Vrooming with vowels and ahhing with consonants
Bring enchantment and light into your writing
When a great singer hums; when a great singer sings a vocalise – a long melodic line sung on pure vowels; when a great voice artist scats or beatboxes … glory reigns!
Listen to Joan Sutherland singing the second movement of Gliere’s Concerto for Coloratura and Orchestra, for instance, or Ella Fitzgerald and Mel Torme’s stellar scat vocal performance.
The musicality of the human voice, confined to pure sound, in a dimension that supports and informs—but ultimately exists beyond—words, is moving, inspiring, uplifting.
Singers can use pure sound to convey the heights and depths of emotions, showing us that the human voice is capable of such music as goes beyond words. That’s their starting point. When they add words, they do so on top of a rich, resonant river of sound. We, as writers and storytellers, can do the same by choosing words musically and poetically. When we do so, our words become infused with artistry; they resonate with word magic. They soar off the page and we revel in the richness of their sound quality.
The most obvious way to use sound in writing is to fling in words like ‘crash’, ‘flutter’, or ‘bang’ – onomatopoeic words. Effective, but brash.
There’s something very different going on in the opening of Rudyard Kipling’s The Butterfly that Stamped:
THIS, O my Best Beloved, is a story—a new and a wonderful story—a story quite different from the other stories—a story about The Most Wise Sovereign Suleiman-bin-Daoud—Solomon the Son of David.
There are three hundred and fifty-five stories about Suleiman-bin-Daoud; but this is not one of them. It is not the story of the Lapwing who found the Water; or the Hoopoe who shaded Suleiman bin-Daoud from the heat. It is not the story of the Glass Pavement, or the Ruby with the Crooked Hole, or the Gold Bars of Balkis. It is the story of the Butterfly that Stamped.
Now attend all over again and listen!
So much going on here! Exotic words and associations flow in with ‘Suleiman’ and ‘Balkis’. We feel the glister in ‘Water’, ‘Hoopoe’, ‘Glass Pavement’, with ‘Ruby’, and in ‘Gold’.
There’s more happening on the level of sound, though – there’s the immediate or close repetition of ‘story’; the close repetitive patterns of alliteration with ‘Best Beloved’ later balanced by a more spread out ‘Bars of Balkis’. ‘Sovereign Suleiman’ is closely balanced out by ‘Solomon the Son’ – alliteration is hidden deep in ‘fifty-five’ and even deeper in ‘wonderful’ / ‘wise’. There’s pararhyme ‘Daoud’ / ‘David’. And don’t forget the pauses—the em dashes in the text. There are no end rhymes—at least none that I can find … but oh, the effect of that ‘O’! It’s not just the parallelism but the rich variety in the sounds of Kipling’s prose that make it so sonorous, so en-chant-ing.
Meaning aside, could your prose be chanted effectively in the context of a religious ritual? Try it. If it can, you will get an ‘Amen’ from me to that!
The truth of sound, in language, manifests through vowels, through consonants, but lies beyond them. It’s worthwhile getting to know them, and how they can act as true conduits for the thoughts they come to life to convey.
How do vowels work?
Vowels are made with an open mouth, with nothing to restrict the sound from its passage through the vocal tract as it goes up through the larynx or voice box, through the trachea, into the mouth, over the tongue or into the nasal passages and out past the lips. Say an ‘Ahhhhh’ as if you’re at the doctor’s and you’ll find your mouth is open and your tongue can lie flat between your bottom teeth. The ‘eeeeeeeeee’ is made with a higher tongue position, and if you make an ‘ooooooooooooo’ sound (as in ‘moo’, the sound a cow makes) without pursing your lips, you’ll probably find the back of your tongue has to adjust to a lower position in your throat. While the sounds of the vowels change according to the position of the vocal tract, they provide a continuous, unbroken stream of sound. Keep a vowel sound going, and it’s hard to tell how long it’s lasted. Vowels have a timeless quality – and vowels carry emotion at the fundamental level of voice quality. In English, as I pointed out in my last post and in a YouTube video here, they can be long (art, aunt) or short (at).
What about consonants?
Consonants break up the continuous stream of vowel sound. They’re formed through contact – contact of the tongue against the teeth or the roof of the mouth; or contact between the lips. They come in many types: explosive plosive sounds like ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘k’; sinuous hissing sibilant sound like ‘s’, ‘z’; flowing liquid sounds like ‘m’, ‘v’, ‘l’. Each group has a different effect – some potentially stretch out the length of a word, something singers often exploit; others break it up, or shorten it, giving a punchier, more rhythmic feel to a word or group of words. Actors often exploit the percussive nature of consonants in order to convey a character’s attitude or state of mind. And both singers and actors often use tongue twisters based on tricky-to-say consonant patterns to warm up their vocal mechanism before a performance – ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’, for instance.
The truth in the play of these creates the effects that Pope draws on in his Essay on Criticism, when he writes
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.
’Tis not enough no harshness gives offence,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er th’ unbending corn, and skims along the main.
At the heart of all of this are two key principles: the continuous and the discrete – the continuous flow of vowels and the discrete intervals of the consonants that punctuate that flow.
You can think of them as yin and yang aspects of qi, against the silent background of the Dao - the eternal Dao which cannot be named. They work together.
Yin is inside but yang guards it.
Yang is outside but yin sends it.(from Chapter 7 of the SuWen section of the Huangdi Neijing medical text.)
How can you use these aspects of rhythm, of the ebb and flow of sound energy in your prose writing?
This is just a taster of a whole group of exercises which will feature in the SOUND section, one of twelve sections I cover in my next book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, a companion volume to my forthcoming book, The Unknown Storyteller where I look at the ebb and flow of story structure.
If you haven’t already come up with a 200-word composition which explores sound in an interesting way that’s inspired by Carol’s illustration for the writing book, there’s still time to enter - find out more here.
Good luck - all the best -
Leon