Nadia Orozco-Sahi, MLIS
Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico

Introduction

I hadn’t entered librarianship to be a teacher. But as I sat in my first research clinic at the University of New Mexico, and then my next, and then my next, observing my fellow librarians guide undergraduate students through the research process, it was clear that I was going to be one, whether I had intended to be or not. I was going to walk into a classroom and be an instructor. I was also going to be visibly brown and obviously queer. My teaching identity was going to be partially prescribed before I even spoke, just by virtue of body politics and positioning – my physical presentation, at a podium, in front of the class. Before I even spoke. And then?

I’m familiar with my voice. As a musician, the way a voice can be manipulated, pitched, thrown, subdued, and amplified is familiar and known. But what of my teaching voice? This isn’t usually what librarians mean when they talk about teaching voice. They mean identity; voice as metaphor. But what of the actual instrument? What does authority sound like? What does teaching sound like in librarianship? Are we meant to find our voice as teachers, but not ask what our voices are actually doing as we begin to speak? Voice as identity is established in education and in librarianship, but what of voice as sound?

I spent my first few teaching sessions as an observer. My fellow librarians had voices which ranged in pitch, cadence, and speed. I could hear their tension or ease in a classroom. Could the students? What did I sound like? As I began to teach, I was hyperaware of the times my voice cracked or wavered. I didn’t have a “teacher voice”, which is to say, I didn’t have an identity as a teacher. But I had a voice, and I became curious about what it said about me. What was I communicating while I was speaking, apart from the words themselves?

In librarianship a version of this conversation exists. We have language for a teaching voice, but it rarely refers to the literal voice. It is voice as stance, voice as confidence, voice as legitimacy, voice as persona, voice as metaphor. When librarians speak of voice they mean the permission to instruct with an authority that is self-granted and self-maintained. Finding a teaching voice in librarianship is a way of developing a teaching identity, and a way of naming the shift from librarian-who-supports-learning to librarian-as-teacher (Walter, 2008). Voice is also teaching persona in cases where librarians cultivate a particular presence in front of students, whether intentionally or unintentionally, in a way that contributes to their authority and authenticity in the classroom (Azadbakht, 2021). Teaching voice as identity is well-accounted for in the literature and is an important framework for understanding teaching in a profession that does not always understand itself to be pedagogical. However even here, where voice is so often invoked, its prosody is absent. While academic librarians are encouraged to find, strengthen, and develop our voice as instructors, we aren’t asked what that voice sounds like, what it is doing while we are using it, and what it signals before it teaches.

Focusing on voice as literal sound means that we must think about our voices not simply as a means for communicating or something to be deployed in a moment of instruction, but as an instrument that can be tuned before we begin to share a melody. An instrument out of tune or out of tempo may play a song, but will it be recognizable as one? Voice has a direct impact on how our students understand us, and as our voices are often our primary method of communication; understanding the components which allow them to resonate can only make us better instructors (Ochoma, 2019).

Hämäläinen et al. (2018) breaks down the voice into three basic components: pitch, loudness, and quality. In speech analysis, these three elements of voice are referred to as fundamental frequency (F0) measured in Hertz, sound pressure level (SPL) measured in decibels, and voice quality which measures how sound is produced through various metrics, one of which is perturbation (the steadiness or instability of F0 and SPL). Many of these components we manipulate on a daily basis, and modulate based on who we are talking to and in what contexts. People tend to pitch their voices higher when speaking with children and lower when speaking with authority (Quam et al., 2017). Our volume varies depending on ambient noise, the size and acoustics of the room we’re in, or the urgency of our message, and our voice wavers when we’re emotional or pauses when we’re pensive or expectant (Scherer, 2003). Voice is used to communicate through language, but it is also communicating something beyond the words we are using. These three components describe what voice is acoustically, but teaching voice is not just sound. It is sound shared through time. Prosody includes the rhythm, emphasis, and silence. If voice is an instrument, prosody is the way it is played.

The voice, as a literal instrument, has a set of tuning pegs. Pitch is not just about personality; it is a vibration rate. Loudness isn’t just about confidence or command; it is breath pressure and resonance. Even voice quality, the part we tend to describe emotionally as warmth or steadiness, is a measurable relationship between airflow, vocal fold closure, and consistency over time(Hämäläinen et al., 2018). Prosody then, is a meaningful layer of the way we use the instrument of our voice as teachers. It is where acoustic components become instruction. Teaching voice, in this understanding of it, is then not an identity waiting to be crafted or discovered, but rather a craft, using an instrument which produces sound. Sound can be tuned. As there are techniques to make sound, so too there must be a technique for using a voice like a teaching voice.

