The Sound Of Your Voice, by Carol Fleming

Just a great great (audio)book about speaking.

It's nothing too deep but I think since we all get judged on how we speak all the time there's a lot of value in spending 3 hours listening to a book about speech/sounds and doing some exercises.

The book is just really well-structured as an empirical exercise. Lots of spaced repetition, lots of practice, lots of specific tips. I realised I was the kind of person who was going to fail to do the exercises anyway, so I went on Upwork and hired a speaking coach to analyse my voice -- she seemed pretty good, charges $35 for a half-hour zoom session after which she generates a two-page written report about your voice, recommend her: https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~01ae6fa926801e24e9

Meanwhile, the book is also the most hilariously 80s thing ever: the author has a posh British comedy sidekick called Wesley. Also synths had just been invented, apparently, so they're played every 5 mins throughout the book.

I should probably have more takeaways from the book but a few notes:

• Fleming points out that our voice sounds different in our own heads because of the resonance from our skulls etc, and that this is why when you hear yourself on tape your voice sounds higher and whinier (my paraphrase).- People saw their reflections since antiquity, but have only heard their own voice since 1950s or so
• A great tip: if you're in a noisy place (e.g. loud traffic) and need to be heard, try changing your pitch instead of your volume -- you just need your pitch to be more-different from the background noise
• Overall, good book in the catalytic sense that it makes you think about a thing that (in my opinion) you can improve at a lot by being deliberate about it. If you, like me, spend your life talking to people, learning how to make your voice sound better feels like low-hanging fruit