The King's Speech: What does a stutter tell us?

On 3 September 1939, millions of British subjects tuned in to hear a live radio address by King George VI on the eve of war with Germany. The king's words came slowly, inevitably, dropping and detonating with gathering gravity, like a salvo of depth charges descending nearer and nearer: "Over and over . . . again . . . we have tried . . . to find . . . a peaceful . . . way out . . . of the differences . . . between ourselves . . . and those . . . who are now . . . our . . . enemies." What the audience did not see were the wrenching strains of the speaker laboring to release these words intact, nor the Australian-born commoner beside him in the cramped broadcast booth, silently coaxing them out of him. (The picture seen here was staged after the address.)

This remarkable event provides the dramatic climax of "The King's Speech," a film based on the true story of how George VI struggled to overcome a debilitating stutter and delivered a life-defining 5 minutes and 37 seconds of stirring oration. Colin Firth plays Albert Frederick Arthur George Windsor, or "Bertie," as he was known to family. In 1936, the diffident duke is thrust onto the throne when his charismatic older brother Edward VIII abdicates it to pursue the hand of a twice-divorced American socialite. Bertie is mortified. Since his youth, a stammer has turned public appearances into humiliating spectacles. Prompted by his wife, Bertie turns to Lionel Logue, a self-styled speech therapist, portrayed by Geoffrey Rush. In time, Logue becomes a trusted friend, and his idiosyncratic methods enable Bertie to reclaim his voice.

An elegant, smart, and uplifting period drama, "The King's Speech" rightly has been praised for calling greater public attention to stuttering and stutterers, or "people who stutter" (PWS), as many activists would prefer. And yet, the film conveys a widespread misconception about the condition. This is the idea that stuttering is ultimately an emotional problem, the outward sign of a soul strangled by anxiety or self-doubt.

Dr. Logue--who, it transpires, is a failed actor with no credentials--makes therapeutic breakthroughs by cracking the gilded shell of his royal patient, releasing him to talk about his essential loneliness and his boyhood torments at the hands of jeering peers and a flinty, unforgiving father. The victory over the stammer arrives with the restoration of the monarch's self-regard and resolve of purpose. The audience is invited to infer that Bertie "finds his voice" not just in coincidence with but because of his embrace of his identity as king and the historical calling to confront Nazism. The re- re- re- repetitions, prolongations, and sudden stops of the stammerer we hear as nervousness, distress, and insecurity. Even Moses, we are told by Abrahamic tradition, had to overcome his reticence about serving as God's mouthpiece to Pharaoh. He worried that Pharaoh would not heed him because he was of "heavy tongue."

One of the most remarkable and robust findings of contemporary research on stuttering is that it can be eliminated by singing, a fact that figures amusingly in the film. But if it were just some emotional aversion to "making their voices heard" that prevented stutterers from speaking fluently, then shouldn't we expect that setting their voices to music would make things worse, not better?

In fact, current scientific research suggests that stuttering is not born of childhood trauma, although it can lead to it. The verbal disfluencies usually emerge between the ages of 2 and 5 years old as children are first attempting to use strings of words to communicate. The condition runs in families, and in February 2010, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders announced the discovery of three associated genes. There is now strong evidence that the brains of persons with persistent developmental stuttering differ anatomically from non-stutterers in the planum temporale, a region dedicated to analyzing complex sounds involved in speech and music.

According to one theory that is gaining traction, stuttering results from a failure of coordination between two brain systems: a speech-motor circuit responsible for producing sounds and a linguistic circuit responsible for selecting, from among the units of a language, the sounds to produce. Speakers' attempts to correct these discontinuities are made more difficult by the anxiety and humiliation of being publicly observed, judged, and often ridiculed.

Analogously, for a driver with poor coordination, the problem of making an automobile move according to one's wishes by the application of pressure and torque to pedals and steering wheel may be made worse by an emotional state of rage or distress, insofar as such states interfere with judgment and motor control. But that does not show that poor coordination is an emotional problem. To suppose otherwise is to confuse the forces that maintain a condition with the forces that brought it into existence.

Perhaps because we all experience moments of so-called normal disfluency at times of fear, confusion, or other negative affect, and because a person's way of speaking is so inextricably linked to a person's identity, it is almost impossible to resist hearing affect into the speaker's voice. Better to fill in those pauses with understanding.

The church bell, the muezzin, and the yodeler: Clashes in the sacred soundscape

Yesterday, The Telegraph ran the story of an Austrian man convicted for yodeling because it offended his Muslim neighbors:

Helmut Griese, 63, was found guilty of "ridiculing" their religious beliefs and fined nearly £700 by a court in Graz. Rather than face a protracted court case, with all its attendant legal costs, Mr Griese agreed to pay.

