I start in the middle of a recurring dream. There is a viscous substance stuck on my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Perhaps it is the soft mixture of stone, sand and water that hardens into concrete. Perhaps it is the sticky contents of two chewed packets of chewing gum. I am trying to grasp and grab and pull the viscous substance out. Sometimes, it is unmoveable. Other times, it loosens and surges and doesn't stop – like some endless handkerchief pulled from a magician's coat sleeve. When this happens, it feels like my intestines are evacuating through my open mouth.

To speak – to ‘give voice’ – involves muscles and guts of the speaker: air flowing through larynx, vocal cords shaping and tensing, vibration, cartilage, stomach muscles, tongue, lips. Voices are physical and material, issuing from bodies and felt by bodies. Lines of breath rendered resonant by the vibrations of vocal cords become speech in material and social configurations. To speak implies (though not always) a listener – a living, breathing interlocutor – whose facial expressions, raised eyebrow, encouraging nod, whisper, laugh, groan can spur the speaker on or somehow move the speaker to close their mouth. Voices respond and intermingle with their sonic and social environments: pitch levels of speakers may align when the speakers are in agreement, or escalate in volume in situations of conflict, or mimic the contours of other voices when power relations are asymmetrical. Sometimes, in the moment of speech, something else surges forth, breaking the boundaries of bodies and skin and guts: a blush springs to the surface, tears spill out, rage burns up, laughter escapes. The spoken voice is also inextricably bound up with silence – not the opposite of speech but entangled with it. The physicality of a voice can alter the material environment – the force of a cry can enliven an object to vibrate, or combine with other proximate frequencies to compose a soundscape.

The term ‘voice’ is also used for the written, authorial voice – the I that writes what they have thought-felt and are thinking-feeling. Crafting an authorial voice is fraught, particularly when the authorial I is preoccupied with the problem of how to think-feel-relate-act with the voices-bodies of (human and more-than-human) others that are inextricable from themselves.