Once again, I welcome the inimitable Jessica Cooper, who has a fascinating insight to share on the role of our voices in our lives. This post comes from work we are doing together on a new book about the voice.  

We tend to think of our voices as ours alone — belonging to us, like a foot or a hand. But in a deeper biological and social sense, the voice isn’t just ours – it exists most fully in the space between speaker and listener, where sound becomes shared meaning. That’s not just a poetic idea – it’s neuroscience.

When we speak, we’re not simply sharing information — we’re triggering emotional and physiological responses in the people around us. That happens thanks to a network in the brain called the mirror neuron system, which lights up when we act — and when we observe or hear others act.

These mirror neurons are particularly sensitive to vocal tone. An inflection, a tremor or pause — they all land in someone else’s nervous system before the words register. Our voices prompt an emotional reaction in others whether we mean them to or not.

For many of us, communication doesn’t always land the way we intend. You say something you think is clear, but it’s misheard or misread. Or you’re unsure how to strike the right tone, or whether your voice is giving too much away — or not enough. That’s not a failure; it’s part of the nature of voice itself. Because your voice is being filtered through someone else’s nervous system — their context, their wiring, their lived experience.

This human sensitivity to voice likely predates language itself. Long before we had words, we had to connect — to collaborate, warn, comfort… and attract each other. Our brains evolved to “read” intention and emotion through gesture and tone. Then, by evolutionary accident, our larynx dropped — a shift in anatomy (possibly related to walking upright) that allowed us to produce a wider range of sound.  Unlike our cousins the chimps, for example, we could suddenly begin to play with the wide variety of tones and sounds that are necessary for complex speech.

But that capacity didn’t mean much on its own. – what mattered was that we already had the neural wiring to receive and interpret it — to hear meaning in vocal sounds. So the voice didn’t evolve instead of connection. It evolved because of it.

So while we may speak with “our” voices, we don’t do so alone. We learn to speak by mirroring others. Our voices carry the inflections, rhythms, and emotional codes of our communities. We adapt our tone depending on who we’re talking to, and what we want to convey — sometimes unconsciously, sometimes not.

And if you’ve ever felt unsure about how your voice is landing — too much? too flat? not what you meant? — that’s not a failure. It’s a sign that the system is shared. It can be tuned. You can learn to work with this system — to tune your voice for clarity, warmth, or impact. Even if it doesn’t always feel natural, you can shape how your voice speaks and connects to others.

And that might be the most human thing about your voice.