As a musician, my immediate inclination was to learn what the proper tuning was. If I knew the components of a voice, I should then be able to tune them to the appropriate setting. What pitch would engage students more, what tempo would complement the instructions so to best communicate meaning? It is documented in educational and communication studies that these elements of voice contribute to student learning and engagement, though many speak of other factors working in conjunction with voice, including teacher immediacy and rapport (Witt et al., 2004; Wilson et al., 2010). To know how to tune my voice for a different kind of song, I first needed to find out where it tuned to begin with.

Hearing Teaching Voice

People often admit to feeling discomfort when hearing their voice recorded, but it was immediately clear to me that I needed to hear myself teach before I could change the way I was heard. I could not tune a guitar without plucking the strings and listening to how they resonated so I could not learn how my voice landed in a classroom without listening to it the way students did. I needed to meet my teaching voice as a sound, not as a metaphor for identity. I recorded myself teaching an orientation session for graduate instructors, and steeled myself to the consequences of hearing my teaching voice for the first time.

Hämäläinen et al. (2018) describe prosodic analysis as a way of studying the way teachers speak, as a reminder that how we say something is not a superficial layer added to instruction, but a method of instruction itself(Hämäläinen et al., 2018). Voice has a structure, and the way we speak conveys whether a sentence is intended as encouragement or critique, if something is parenthetical or emphasized, whether it is safe to ask a question or discouraged. It is a part of teaching that is constantly at play beneath the content, and shapes student experiences in ways even they may not realize.

Listening for Tempo and Pause

When I first listened back to the recording, I was unsurprised by the speed of my words. Despite constantly reminding myself that I must slow down, I inevitably speed up my tempo in moments of nervousness. The speed of our words is not unimportant, with 187 words per minute being a decent average for both comprehension and clarity when listening (Rodero, 2016), but I wasn’t able to make any determination about the pitch, volume, or quality of my voice based on simply listening. I turned to a speech analysis website to understand more of what my voice was doing while I was standing in front of students.

Teachers entering classrooms for the first time will have their voice and speech characteristics shift between learning and teaching contexts, talking differently when authority is expected (Aung & Puts, 2020; Järvinen et al., 2024). I was able to hear this difference even with only one sample of my classroom voice. To give myself something to compare my teaching voice to, I recorded myself reading aloud in a quiet room, away from the gaze of an audience or the need for authority. My reading voice was not as seemingly filled with urgency, without the quickness of responsibility. It didn’t seem as though I abandoned my voice when I was teaching, but rather became more cautious, aware of being assessed perhaps. Being in a classroom didn’t just require that I speak but asked that I sound like someone to be listened to.

Listening for Pitch, Stability, and Immediacy

Authority is not just a role; it is also a sound. It is something that is projected through steadiness, volume, pacing, and pitch, and is subconsciously evaluated alongside the content that is being shared. Voice pitch specifically has been described as a window into the communication of social power (Aung & Puts, 2020), and as I listened to my teaching voice, I could hear myself negotiating that power in real time. And if authority has a sound, then learning is impacted by sound as well. The classroom is not just a place where information is shared and knowledge is created, but where attention is held or lost, where trust is negotiated, and where lessons will be meaningful or forgotten.

Communication scholars describe this relational part of teaching as part of the learning experience itself. In studies of instructor communication, things like immediacy and rapport are consistently linked to student outcomes, including motivation, affective learning, and perceived learning(Wilson et al., 2010; Witt et al., 2004). For librarians, this is important because our instruction often happens in one-shot sessions and research clinics. We are not often able to build trust over weeks, sometimes having only minutes to create a positive learning relationship. Sound, through voice, is one way to do that.

Teacher immediacy is described as behaviors that make an instructor feel psychologically close, and voice plays a central role in creating that closeness. Warmth, variation, and responsiveness can all contribute to the way students feel about a classroom and by extension the instructor at the front of it, as well as how effective that teaching is to the student learning experience (Gorham, 2003; Wilson et al., 2010). A meta-analysis by Witt, Wheeless, and Allen (2004) pulled together research showing meaningful relationships between teacher immediacy and student learning, making it clear that how we communicate instruction is not ornamental. Rapport, too, predicts student outcomes, including satisfaction and perceived learning, suggesting that students learn not just because of instructor expertise, but from how the instructor makes learning feel (Wilson et al., 2010).

