When we speak, we come closer than we think: how voices shape our relationship to the world

The new essay by cultural scientist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "Life of the Voice," explores something that, unlike writing, has no fixed form or structure. A voice has barely been heard before it fades away again – unless it is captured using modern recording techniques. Then it may well remain in the memory for a lifetime. What is its secret?

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, at home in several linguistic worlds, outlines a cultural history of the voice: It ranges from new media theories to Platonic philosophy, which assigns a central role to dialogue, from the essays of Roland Barthes to the biblical revelations in which God reveals himself as a voice. Even today, the priest at Catholic High Mass, as the former altar boy knows, transitions from speaking to singing when his voice is to replace the divine one.

For Gumbrecht, the voice also has an important communicative function beyond any comprehensible meaning. As a sound, it evokes moods and atmospheres. Thus, it may well happen that the content of the statements is not necessarily the focus of a conversation. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out the hidden relationship between music and language: "The understanding of a sentence in language is much more closely related to the understanding of a theme in music than one might believe."

When Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht considers which voices have moved him the most, he thinks exclusively of singing voices – five singers, each representing a period of his life. Elvis Presley's voice accompanied him from childhood into adolescence, and Edith Piaf's voice accompanied him as he explored the Romanesque world during his student years.

Janis Joplin's "Me and Bobby McGee" provided the bridge to the USA. And the Whitney Houston soundtrack provided the backdrop when Gumbrecht, now a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, became an American citizen in 2000. The songs, and especially Adele's voice, ultimately lifted him out of a deep depression and life crisis.

His editor, writes Gumbrecht, described the voice as a "messy subject." Rightly so, he believes, and in his autobiographically grounded essay, he brings some order to this fleeting and perhaps therefore underestimated everyday phenomenon. His cautiously worded conclusion: Voices express our closeness to other people and connect our material existences. They establish a kind of physical contact. Yet they can also be disconcerting: Gumbrecht's father, a respected surgeon in Würzburg, had such a high-pitched, squeaky voice that it pained his son to hear it.

"Since singing, unlike speaking, assigns meaning only a secondary importance," a collective feeling, indeed a collective body, emerges more quickly and easily in sound. The individual can feel at one with the mass in the sound experience—be it at the opera or in a football stadium—without having to argue about concepts, arguments, or opinions.

Gumbrecht addresses such effects of merging with one's favorite voices at the end of his insightful essay. There, he also explains why even pleasant, warm speaking voices like those of the great philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer failed to captivate him as much as the five singing voices he still vividly remembers at the age of 77.

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht: Life of the Voice. An Essay on Proximity. Suhrkamp-Verlag, Berlin 2025. 268 pp., Fr. 43.90.