This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. There are a lot of things we take for

granted and among them are our voices. We sing, we laugh, we yell at ball parks, and we talk

all the time, on the phone, in the office, on street corners, and in doing so we can damage our voices.

Our guest, writer John Colapento, has had his own experience with that, which you'll soon hear

about, and he became interested in the voice, which is the subject of his book, This Is the Voice.

It's an exploration of the astonishing complexity of our vocal apparatus, how we form words,

how babies learn to speak, how accents arise, and how different kinds of voices affect us,

which one sound authoritative or sexually appealing or politically persuasive.

Colapento argues that the development of our prehistoric ancestors' vocal structures

may have been the key to humans becoming the dominant species on the planet.

John Colapento is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. He's the author of the best-selling

nonfiction book as nature made him and the novel about the author. He joined me from his home in New

York City last year to talk about his book, This Is the Voice, which is now out in paperback.

Well, John Colapento, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much. I thought we would begin with

the story that you tell in the book early. When you're 41 years old, I think, working at Rolling Stone

magazine, and the publisher, John Winner, is putting together a sort of an ad hoc rock band for a

big staff party and asks you to be the lead singer. Had you done any singing?

I had actually. I had been singing since high school just kind of casually. I sang in my school

choir and so on. I played piano in coffee houses in college. So I was, you know, some I could carry a

tune. I even knew what projection was. You sort of making the voice big and filling a room with it.

But I had never done any proper vocal warm-ups. And that's how I got into trouble when I was singing

with John Winner's rock band with Rolling Stone magazine. And I was being silent all day long.

...