INSIDE VOICE My Obsession With How We Sound

Film director Lake Bell says she is “obsessed with voices.” In this direct-to-audio book, she considers matters anatomical, social, political, and historical as they relate to people’s voices. The wide-ranging material includes discussions of animated character voices, vocal indicators of social rank, regional accents, gender assumptions, and depictions of how both our personal histories and the culturally popular vocal models of each generation shape how we hear others and how we use our own voices. Bell provides many accents and timbres as examples, including recordings of people on the street and interviews with such experts as a race scholar, a transgender author, and podcaster Malcolm Gladwell. Without being scholarly, this listening experience offers many revelations and suggests further questions. F.M.R.G. 2022 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine [Published: OCTOBER 2022]