013 - VocalScope: John Colapinto, Author & Journalist, discusses his extraordinary book 'This Is The Voice'.
About John: JOHN COLAPINTO began his career as a journalist in his native Toronto before moving to New York City in 1989 where he worked as staff writer at Rolling Stone magazine and, later, The New Yorker. He won a National Magazine Award for his Rolling Stone story about the world’s first infant sex reassignment and expanded the story into the New York Times bestselling book As Nature Made Him (currently in development with Peter Jackson as a feature film). His articles have been anthologized in the annual compendiums The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2008, ’10, ‘11); Crime Reporting (‘09); and Sports Writing (2017). His first novel, About the Author (a tale of literary envy and theft), was published in 2001 and, in 2019, it was named, by the Times of London, as one of the top 100 thrillers published since 1945. His novel Undone (2015) challenged the new prudery around sex and was promptly rejected by almost 50 publishers worldwide, but was finally brought out in the US, UK and Canada by small, brave publishing outfits. He published This is The Voice, in January 2021. Colapinto is also a singer in the NYC-based rock bands Rack of Lamb and the Sequoias and in May 2021 he extended his adventures into vocal expressiveness by co-starring in the upcoming short film “The File.” About This is the Voice: This is the Voice takes a deep dive into all aspects of the noises we make with our mouths, from the goose-bump inducing power of song to the intellectual stimulation of conversation and monologue, and reveals how these extraordinary acoustic signals (which began with the grunts and wheezes of the lungfish, 400 million years ago, and which our species refined into speech) shot us to the top of the food chain. Emotion, accents, speech disorders and injuries (like the vocal polyp suffered by the book’s author), are among the many topics addressed—all with an eye (or ear) toward showing how our unique vocal signals are an indelible badge of identity, a key to our geographic origins, level of education, socioeconomic status, race and even sexual orientation. Because the very sound of the voice is so important to how we choose our political leaders (from the rolling orotundity of a Churchill to the ripping shriek of a Hitler), the book also shows how unexpectedly important the vocal signal is to the fate of a species whose leaders must guide us through the dangers of thermonuclear weapons to the ravages of global pandemics. Ultimately, This is the Voice argues that voice is our most important faculty of all, the complex gymnastic achievement of lungs, lips and tongue that made us human. John's Favourite Voice: Neil Young singing Harvest. Listen to John's 'Voice Choice' on the VocalScope Podcast Guests playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4pjclKQVRnnUnMW0vgu0H0?si=8380f4264b42464e Join the VocalScope Book Club: https://vocalscope.ac-page.com/book-club-sign-up