Few academics use the full potential of their voices, yet speaking well allows us to be alive and connected in the moment, says Joe Moran.

Sometimes I slip off to Liverpool’s Metropolitan Cathedral, just over the road from where I work, and sit at the back while a service is on. My Catholicism is long lapsed, but the cathedral dean, Anthony O’Brien, has one of those soft Liverpudlian voices that bring out perfectly the sonorous cadences of the King James Bible. As his words resound in the light-filled space, I let them wash over me and I reflect on the eternal power of the human voice to connect us through the air.

My long connoisseurship of other people’s voices is driven mostly by envy. As a lecturer, I know that my voice is, with the possible exception of my brain, the most important tool I have – as crucial as dextrous fingers are to a concert pianist. But I have spent most of my career being ignorant of how to use it and how to look after it. I began teaching with all the usual bad habits, such as shallow breathing, dropped consonants and a falling inflection, that we acquire when we are unsure if others want to hear what we have to say. Gradually, through trial and error, I learned to drink enough water, to breathe from the stomach, to pronounce each bit of a word. But my teaching voice still has a habit of sinking into my throat or dying a slow, rasping death, leaving me feeling defeated and not up to my job – which, in a sense, I’m not.

The traditional neglect of voice training in academia presumably derives from the idea that universities are all about the life of the mind. For the voice is all about the body: it is simply an exhaled breath, vibrating in the vocal folds but affected by every aspect of our carriage and posture. Any bit of tension in our shoulders, chest or abdominal muscles, even locked knees, a sprained ankle or high heels, can affect the sound that comes out of our mouths. A voice is just a breathing body trying to make itself heard.

By releasing words into the space around us, we cannot help leaking evidence of our moods, fears and failings. A classic symptom of depression, for instance, is dull vocal tone. That permanent lump in the throat that I get when I am very low feels as if my voice is lodged in my windpipe and I can neither gulp it down nor release it. Vocal coaches all have stories about their students sobbing uncontrollably when they finally learn to breathe properly and free their true, buried voices. Our voices are so closely identified with our deepest selves that it is no wonder that some students find it daunting to speak in class.