The voice is crucial when it comes to self-expression, and it’s understood to reflect emotional and mental states. Studies show that there’s a relationship between trauma and vocal physiology, supporting the argument that experience and trauma impact the voice (Carroll, Castano, Kidd, and Monti, 2017). After all, the voice is attached not only to a body, but the body of a human being (Simonson, 2017). While the physical voice is most often regarded as an instrument, understanding sounds made by the voice as independent artifacts, enables these sounds to serve as individual objects. In his chapter in Theorizing Sound Writing, J. Martin Daughtry suggests that we look at the voice as an acoustic palimpsest, which produces sound, and also carries the imprint of every sound it has ever produced or witnessed (Kapchan, 2016). This is similar to the idea mentioned earlier, that a single voice can represent and carry the voices of others in addition to its own. If the voice serves as an imperfectly erased canvas as Daughtry suggests, what sort of impression has an environment of trauma left on the voices of the children in HBV? Can you conclusively and consistently hear the imprint of trauma in the voice? Based on my research: no. For as many different voices as there are at HBV, there are as many different physical responses to trauma. Some responses may affect the voice, and others may not.