Was this something I was going to be able to hear in my recordings? Probably not. Trust does not have a frequency, rapport isn’t found in a particular decibel. The relational parts of teaching would not translate into a metric I could point to as evidence, but I could still listen to my teaching voice and analyze the mechanics. My pauses could be quantified, my tempo measured in words per minute.

Listening to myself

From there, cadence seems the most immediate place to begin. Cadence is voice as tempo. Did I rush, as I thought I had? Or was my teaching voice paced appropriately for students to understand what I was saying? Cadence plays a role in how quickly meaning arrives, how long students have to process instructions, and whether there is room for student thoughts. When I measured my speaking rate across my recorded lessons, my words per minute were 192, 187, 185, 197, and 193 throughout the lessons, for an average of 190.8. My reading voice was comparable, at 184, 206, 185, 191, and 202, for a slightly higher average of 193.6. The numbers slightly complicated my assumptions, which were that my teaching voice was likely faster than my voice would be in other contexts. Turns out: I speak quickly in general. What this told me, at least, was that my voice was not becoming frantic or rushing when I was in front of the class, but rather holding a steady tempo throughout. This consistency may have worked in my favor, but my tempo didn’t necessarily. Research suggests that listeners have an efficient rate for processing spoken language, and that prosody and pacing can shape that comprehension (Kuperman et al., 2021; Hämäläinen et al., 2018). While the exact words per minute for clarity are not agreed upon, as factors such as density of the content and listener’s native language can play large roles in comprehension and engagement, some research places a speaking rate of 150-165 words per minute as comfortable for comprehension, with rates closer to 200 words per minute considered fast (Hux et al., 2020; Rodero, 2016). This reframed my concern. My tempo was steady, but definitely faster than what is typically considered comfortable for comprehension.

Cadence, however, is not only about speed. It is also about space. It is about where you pause and for how long. Pauses have always been considered part of the instruction, as a way to mark what is important, incomplete, or still invites attention (Hämäläinen et al., 2018). In listening to my pauses in the recording of the teaching voice, it was clear that I was not using pausing correctly. Occasionally they were used to catch my breath, at other times as I changed from one slide to the next, or to give myself a moment to figure out where I was in the lesson. Even without a formal metric, these patterns were audible. Pauses were not placed in strategically relevant moments such as after definitions, before demonstrations, following complex content, and so were not used to allow comprehension to catch up to the sound (Ruhl et al., 1987; Rowe, 1972). My list of possible adjustments, and more important my understanding of my voice as a teaching instrument, continued to grow.

Having considered my cadence, I now moved on to a metric I couldn’t discern from simply listening to a recording: pitch. To determine my pitch, I uploaded the recordings of both my teaching voice and my reading voice into the Voice Quality Analysis Laboratory (VQLab), a voice analysis software provided for free through the Internet Institute for Speech and Hearing. Though they have many tools available for speech analysis, the VQLab states that it can “make measurements of voice quality and pitch. Suitable for measurements like jitter and shimmer for single vowels or for plotting fundamental frequency distributions of long passages” (Internet Institute for Speech and Hearing, n.d.) Jitter and shimmer were ways of measuring variance, the unsteadiness of a voice, though they are more descriptive than diagnostic. Listening to my tempo and pausing practices had already given me insight into my voice as an instrument, but pitch and vocal quality would tell me something of the social weight of using it.

Fundamental frequency (F0) is often treated as a neutral acoustic measurement, but we know that as one of the more socially legible features of voice, it has the potential to cue authority and expertise (Aung & Puts, 2020; Sorokowski et al., 2019). I would have expected that my pitch in my teaching voice might be slightly lower than in my reading voice, but once again the data didn’t support that assumption. My mode F0 was identical in both contexts (141.1 Hz), and my mean F0 was nearly the same, averaging 160.3 Hz while teaching and 158.9 Hz while reading. So I wasn’t conveying authority through lowering my pitch in the classroom. Was I conveying it anywhere? The clearest vocal indicator came actually from my voice quality than from anywhere else. My reading voice had greater pitch variability (a higher standard of deviation) and higher perturbation (jitter 3.374%, shimmer 2.315%) while my teaching voice was more stable (jitter 2.631%, shimmer 1.739%). Teaching did not move my pitch so much as it tightened my grip on it. The classroom pulled my sound to steadiness. This doesn’t necessarily mean that steadiness read as confidence or authority, but it is still an acoustic fact, and one of the ways my voice had aimed to sound credible.

