Sabrina Imbler
Appearances
Radiolab
The First Known Earthly Voice
It fell off cliffs in conversation only to reappear moments later. It became a shadow I could not pin down. Although I knew others found this pubescence embarrassing, I felt thrilled by the discomfort. I could hardly blame my body, transiting between one voice and another like a blinking satellite, destination unknown.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Of course, there would be blips along the way, but eventually, I realized I had lost my urge to karaoke. If speaking had become a gamble, singing was an impossible hazard. I could no longer handle my old songs. Notes that my voice once wrapped around now dangled out of reach. When I did hit the right notes, a frog stuck in my throat. I riveted. I croaked.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I tried switching octaves and often swung too deep. Still, I laughed it off. In the grand scheme of things, it was no big deal. It wasn't like I traded some perfect voice for an imperfect one. I mostly felt impatient, excited for the point when my new voice would feel worn in and familiar. I hardly thought about the notes I had lost, instead fixating on the new, deeper ones yet to emerge.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Just how low could I go? No, I never miss my old voice. But I miss the way I used to feel singing Lips of an Angel. Punching each note with confidence, a beer swinging from my hand. I'd stopped singing it a few years into testosterone. It's true that the song had become more difficult. It's true that one night at a karaoke work party, I told my coworkers that I had left it behind.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
But I didn't admit to myself until now, as I write this, that I hadn't quit Lips of an Angel as much as I had quit karaoke. In my most honest understanding, karaoke became hardest not when I could no longer sing, but when I could no longer drink. I had a problem like many others have a problem.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Not as bad as it could have been, but bad enough that it had run slipshod through my relationships, my health, and my ability to see myself surviving into old age. I had known this for years, but the only person I felt accountable to was myself. I shrugged off friends and lovers who had pulled me aside to share their fears.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I desperately wanted to believe I was someone in control of their life, and quitting drinking felt like an admission that I was not. So I kept drinking. and drinking and drinking. But this is the terrifying, miraculous thing about transitioning.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Once you imagine a body that might bring you happiness instead of loathing, and once you imagine a version of yourself with less reason to hide, you might dare to imagine a more beautiful life. After I'd been on testosterone for a little more than a year, I found myself having more days in which I wished for nothing more than to be present in my body.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I realized that quitting would be, in essence, to value my own life and wish myself into the future. So I stopped. But once I did, I felt far too exposed to strain for those old highs at karaoke. I had never been more aware of myself, my body, my newly raw voice. The dark rooms and bars had lost their sultry twinkle.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
They made me remember a past self that was freer to abandon themselves into gauzy oblivion. The loss of the self with nothing to be mourned. I was glad to have arrived on the other side. But I was too freshly molted. my shell soft and nerve endings still tingling. So in the years following, even as my changed voice began to grow roots, I stayed home.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
All right, here we go. Key Changes by Sabrina Imbler. The first sound in the universe is joylessly underwhelming. White noise, boring through the taffy stretch of nascent space. The Big Bang is not a bang, but a droning robotic purr. Galaxies expanding from the hot throat of a cat. Things cool. Atoms whirl into being. then light, scattering in the cosmic fog.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Almost a year after I stopped drinking, I learned about a population of crickets in Kauai. They were Pacific field crickets, Teleogrylus oceanicus. And their song was round, bright, and sweet. Four loud chirps culminating in a husky trill. Several decades ago, a biologist named Marlene Zuck discovered that the males had suddenly stopped singing.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Zook started studying the crickets in the 1990s when the insects would bleat together. But one year into the new millennium, she heard only a single male call out in the entire field season. An orchestra replaced by a soloist. The silence might suggest that the crickets themselves had vanished, or at least absconded.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
But when Zook and her team returned to Kauai in 2003, they found crickets abounding in the fields. The males still went through all the motions, scraping mute wings together. But their wings had slickened, rid of the corrugations that once allowed them to sing. The culprit was a mustard-colored fly, Ormia orchotriae.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Only slightly larger than a pea, the fly cannot attack the cricket like a typical hunter. Instead, it is a parasitoid. The fly listens for the cricket's song with its highly specialized eardrums, which waggle like a teeter-totter to triangulate the insect's location.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Then the fly unloads a heap of maggots atop the cricket's back, babies that burrow through the exoskeleton, and curl up inside the cricket as if its body were a womb. The maggots develop inside this walking, singing incubator, and when they hatch, they erupt out of the body and eat their way out. In singing their old song, the male crickets had unknowingly condemned themselves to a gruesome death.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
