This chapter examines voice quality as the long-term, relatively constant or habitually recurring phonetic characteristics of an individual’s speech. The identification of voice quality settings relates the auditory/acoustic components of the voice quality strand of an individual’s accent (i.e. habitual manner of speaking) to the articulatory postures or movements that shape speech sound quality over the long term. An essential generator of long-term quality is the larynx, producing sustained vibrations and laryngeal articulatory resonances that interact with vowel quality and tonal quality. Various instrumental phonetic procedures have been developed to observe postural settings of the parts of the vocal tract. The images from these experimental observations have been incorporated into instructional tools for teaching and learning about voice quality settings and the movements of the laryngeal articulatory mechanism in particular.

It is generally accepted that the body plays an important stylistic role, but few scholars embark on multimodal investigations of variation. In this chapter I discuss the results of two studies on the realization of the GOAT vowel to show that bodily practices occur alongside, and indeed can influence, linguistic behavior, both from moment to moment (through expressions of affect like smiling) and duratively (through facial postures like an open jaw). Study 1 reveals that GOAT exhibits a higher F2 when it occurs in the context of smiling, suggesting some sound changes may be advancing during moments when the body is used to express heightened affect. Study 2 illustrates that the more durative embodied practice of maintaining an open-jaw setting has had lowering consequences across the vowel system of California English – even for GOAT, which is typically described as undergoing fronting rather than lowering. The proposal advanced here assumes that linguistic variation is meaningful and that a non-trivial number of a linguistic variant’s social meanings derives from embodied practice. And crucially, meaning – some of it embodied – can initiate or influence the trajectory of change.

Terminology for voice quality is revised, particularly for the lower vocal tract. The concepts of ‘voice quality’ as the long-term, habitual postural settings in an accent and ‘voice quality’ as the vibratory, phonatory portion of speech are reconciled through the laryngeal articulator mechanism that explains how multiple configurational adjustments and vibratory elements are achieved in the lower vocal tract. The origins of voice quality theory are reviewed, and articulatory settings of the laryngeal mechanism, velopharyngeal opening, the tongue, the jaw, and the lips are reviewed. The descriptions from Laver (1980) are reinforced, connections to laryngeal articulation are made explicit, and the musculature responsible for each setting is outlined. New drawings of the mechanisms of the vocal tract provide a fresh perspective on articulatory movements and resulting auditory qualities. Pharyngeal/epiglottal articulations are remapped, and their status as laryngeal configurations is made explicit.