While I wasn’t surprised that my voice did have slight changes when I was teaching, I was surprised by the ways in which it changed, and that the things I had noticed were all things I could practice and hone to craft a true teacher voice. My teaching voice was already steadier than I had anticipated, but not because I had discovered some hidden teacher identity or lit upon a teaching persona, but likely because teaching in front of a class required a different posture – something that altered my quality without doing much to either my pitch or cadence. What learning these metrics did was give me access to where my instrument could be tuned. I could slow my cadence, better place my pauses, perhaps even lower my pitch slightly if that was something I decided was important. Crafting my voice then, was not a performance of authority but a sharpening of sound. I now had some sense of how to tune the instrument of voice before I spoke, and how to tweak that tuning during the lesson, should I need to.

Making Adjustments

While much of the literature about voice comes from communications and education fields, librarians have not been entirely silent about literal voice. Schoofs (2010) frames voice in teaching as part of a classroom connection and sound as something that is always present in instruction even when we don’t specifically name it. He further suggests that voice is a tool which ought to be part of professional development for librarians, giving practical advice about how to practice and maintain vocal qualities through rehearsal, vocal exercise, and reading aloud daily. This still situates voice as having to do with something like intuition, which can still be practiced upon and improved, but not analyzed. I situate the voice more explicitly as an instrument of sound, with mechanics, patterns, and tunable components.

The first peg librarians should consider when tuning their teaching voice is tempo. Not necessarily because tempo alone determines whether students learn, but rather because it makes us think about whether we’re leaving time in our speaking for student learning. While speaking briskly may seem like we’re projecting efficiency or competence, it’s important to make a distinction between instruction and performance, an area where having a literal teaching voice instead of simply a teacher identity can be a real asset. Research on teacher voice suggests that vocal delivery features contribute to teaching effectiveness, supporting the idea that tempo is not merely style but part of what makes instruction work (Ochoma, 2019). Once I was able to see my cadence in clear numbers, I was able to reframe tempo as being not just an unconscious habit, but something I could alter as part of an instructional design choice. Following Schoofs (2010) suggestion for daily practice, I could craft my tempo to pace myself intentionally so students could follow me.

The second peg that could use some tweaking for me personally is using pauses strategically rather than haphazardly. I may not be the only librarian who wasn’t intentional about this during their instruction. Pausing appropriately doesn’t require that you adopt a new persona, become louder or softer or build more rapport. Pausing, as with slowing down tempo, simply asks that you let time be a consideration in your teaching. In research, prosodic features such as tempo and pause structure can play a part in how students determine what is important and what to expect (Hämäläinen et al., 2018). Other educational research uses pausing as an instructional procedure, as a way to improve lecture recall and the quality of student notes (Ruhl et al., 1987; Ruhl & Suritsky, 1995). It may come across as strange to consider a pause to be a part of the sound of speech, but in analyzing teaching voice through prosody, pausing is considered simply another part of instructional sound. In library instruction, where pacing can sometimes be constricted due to session time limitations, pausing strategically may be the most accessible way to create cognitive space without cutting content.

Pauses, in this context, are akin to how musicians think of rests: not silence as absence but silence as structure. In instruction, a pause after a useful piece of information isn’t just about making sure students hear the information, but actually recognize it and contextualize it for themselves. A pause before an instruction allows time for a shift from passive learning to active learning. A pause after a question is a way to encourage participation. Research on wait time has shown that extending silence after asking a question changes how students are able to answer the question, improving their answers and increasing participation (Rowe, 1972). Pauses are not places where teaching stops, only the teaching voice, to make space for student understanding. For librarians, this can be practiced deliberately, by treating it as part of the session plan, not as a failure of momentum.

