What Is in a Voice, or How Systems Sing

A few weeks back, I caught a repeat airing of Krista Tippett’s “On Being” interview with acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton. Hempton travels the world, recording soundscapes like desert thunderstorms, the sound of wind in the grass, birdsong in deep forest. I remember first hearing this interview back in 2017 or so, and even then I was so struck with what Hempton was trying to do that I attempted to use his work with one of my teams. (Note: it didn’t go so well. The team called that experiment “log jam” and were kind of weirded out that I was asking them to listen to the sounds of the ocean inside a hollowed cedar log. But I digress.)

The repeated Hempton interview jogged another memory for me, this one of a choir of British military wives. Their husbands had been deployed, and to combat loneliness and to help them find home and connection, they gathered to sing. I don’t remember any of them being trained singers or even having much interest in singing, but coming together to raise their voices in loneliness, in longing provided an outlet that they didn’t even know they needed.

The combination of Hempton’s work with acoustic ecology and a choir of untrained voices made me stop and think about the concept of voice from a coaching perspective. What are the voices in a system? How do we listen to those voices? How do we lift those voices up? And lastly, how can we help people learn to “sing?”