland Barthes on photography or Jacques Derrida’s On Grammatology, are acknowledged, but not referenced. Some familiarity with the writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein is assumed.

The Tronick experiment, analyzed in some detail in Chapter 1, can easily be found on YouTube.