Pitch was the peg of the voice that most resembled a standard instrument tuning but was the place where I was the most wary to suggest modifications. Intentionally pitching a voice higher or lower could easily become performance, exaggerated and difficult to maintain. Fundamental frequency was easily measured and analyzed, and is one of the quickest ways that students would decide whether to trust the person standing in front of them. Would pitching my voice lower to convey authority and expertise (Aung & Puts, 2020; Sorokowski et al., 2019) make a meaningful difference? Perhaps, but ultimately, knowing where my voice naturally landed offered me some awareness of the ways in which it differed in a classroom. Crafting pitch was about choice, not performance. It meant recognizing when my voice rose, and if that was a moment of unease for me. For librarians who enter a classroom without automatic pedagogical authority, pitch awareness can offer agency without requiring any specific modification. Additionally, Ochoma (2019) makes the case that one of the most important parts of pitch as sound in instruction is not its average F0, but the way it is varied to convey different parts of the instructional content. Pitching a voice higher might invite engagement, while dropping low may indicate something wrapping up. It is a tool that can be used and understood incredibly subjectively, but is ultimately at the disposal of the voice using it.

Finally, voice quality made me consider the ways in which my teaching voice shared a message that I did not necessarily project through other means: steadiness. The classroom found my voice becoming more controlled, with lower perturbation measures, which I found both comforting and also enlightening. Comforting because I could hope that the stability in my sound communicated an authority that perhaps my physical appearance does not always, but enlightening in that it also suggested restraint in my voice. A possible goal for a teaching voice would be one that can remain stable without sounding rigid. If voice quality is part of teaching effectiveness, as Ochoma (2019) suggests, then voice steadiness is a sound that students can trust.

How to Practice

What surprised me most about listening to my teaching voice was not that it needed a lot of work, but the work felt tangible. Once voice became sound rather than metaphor, it also became something I could practice. The adjustments I made were not dramatic reinventions of personality, or discovering a layer of identity that was called “teacher”, but small acts of attentiveness that impacted my effectiveness in a classroom. I was not trying to become someone else, I was listening to myself as an instructor.

What emerged from that was a handful of practical adjustments that librarians might attempt within their own instruction, particularly one-shots and research clinics where voice carries much of the lesson.

1. Record Yourself Teaching
People often dislike hearing recordings of their own voice, but discomfort can still be useful. Recording a lesson allows the teaching voice to become observable rather than extrapolated from imagination. While actively teaching it is difficult to notice pacing, tensions, or pauses, because attention is placed on delivering the lesson, actively engaging with students, paying attention to slides and timing. Listening later creates distance to hear what students have been hearing all along.

This kind of listening doesn’t need to be overly critical or analytical, as the goal here is not to find every flaw in a vocal performance, but to become familiar with the instrument as it is being used to teach. Even listening casually to recorded sessions can reveal moments where explanations become rushed, where nerves speed up tempo, or steadiness disappears near the end of the lesson. Acoustic tools and speech analysis software can provide another layer of insight, but are not necessary to become familiar with how your instrument sounds.

2. Slow Down More than Feels Necessary
One of the clearest thing I discovered was that my speaking pace remained consistently fast even when I thought I was slowing down. While speaking quickly can sometimes feel energetic or efficient, instruction is a performance which requires student engagement and comprehension. Students need time to process unfamiliar vocabulary, conceptual shifts, and procedural steps, especially in sessions where the content itself may already feel overwhelming.

For librarians teaching within compressed timeframes, there can be a pressure to move quickly in order to cover enough material, but slowing down is not wasted time. Tempo creates room for comprehension, student reflection, and for true learning to happen. Speaking more slowly than feels natural may actually produce a pace that feels manageable to students hearing the material for the first time.

3. Treat Pauses as Part of the Lesson
Before listening to my recordings, I thought of pausing mostly as interruptions in speech. What I began hearing instead, and what the literature reaffirms was that pauses shape instruction just as much as words do (Hämäläinen et al., 2018). A pause after a definition gives students time to connect meaning. A pause before a demonstration or instruction signals transition. A pause after a question invites participation. In this way, pauses resemble rests in music: not silence as absence, but silence as structure. In library instruction, where time limitations often compress pacing, pauses may be one of the simplest ways to create cognitive space without reducing content. They can be planned intentionally, rather than occurring out of uncertainty, needing to personally regroup, or losing breath.

4. Listening for Tension, not just Content
Voice carries emotion and posture even when words remain unchanged. Moments of uncertainty, rushing, or self-consciousness can often be heard acoustically before they are consciously recognized. Listening for vocal tension can become another way of listening for where instruction itself feels trained. Once this is known, rehearsing or revising those parts of the session can be a way to lessen the tension, and stabilize what your voice is doing in a classroom. Students will not then react to tension in the delivery as though it were part of the instruction itself.

