“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I stood up and began to read. The sudden volume and depth and timbre of my voice was instantly apparent, and startled me. I read all of the Lepanto and part of the Elegy in this manner. My voice boomed—I sounded more like Father Trainor than like myself. The volume of my voice was really tremendous.

(I was so angry that I did the whole thing over again. Lepanto is a four-page poem. This time the performance was about like the second one, already recorded. Perhaps if I feel subjectively right about doing it again, I may try it tonight. I don’t know where the volume comes from, the deep manlike tones. Perhaps it is what actors call merely projection, breathing from the diaphragm. I wasn’t conscious of breathing any differently than usual, but if this was a subconscious production that wouldn’t make any difference. But where would the male aspect enter, unless it be a woman’s attempt to mimic as best she could the voice of a man she had admired?

(As a check I suggested later that Jane try reading a different poem, one not read by Father Trainor, to see if she could summon this powerful new voice at will. I wanted to see if something Jane had no emotional involvement with, via memory, could also be used to summon voice changes. Nothing happened. To begin with Jane could not consciously summon nearly the volume of voice, and within a few lines she was so hoarse she had to rest. She said Father Trainor always read the Lepanto and the Elegy on his Sunday visits, and that she could not remember his reading anything else.

(The volume and male inflection Jane achieved during her various readings was quite amazing. I noticed that toward the end of each verse of the Lepanto she would reach a crescendo of volume and emotion that was indeed thrilling. For brief periods her voice would sound very alien. For other periods, during what seemed to be letdowns, I would know the voice was hers. But still it would be much stronger and lower in timbre than her natural voice.