Voices was a project started by the author when he learned that he would soon lose his hearing and become completely deaf. This book is "a harvest and a storage" of the emotional and psychological responses to the human voice in song that Coleman sought to preserve for himself, and a wider meditation on why vocal music--particularly post-war popular music--is such an important part of our lives
Voices explores the way we internalise others' voices in the interests of our own development/happiness/understanding of the world--a largely unconscious process but a vivid one for all that. And a psychologically private one. In other words, it's a book about the intimacy of our deepest, most telling relationships with music