The crickets had lost their song and might now survive into the future, for generations the mute flatwings hopped around the island, freed from the flies but scarcely able to find mates. But in 2018, biologist Robin Tingitella overheard a population of Pacific field crickets in Hawaii singing a new song.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
It sounded nothing like the species' signature chirping, but rather like a cat's low, throaty purr. To the careful ears of female crickets, these calls are crude imitations of the old one. The alchemy of the first, crafted by eons of evolution, remain lost. But these new songs, however coarse and tuneless, may be the cricket's ticket to the future.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
When I wrote about the Hawaiian crickets for my day job, I recognized what seemed like parallels between us. We were creatures who had traded some original ability to sing for something else. survival, and a newfound masculinity. But I am not so obtuse as to conflate our situations.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I had no life-threatening predators around to silence me, no flies dumping a litter of maggots on my back to remodel my body into a nightmarish womb. Thinking about our situation side by side only reminded me of my luck. I had simply fallen a little out of love with karaoke. What once had been an outlet for rage, love, and desire had now become a site of discomfort, even fear.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
It was no longer a place I could go to lose myself. In fact, I was running out of places to lose myself. Perhaps this was the point of stopping drinking, but it did not halt my yearning for times when I could step into a karaoke room, pick up a mic, and become someone else for a few minutes. Now I'm much more myself. This is sometimes a relief, sometimes a restriction.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
When I used to sing Lips of an Angel at karaoke, I often found myself reading the lyrics off a simple blue screen. but the fancier bars would play the actual music video. It opens with Austin John Winkler, the former lead singer of Hinder, a quasi-tatted white guy with dark stringy hair, talking to his old girl on the phone as his new girl is in the next room.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
The video, like the song, is quite literal. When I duetted lips with the video, I mirrored Winkler's affect as I wailed, holding up my own quasi-tatted arms, nodding my own head of dark stringy hair. When I revisited the music video for this piece, I came across an interview with Winkler where he talked about reaching three years of sobriety after being hospitalized for liver and kidney failure.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
He talked about addiction, a string of stints in rehab, and saying goodbye to the person he was. He talked about coming back from the other side, going to therapy, picking up a microphone again, and feeling alive.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I was struck, stupidly, by how this man I'd only ever seen lip-syncing in a cinematically jaundiced music video about the romance of cheating on your girlfriend was a real person trying to overcome something unimaginable. Something I didn't realize before quitting drinking is that sobriety is not a single decision, but an ongoing one.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I didn't realize that every sober person I know has achieved something close to a miracle by choosing survival. I didn't realize how many of the sober people I know are also trans. In my early days of testosterone karaoke, I listened to a podcast about a trans singer who had also recently started testosterone.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
He talked about how he always feared the hormones would ruin his ability to sing and said he feared killing his sweet old voice. This framing made me bristle, as does anything that frames transition in the language of death. Even after my worst vocal cracks, I never felt any grief over a voice that was becoming less accessible, less familiar. I didn't see myself as killing anything.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Puberty, even delayed, is the promise of more life. Instead, I found a better resource. I called my friend Siobhan, a singer early in her own transition, and she coached me through the cracks. She told me to drop the song an octave down, to switch between octaves in a single song. She told me when in doubt, I could always sing Elvis. But I wonder if I'm being unfair to that singer.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Maybe I never thought of my old voice as something I could lose because I could never sing in the first place. The further I move in my medical transition, a journey that has not been without some regret, the more it has made me rethink what loss means, and if it is always something to be mourned. Loss accompanies life in any body, trans or not.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Our bodies are always in a state of change, strengthening and crumbling, breaking down and repairing themselves in thousands of ways. Part of the wonder of medical transition is that you know to expect these changes, and yet each manages to astonish you in its particulars. It is a gift to wait with bated breath for your body, which seems so solid and immutable to surprise you.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
To constantly become strange to yourself, re-encountering the wild, slickened animal of yourself each day. And I am even more grateful to be wholly present so that I can experience these changes in their full vibrance. My voice is still changing, still dropping, still breaking. Singing remains a work in progress, but speaking has become a pleasure.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Recently, when my partner heard my voicemail recording from several years ago, they thought they'd gotten the wrong number. I listened to the recording and felt no pang of remembrance, only shock. Surely there was a mistake. Could that really have been me? That old voice was beautiful in its own way. One time, a girl from college referred to me as that bitch with the This American Life voice.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
