Mladen Dolar's The Linguistics Of The Voice

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The idea of voice is a very important topic today. Everyone wants to have a voice and have that voice be heard, whether they share their voice through social media, talking or singing. Mladen Dolar, author of The Linguistics of the Voice, proposes that the voice is the most important way we can communicate and get our points across. People use words and tone to accurately portray their feelings to others. In addition to words, people also make use of sounds to express their emotions, like crying and laughing. The connection between the voice and the body is largely significant when studying communication, throughout time humans have used varying modes of sounds to describe themselves and their emotions. Although words tell how a person feels, …show more content…

These three forms of voice each describe a different manner in which society perceives voice. Accent, as explained by Dolar, is like singing. The different ways of pronunciation can make the spoken word challenging to understand because certain ways of speaking are different from the ‘norm’ of the society and what they are used to hearing. This can be an obstacle, but is overlooked once the accent has been heard for some time. Intonation is the second mode Dolar examines, he explains this as a melody, or a tone of voice. Intonation is how irony is expressed. When someone is speaking nicely about a topic, but have a rude tone of voice, then the voice is more important than the words. In this way, the tone voice overrides whatever words are being said and explains the emotions of that person more accurately in comparison to their words. The third mode is timbre, Dolar describes this as a vocal fingerprint. It represents how others can be known simply from their voice. People can still be easily recognized according to their voice alone, even when their identity or face is absent. Each person has a distinct tone, rhythm, and pitch of their voice, through these different components the person is identified. These modes explain all sounds that humans make and connect them to people around

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