Reflecting on Voice and Authority

An awareness of the way our voices work as sound, and what that communicates in a classroom, does not necessarily call for a personality makeover. It is not an audition for the role or persona of a teacher. It is a set of acoustic choices and understandings that can be practiced and honed without creating a new identity. Librarians are often asked to teach without being trained as teachers, in contexts where time is constrained and authority isn’t easily granted. Voice, as sound, offers an entry point. It gives us something concrete to work with: tempo, pause, pitch, steadiness. These components of voice are part of how instruction becomes clear and how students decide how to participate in the learning process. To tune the voice as an instrument is to make space for understanding.

None of this craft, however, happens in a neutral soundscape. Each student does not hear a voice in the same way, and while I’ve spent some time talking about how pitch and vocal quality can communicate something about authority, the truth is that authority is not a measurably acoustic property. It is a social judgement, of which sound is one indicator. Pitch, vocal quality, and tempo can be read as confidence or arrogance. At the moment when I entered the classroom, the moment before I spoke, I was already being read. There are aspects of myself I cannot tune or alter, and I cannot be assured that sounding any particular way will be heard in the way it’s intended. For instructors whose bodies place them politically outside of what is assumed to be authoritative, voice can be a place where belonging is tested. This is part of why I resist treating teaching voice as an identity to be discovered. If voice is primarily persona, then the way I sound moves closer to performance and conformity. But if my voice is primarily sound, there is room for technique without assimilation. Voice as sound gives librarians the ability to ask “How do I make my instruction intelligible, generous, and credible, while sounding like myself?” rather than “How do I sound like a teacher?”

For librarians, this pressure is made more intense by the structure of our instruction. We often speak to classrooms as guests, not as professors. We provide instruction in one-shots and research clinics where there is no time to earn trust slowly, and where authority can feel provisional. In these environments, our voice does the work of striving to sound credible, approachable, confident without being overbearing, and inviting without sounding uncertain. Because library instruction is often framed as support rather than scholarship, our teaching voices can lean slightly more towards service than authority. Walter (2008) describes the constant negotiation of librarian-as-teacher identities in a way that allows voice to become not only what we’re delivering, but evidence of how we are doing so. The mechanics of sound, of the way we use our voice, is one of the tools we have at our disposal to tune in real time, where authority is often borrowed and time is short.

I think librarianship can do better at making space for instructors who do not identify as teachers, and allow them to continue to inhabit that space rather than assume that an instructor pre-teacher-identity has simply not yet discovered theirs. If we understood teacher voice as a craft rather than an identity, we might make space for more librarians to feel at home in instructional roles. Voice is not neutral, as we’ve heard, but it is learnable, which opens new possibilities for teaching that does not require assimilation, but rather attentiveness.

Many of us enter librarianship through other identities first: researcher, organizer, storyteller, musician, guide. Teaching is not always our drive, but ends up becoming one of our responsibilities. As a librarian, I feel better prepared to use my voice, rather than rely on an identity in a classroom. I can tune in real-time, slow tempo, place pauses, shape steadiness. These are not substitutes for other kinds of pedagogy, but rather pedagogy made audible. My voice makes room for students to not just hear me, but understand me.

The first time I walked into a classroom to actually lead a research clinic, rather than observe my colleagues, I walked in quietly and alone to set up the room. When students trickled in, I was legible to students as a stood at the podium in ways I could not do little to change: queer, brown, androgynous, librarian, not-quite-professor, not-quite-guest. Teaching identity seemed like something that might offer some semblance of armor, but that would take time to develop and exude. Sound offered me another way in. Authority was not only the way I stood in front of the room, not just the content of the session, but in the steadiness of my instrument. I didn’t own a classroom yet, but I did begin to hear it.

I don’t think I have a “teacher voice” yet, if that means an identity rooted in teaching. But I am more familiar with my voice as a teacher now. I don’t become someone else, but I do tune what I already have: tempo, pause, pitch, vocal quality. This is the argument librarianship should consider. We can teach without necessarily calling ourselves teachers. We can be effective through craft rather than through identity.

I have resisted voice as metaphor for identity, but it’s clear now that I have leaned on music as a metaphor for voice. This is my musician identity, an identity well-established by the time I started my career in librarianship, exerting its dominance. I don’t use music as a way to complicate the measurable impacts of sound, but to insist on it. Instruments require technique, tuning, rest, and practice. And so do we, each time we step in front of a room and begin again. Before we even speak.

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