An insult come compliment that I carried with me like a badge of honor. Proof that I had cleared some objective standard of beauty. But isn't survival more astonishing than beauty? Especially with someone else's conception of it? Hormones and vocal training may not win you any voice you want, but they'll get you much closer than doing nothing at all. Perhaps this is the real joy of karaoke.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Not hitting all the notes or nailing a vocal run, but giving yourself permission to be another person, another voice, just for the night. In these rooms, I now workshop future versions of myself. I sing low. I swagger. I'm learning how to tame a voice that is still unfamiliar, yet inconceivably my own. I've started singing pop songs an octave down.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Kylie Minogue, if she were a baritone, that I have always avoided, scared off by a feminine register that seemed out of reach. I still go back, sometimes the only person in the room without a drink in hand. Even if I only manage to sway in the back of a room as someone else wails into the mic, I'll sing along, my voice breaking, croaking, and if the song is good enough, screaming.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I sing until, at the end of the night, I lose my voice. But now I trust it to return.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Gas clumps to form the first stars, whose huddled masses in turn form the first galaxies. A storm of gas and dust collapses, perhaps t-boned by a nearby supernova skidding and spinning into a sun. Our sun. All of this cacophony, the universe ringing like a cosmic bell, would be brutal for anyone around to hear it.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Life remains entirely uninvented. And when it finally appears, likely around 700 million years later, ears remain entirely uninvented too. So no one hears the torrent of the first oceans, the slick of the first big freeze, the jostling of the continents. Life pleats, becomes multicellular. Sponges drink in the ocean, fungi unfurl, worms slither in the murk.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Eventually, the first plants extrude from land and insects skitter. The seedlings swell skyward, thundering into forests. Insects sprout wings and join them. This living does not happen silently. Bodies scraping through brush, whirring of wings, exoskeletons crunched by jaws. But these noises are unintentional. They're not meant for anyone.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
This changes 270 million years ago, when an insect akin to a cricket scrapes one ornamented wing over another, veins stiffened like corduroy, creating a rasp. The rasp does not sound like a song or even a note. You might mistake it for one rock scruffing against another. But however tuneless, the rasp of Permostridulus brognardi became what biologist David George Haskell calls
Radiolab
The First Known Earthly Voice
the first known earthly voice. There is no single agreed-upon definition of animal song. Some biologists reserve the label for the steepled melodies of birds and tapestries of whale song. Others apply it more generously to any creature that calls out again and again toward others of its kind.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Promostridulus's coarse guttural call lacked the complex structure of modern cricket songs, but it used the same mechanism.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
So you might agree that the moment, hundreds of millions of years ago, when a rasp crackled out of two wings and bellowed out into the insect's presence for some unknown reason, escaping a predator, threatening a foe, finding a mate, marked Permostridulus as the planet's first singer. The fact that I have never been a skilled singer has never kept me from karaoke.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
In adolescence, I was a part-time theater kid, a past that left me with a simmering, unquenched desire for some kind of spotlight. I began singing in earnest after college, in matchbox rooms with friends, coworkers, and strangers, in bars where we all thrummed against one another. My voice is loud and clear, but also flat and often tone-deaf.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I could never command a room as well as a talented singer, a fact I was reminded of whenever I karaoke with certain friends. When they sang, the rooms fell silent. I envied this attention, how it felt alchemic, sublimating into self-worth. I too wanted to conjure delight and affection. In this way, I suppose I am no different from any other creature.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
The evolutionary basis of any animal song is a bid for a mate. Karaoke is famously an outlet for rage, the rare public place where screaming will be met with applause. But in my experience, the night always ends with love songs. thinning, bleary crowd, some too many drinks deep, listening to a ballad of the unrequited.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
In my 20s, my favorite karaoke ballad was Hinder's Lips of an Angel, a grungy confession sung by a man to his ex-girlfriend over a whispered phone call. Whispered because there's new girls in the next room. Lips is so wretchedly self-serious in its generic valorization of cheating that it is transmuted almost endearingly into camp.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I listened to the song in middle school on some torrented copy of Now That's What I Call Music. I was not necessarily drawn to the lyrics, can't cheat on your girlfriend if you don't have one, but rather its naked emotional core. It's a song about yearning, which was then my favorite pastime. I yearned for everything, a crush, adulthood, a body, and self I could love more.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