The court heard how the Muslim family regarded Mr Griese as a "grumpy old man" whose open-air Alpine chanting was intended as a taunt aimed at their religion. The retiree was accused trying to "mock and imitate" the call of the Muezzin, who calls the faithful for prayer in mosques. They alleged that he always began his yodelling just as they knelt down to pray.

Mr Griese, however, told the Austrian newspaper Kornen that "it was not my intention to imitate or insult them. I simply started to yodel a few tunes because I was in such a good mood."

The court heard how things came to a head late in the summer when Griese was both mowing his lawn and yodelling as the Muslim family were praying. Police were called, and he was served with a summons.

Mr Griese was charged the "disparagement of religious symbols" - an offence usually used to prosecute for neo-Nazis who desecrate Jewish graves - and hindering religious practice.

Look past what appears to be an illiberal abuse of a law pertaining to hate-motivated destruction of property, and Austria's broader problem of curtailing free expression in deference to religious sentiments--in the 1994 case of Otto-Preminger Institute v Austria, the European Court of Human Rights upheld Austria's national blasphemy law, under which the government had banned and confiscated a film deemed offensive to Catholics, citing an amorphous “right of citizens not to be insulted in their religious feelings." Could Mr. Griese claim that he was offended by the muezzin's call to prayer, delivered five times daily, and not always more mellifluously than the average yodel?

The case of the yodeler and the muezzin points to a far-reaching struggle over the rights of mosques in the shared aural environment of communities from Cairo to Oxford to Dearborn, Michigan. While some historically Christian communities may be uncomfortable with the call to prayer, the azan or adhan, many already tolerate religious sounds in the form of church bells. Mosques, therefore, can stake a claim of fairness and equal treatment under the law. But the controversy is complicated by the widespread use of amplifiers and loudspeakers to broadcast the call.

As the Alpine yodel was once, the Arabic adhan is today primarily a form of communication. It carries doctrinal content lacking in a bell tone:

God is great! God is great!
I bear witness that there is no God but Allah
I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah
Come to prayer
Come to salvation . . .

The words vary depending on time of day ("Prayer is better than sleeping") and sect. First and foremost, however, the adhan is a summons. Traditionally, any believer who hears its strains is under an obligation to attend prayer. Hence the incentive for mosques to technologically project their calls further and further, especially when competing with the noise of urban soundscapes. The aggregate can be cacophony. "Rather than being a joy, to listen to the call to prayer is a daily torture to the ears," one Cairo resident told the BBC in 2005.

The religious propriety of amplifying the adhan has been the subject of debate among Islamic scholars for generations. For many, the resolution hinges on whether the sound emerging from the loudspeaker counts as the voice of the muezzin, or something else--a fascinating metaphysical question. What seems uncontroversial is that Muhammad did not foresee the microphone, and that the Qur'an and Sunnah contain no positive injunction to broadcast the call as far as possible. Instead, it is assumed that some ears will be beyond its reach.

How should municipal governments regulate "sacred" sound? If majority non-Muslim communities wish to muzzle the muezzin altogether, they will have to be prepared to silence their bells, or else be guilty of arbitrary discrimination by failing to demonstrate equal regard for the claims of some citizens merely in virtue of their religious identity. A more promising solution is to forbid amplification of the call to prayer, provided that comparable amplification is also denied to church bells, to say nothing of--God save us--amateur yodelers.

On Human Rights Day, the words of an Iranian singer

Today, the tenth of December, is the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. This "common standard of achievement for all peoples of all nations," as Eleanor Roosevelt called it, along with the subsequent treaties and covenants that make its provisions legally binding, guarantees to everyone the freedom to make music.

Article 19 of the UDHR states, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"; Article 27 states, "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."

"The tenth" is the literal meaning of Ashura, the Muslim holy day of 10 Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar, which this year falls on 16 December. The ritual fasting is thought to have derived from the observance, by early Muslim communities, of the Jewish Day of Atonement. For the Shi'a, Ashura became a period of mourning to commemorate the tragic military defeat and heroic death of Husain bin Ali at the hands of Caliph Yazid at the battle of Karbala in 680 CE. According to the tradition, al-Husayn was the son of Ali, who was the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad.

For the Shi'a, the Party of Ali, al-Husayn is the "Prince of Martyrs" whose sacrifice symbolizes righteous resistance to unjust power. The rulers of the Islamic Republic Iran draw on the religious power of Imam Husayn's martyrdom for their maniacal opposition to the "global arrogance" of the United States and its allies.

