John Colapinto

Well, this thing right under our noses, where our mouths are, that emits this sound.

signal that is layered like lasagna that is carrying information that is making us judge people's wealth and income and education level, but it's also conveying all this emotional information, hostility, love, lust, anger, jealousy, all these physical operations, this respiratory, articulatory feat of symphonic timed movements

that we use to make the air vibrate in interesting ways.

John.

Oh, yeah.

My name is John Colopinto.

I was a longtime contributing editor at Rolling Stone, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker.

I did.

It's called This Is The Voice.

What a title, too.

Isn't that grabby?

You got to be kidding.

Get out of here.

About 400 million years ago...

In periods of drought.

Suddenly.

Completely landlocked.

Doomed.

They only can breathe underwater.

They don't have a means for extracting oxygen from the air.

I mean, it's so hard to wrap your mind around the randomness of it all, but that's the way it was.

So you've got a fish.

That would literally permit oxygen to pass through it into the bloodstream of the fish and keep it alive.

You got it.

You have got it.

Now that's critically important.

And again, the thing that just made me go, oh, I got to write this book was that slit, that valve that became our vocal cords and our vocal cords remain a valve.

I mean, I never knew this because we call them vocal cords.

We think of them as being like strings, like on a violin or piano strings that are struck and vibrate to create sound.

Right.

That's not how we make our voices.

That's not how we produce sound with our voices.

Yeah.

It's hard to do...

I'm not doing it.

Yes, like a horse.

Annie's doing it so well there.

All of a sudden, it's being refined.

which now enable, through a complex like twisting and moving back and forth of those cartilages, you can stretch the vocal folds to create a higher-pitched sound.

You can loosen and slacken it for lower sounds.

You can actually tense it for growling sounds.

You can sort of make the vocal cords stiff.

So the action of affixing lips to a nipple and then coaxing milk from that nipple with very specific rhythmic lip movements, but then also coordinating the tongue to sort of get out of the way to let the milk come in, but then rippling the tongue in complex ways in order to make the milk pass down into our stomach.

Hi, my name is Darius, and I'm the first male African-American English speech synthesis voice from an acapella.

Pooped.

Yes.

Yeah.

So he could breathe.

Good, how are you?

Out of pure frustration.

I had a respiratory arrest.

And it just evolved from there.

And they could hear their baby cry for the first time.