Voices

Yesterday evening, for some unknown reason, I was thinking about how who the narrator is in a book can really change what you learn of the story (more on that another time). Anyway, this suddenly made me wonder what the voice was that I hear in my head when I read. This then made me wonder if the voice G hears has a Scottish accent. At this point G got home from work, so I took the opportunity to ask. But G doesn’t seem to hear a “voice” when reading, which I find perplexing (although this does also make me wonder if I am “hearing voices”, which probably wouldn’t be a good thing – unless they gave me the winning lottery numbers).

Then I was trying to work out if the ‘voice’ I hear when I read is my own, but actually I’m not sure it is because I don’t think it is enough of a sound to actually be a clear voice in that sense. However, when I recently read “The Girl Who Played with Fire”, I heard a lot of that as though a bloke with a Swedish accent was reading it, although that was because I listened to the previous book in that series as a talking book and it was read by a bloke with a Swedish accent and I was ‘hearing’ his voice.

The more I try and concentrate on what the voice sounds like, the more weird it becomes to think about it and it actually gives me a strange physical feeling in my head. I still can’t quite work out what it is that I hear beyond there being words.

We tested this last night (we really need to watch more television) and G seems not to hear the words really but sees the words on the page and almost just kind of “absorbs” them. Although, with real concentration, does seem to be able to hear a voice, but that isn’t the norm.

I need to stop thinking about this because the more I think about it, the more perplexing it becomes.