Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting

A Social History of the Modern Voice

Josephine Hoegaerts

$162

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Pennsylvania Press
30 September 2025

Music; Social & cultural history; History of medicine; Regional physiology; Speech & language disorders & therapy

Series: Sound in History

What was considered a good, normal, or healthy voice in the nineteenth century?

In 1854, singing master Manuel Garcia became the first person to see the vocal cords at work in a human throat. Less than a decade later, surgeon Paul Broca identified what he called a speech center in the brain. The almost simultaneous invention of the laryngoscope and the discovery of Broca's area present important turning points for how medical, musical, and other experts understood how the human voice works.

These developments did not occur in a vacuum, however. In Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting, Josephine Hoegaerts describes the ambitious attempts, throughout the nineteenth century, to observe, understand, and manage human voices, as well as the host of more traditional, domestic, and stereotypical beliefs about the voice that continued to exist alongside these new insights. She peers into the stammering therapist's office, over the singing teacher's shoulder, and occasionally into the laryngoscope to see how something so simple—the sound Europeans produced when they opened their mouths—changed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Combining insights from medical and musical histories with methods from the fields of sound studies and the history of experience, Hoegaerts traces how people imagined human voices in the nineteenth century and how they used them. Rather than focusing on the great singers and orators of the age, the book looks at the mundane daily practices of singers, speakers, and stammerers and the people who trained and studied them. What did it take, according to all these increasingly specialized professionals, to have a normal voice in nineteenth-century Europe?

By: Josephine Hoegaerts
Imprint: University of Pennsylvania Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9781512827736
ISBN 10: 1512827738
Series: Sound in History
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 30 September 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Josephine Hoegaerts is Professor of European Culture in the Department of History and European Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Reviews for Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting: A Social History of the Modern Voice

""Impeccably researched and elegantly written, Josephine Hoegaerts's book tracks social change by showing us how the meaning of voice and vocal sound changed in the nineteenth century.""-- ""Janice Schroeder, Carleton University"" ""Speaking, Stammering, Singing, Shouting is a treasure trove of research on the cultural, historical, political, clinical and pedagogical influences on vocal practices, and is a pivotal contribution to contemporary knowledge of the voice's role in society.""-- ""Michael Bonshor, University of Sheffield""