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During a lecture today on phonation, my hot linguistics professor described a murmur as “that raspy, sexy voice”.

Oh, that one, I thought, as a conspiratorial smile spread across my face. Finally a concept I can fully grasp in this course.

Our textbook describes four basic types of phonation: voiced, voiceless, whisper, and murmur. When I read the text before class I didn’t imagine that it was *that* sort of murmur. Technically, a murmur is a combination of the vibration of a voiced sound and the voicelessness of a whisper. Place your fingers on your throat and say the sound /f/ and then the sound /v/ - you should feel a vibration on the /v/ because it is voiced. When we murmur (sweet nothings preferably) our vocal cords do not close along their entire length and the air that flows through adds whisper to our voiced sounds.

At first it seemed a bit antiseptic to turn something that, for me, was almost second nature into something scientific and classifiable. Then I thought of the bodily nature of this thing, the murmur. The movement of the tongue in the mouth and across pearly teeth. The breath sent through pursed lips to caress any vulnerable and exposed bit of a lover. The vibrations of the vocal chords that carry through our entire bodies. Perhaps understanding this little bit of biology, anatomy, and the marvel of the human capacity to communicate draws me closer to understanding the communication between bodies and minds during lovemaking.

This little lesson in the phonation is part of the science of arousal and seduction. Especially vocally. That murmur that we love to hear, the breathiness and raspiness of it, signals something in our psyche, an utterance between voice and whisper that points to a similar longing.

I guess I always knew that my voice was an instrument but I never quite knew how it was tuned. And now, with this awareness, I’m ready to stretch the vocal chords again.