Aristotle attributed the low pitch of men’s voices to their testicles acting as loom weights on their vocal cords. The high-pitched voices of the Furies and the Sirens were harbingers of death. The name of the dreaded Gorgon comes from the Sanskrit word *garg, meaning a ‘guttural howl that issues as a great wind … through a hugely distended mouth’. Plutarch (like the Taliban) believed that a woman should no more expose her voice to outsiders than her unclothed body.

In this compact, tightly argued essay, first published by New Directions in 1992, the poet and classicist Anne Carson unpacks the gendered meanings of sound in ancient Greece and their echoes in the modern world. For the Greeks, high vocal pitch belonged to women, catamites and eunuchs; they associated higher registers with garrulousness and gossip, emotional and sexual incontinence, wildness and lack of control. The female voice, with its ritual shrieks and howls of pleasure and pain, was identified with disorder, monstrosity and death. The masculine voice was rational, controlled, appropriate for civic spaces. The prejudice persists: Margaret Thatcher trained for years with a vocal coach to lower her voice to a proper parliamentary pitch.

‘Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography,’ writes Carson. ‘A piece of inside projected to the outside. The censorship of such projections is a task of patriarchal culture.’ Logos, or rationally articulated speech, is civilisation’s skin, keeping inside and outside separated. But logos belongs to men; a woman’s