Code-switching and voice-changing

There are a lot of phenomenal things in the world. Compost, seahorses, and lightning are three. But try wrapping your senses around a person whose velvety, medium-bodied voice rises from a B-flat in Japanese to an F-sharp when they switch to English.

It's very typical for people to speak in higher, sweeter, politer tones when they use Japanese. This is hardly a phenomenon (it's banal, even), and I am talking about the opposite effect. In speakers living with this phenomenon, it's as if the strain of verbalizing thoughts in English squeezes out everything reasonable in his/her voice, and creates an otherworldly tone and pitch better suited to art than to a straight-faced conversation.

My friend Sohhei is one of these speakers. Indeed, he makes commendable use of his built-in vocal effects through song. Based on how he speaks English versus Japanese, I am sincerely guessing that he wouldn't be able to reach such a soprano in his mother tongue. (If you choose to follow the link, please select the track entitled "cosmic love" and listen all the way through. I find this song very beautiful, especially when he wails in the middle. Can you feel every saccharine cent of his androgynous pain?)

Tokiko is another example. She is a student of mine who works with mergers, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring. Tomorrow, she will interview with an American executive for a position as manager of the Japanese subsidiary. She knows exactly what Japanese executives are thinking when they interview her ("Can I really hire a woman?"), but she is unsure how her femaleness will be received by an American interviewer. I told her not to worry about that. She is a brilliant and strong person; an excellent candidate for any managerial role, regardless of her gender.

What I didn't tell her was that it's difficult to focus on her flawless grammar when it's presented on distractingly birdlike emissions fluttering through her throat and nose and it's only possible to catch every other sentence because the other half of the time, the listener is trying to look somewhere besides into the black hole of her mouth in order to imagine the source of these unearthly patterns of sound. Where does this world end and Tokiko's English-speaking voice begin? And Sohhei's? Who sent them, and how long will their presence grace our unworthy planet?