My friends and I loved to karaoke to the pop divas we grew up blasting from our boomboxes. But the first time I heard one of them sing Lips of an Angel, a song I had not consciously listened to in nearly a decade, I felt a swell of my old adolescent kinship.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I started my own surreptitious relationship with it, singing it in rooms and bars full of strangers until it felt as inextricable from my identity as my haircut. I grew to relish the way some people, often men, reacted to my performance, nodding along to the melancholic opening chords before surprise plastered their faces when they saw who held the mic.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
At the risk of being reductive, Lips of an Angel is a boy song, not a girl song. When I first began to sing, my face soft and eyebrows painted on, I felt a certain frisson, as if just for this moment I was stepping into another body. As an alto, close to a contralto, I had always felt more comfortable singing songs written for men.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I wonder now if my singing voice was the first plane on which I would claim to have passed, even briefly, as something other than a woman. Each time I sang lips, I practiced embodying this man, this self-defeating, aspirational cheater, too afraid to leave a relationship that rendered him dispassionate. During the chorus, I gripped the sweaty neck of my beer and held it like a candle.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
But girl, you make it hard to be faithful. During the guitar solo, I thrashed my head along, I spat gravel from my throat and sang not to the back of the room, but beyond it. The morning after, I'd wake up without a voice. We never learn if the singer gains the courage to go back to his ex, but it seems unlikely that he moves beyond his comfortable stasis.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
As a middle schooler, I never questioned the idea that his ex's call came too late to act on. I was obsessed with the idea that my life had already foreclosed certain possibilities, such as becoming a figure skater or speaking Mandarin. Only when I got older would I learn that it is never really too late for anything. Humans, birds, and whales learn their songs over the course of their lives.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
They practice, learn through mistakes, and even compose new songs together. But crickets, who live only a few months and hatch long after their parents' generation has perished, cannot learn their songs from elders. Rather, each species is born with its own signature song. The composition is genetically encoded and manifests in the specific ridges of the male's wings.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Even if a cricket is raised in total isolation, having never met another of its kind, he will know how to sing his own particular song. at least after a few raspy attempts. As soon as the cricket, known as the handsome trig, molts into an adult, he can rub one wing over another and emit his characteristic rattling trill. A cricket's song is a beacon of connection to his kind.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
If it were ever lost, he may be doomed to wander alone in the reeds.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I know that he just totally is like, he just wakes up and he's like, I know my song.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
I thank you. Many crickets look identical, at least to us. Dark almonds with short wings and elbowed legs. But in the 1950s, researchers trudging into fields with tape recorders discovered many more cricket species than they had identified by eye.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Although the first songs of early crickets, like their perma-stridalists, were little more than rasps, modern species have since developed a vast repertoire of songs that feature chirps, trills, rattles, and lisps. Carolina ground crickets make an impatient, sloping trill that suddenly catches, as if their wings needed to take a breath.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
A tinkling ground cricket emits a quick, hushed series of cheeps, like a bird wrapped inside a blanket. The confused ground cricket buzzes two short syllables again and again, raised like a question. Some songs, especially those of tree crickets, which often have wings translucent as a sugar crust, sound more beautiful than others. This beauty is human bias.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
The principles of cricket aesthetics remain a mystery to us, and is also the afterglow of evolution. After all, the first cricket song emerged as a mutation. An insect born with an unusually craggy wing rubbed it against the other to produce a sound so soft that it was only perceptible from nearby, perhaps to a mate.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Scientists suspect all the songs in a modern cricket's repertoire arose from this ancient intimacy. They needed to whisper before they could wail. But when they wailed, it was the males who became the first beacons of sound. Given the animal kingdom's penchant for male flamboyance, perhaps this is unsurprising.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Only males make themselves vulnerable with song, screeching out their presence both to potential lovers and potential predators. To protect themselves, males often hide while they sing. Nestled within clumps of grass and under rocks and leaves, they have no choice but to sing. even if it means opening themselves up to doom. I didn't start taking testosterone because I wanted to become a man.
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The First Known Earthly Voice
Rather, I coveted certain manly flourishes. A wispy mustache. Flesh desperate to become muscle. A new mystery of a face. What I wanted most of all was a deeper voice. one that could drop into the abyss and skim the sea floor. As testosterone tilts your larynx and thickens your vocal cords, your voice sinks, stretches, and breaks. Mine skipped like a broken record.