But on Ashura in 2009, when anti-government demonstrations swept Tehran, the chants of the protesters were referring to Ayatollah Khamenei as Yazid. A 26-year old singer named Arya Aramnejad was moved by the Ashura uprising to write "Ali Barkhir," or "Ali, Rise Up." After releasing the song, Arya was arrested, held in solitary confinement, and tortured by the authorities. What follows are excerpts from Aramnejad's courtroom testimony earlier this year, from a transcript provided by the blogger Azarmehr:

After the Ashura uprising which resulted in so many of my compatriots being killed, I felt it was my duty to condemn this inhumanity and use my musical talents in doing so. I wrote and composed a song, which became known as "Ali, Rise up." The content of this song is to do with the exploitation of God, the Koran and the Imams by a bunch of impostors to achieve their demonic goals. In this song, I asked the Imams for help in uprooting lies and hypocrisy. Is it not strange that in these days to ask the Imams for help in battling against evil is considered a crime in our country?

Imam Hussein was martyred for good to triumph against evil, so should we not expect the same from his followers? Or are we just supposed to ceremoniously beat our heads and beat up our chests and pretend we despise tyrants and despots?

I do not recognize this man as our president! Am I then not a Muslim? On the day of Ashura, I chanted "God is Great" and I am proud of calling His name. Surely whoever jails me for chanting "God is Great" is a non-believer and an infidel himself.

Those who make out they are Muslims these days, themselves disregard the most basic teachings. They easily lie to a nation of seventy million and make false promises, and feign that they want to glorify Iran and Islam. Iran and Islam are both much grander than having the need for such claimants.

The constitution has to be made clear. It gives me the right to criticize. It gives me the right to take part in gatherings without carrying weapons, it gives me the right to free speech and free thought. And because of this constitution that our fathers voted for, I am free not to be indifferent to the destiny of my country. Interestingly instead of being commended, I have to stand trial today for this. . . .

These policies of mass oppression and intimidation are dictated by which eternal power that justifies silence? Which divine laws allow such invasions of privacy into people's homes and into the privacy of people's private beliefs? and not tolerate the slightest of criticisms? These [self-interested] persons who claim to be kinder child minders than our own mothers, not only think they own this land but consider any non-conformity a crime and trample on the basic rights of our citizens. I recommend, in a brotherly way, some reality check and some insight than just having your eyes fixated on the seats of power; for rectifying your mistakes in the future will be much harder.

No escape from Christmas music

In working with the imprisoned singer Lapiro de Mbanga over the last several weeks, I have had occasion to reflect on one of the unusual cruelties of being confined in a room with dozens of other people, day and night: the noise. Inescapable disturbance and sleep deprivation caused by constant noise are no doubt part of the reason that the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners–a non-binding agreement adopted in 1955 and approved in resolutions in 1957 and 1977–call for private sleeping quarters for all prisoners.

Noise is a perpetual cellmate not just in the prisons of the developing world. Overcrowding is an enormous problem in United States. The U.S. stands out among rich democratic countries not only in having the largest prison population and the highest per capita rate of incarceration, but also in not having an independent federal agency that ensures minimal standards of health, safety and humane treatment. For this reason, in addition to the fact that convicts in 48 of 50 states are deprived of the right to vote, most reform of the penal system has come about through lawsuits brought by prisoners themselves. The case of Hutto v. Finney, for example, which was eventually heard before the Supreme Court in 1978, concerned an Arkansas institution known as Cummings Farm in which prisoners slept in 100-man barracks.

Six lawsuits by inmates of Maricopa County Jails in Arizona have failed to stop the seasonal aural abuse by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and who once again this year began broadcasting Christmas songs into his institutions 12 hours a day, every day. The plaintiffs claimed that the forced exposure to "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman" and "Feliz Navidad" constituted cruel and unusual punishment and a violation of religious liberty. In dismissing the case last November, District Judge Roz Silver said that Sheriff Arpaio was free to “inject the holiday spirit into the lives of those incarcerated over the holiday season . . . ." The self-styled "toughest sheriff in America" has described his holiday selection as inclusive and multicultural, featuring "A Christmas Kwanzaa Solstice" and "Ramadan" alongside selections by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, but he goes gooey over Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Saccharine, childish, mind-numbingly monotonous, much of the popular Christmas playlist would not be out of place in the U.S. Army's repertoire–which includes Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s “I Love You”–for use in disorienting and demoralizing detainees. Professional military interrogators call it "futility music."