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Charlie Rivera—Voice Comp

This document is a writer’s reference for how Charlie’s speaking voice sounds to the ear, expressed through real-world voice comparisons and accent and dialect mechanics. It is a calibration tool for drafting, audiobook narration, and adaptation work. It is not in-universe canon. Charlie’s biography is the authority on what the voice IS; this document helps the writer (or narrator, or casting director) hear it.

For Charlie’s singing voice (Romeo Santos as primary, Sam Smith and early Miguel as secondary), see Charlie Rivera - Voice Style. For Charlie’s interior cognition and the rendered-on-the-page deep-3rd narration, see Charlie Rivera - Narration Style. For the bio’s characterological voice section (how the voice betrayed emotional state, how others heard it, how it changed across the lifespan), see Charlie Rivera.

Speaking Voice Profile

Speaking range C3 to G4 in his neutral register, with the working zone centered around D3 to E4. The pitch sits higher than most adult men’s speaking voices, but the defining quality is not the height—it is the androgyny. Strangers on the phone misgender him as a woman or as much younger than he is, regularly enough that the misgendering becomes part of the texture of his life. The voice is light, forward, bright, and carries a slight rasp acquired during his teenage voice change that never fully cleared, deepened later by gastroparesis-and-POTS-related breath management. Underneath the placement is a Queens-Boricua rhythm—the lift at sentence ends, the bitten consonants, the casual sharpness of Jackson Heights speech, the Spanish phrasing shaping the English even when he is not code-switching.

Constraint Checklist

The following constraints are surfaced from Charlie’s biography and are the test against which any proposed real-world voice comp must be verified.

  • Speaking range C3 to G4
  • LOAD-BEARING TEST: Strangers misgender him as a woman or as much younger on the phone.
  • Androgynous quality, not just “high”
  • Queens-Boricua rhythm specifically (not island-Boricua, not Bronx, not Bushwick)
  • Light + bright + musical, with slight rasp post voice-change
  • Small frame (5‘5”), voice carries despite size
  • Bilingual Spanish-English with continuous code-switching
  • Voice betrays emotional state on a wide pitch envelope (drops to B2-D3 fatigued, climbs to D4-B4 panicked, climbs into head voice E4-A4 flirting)

Primary Placement Comp

Elliot Page is the closest single real-world comp for Charlie’s speaking placement, and the comp works across both Elliot’s pre-transition voice (the ‘’Juno’‘-era and ‘’Inception’‘-era press circuit, 2007 through roughly 2015) AND his post- and early-transition voice. The pitch sits in the ambiguous zone where the listener’s brain does not auto-sort the voice as masculine or feminine; the placement is forward and light without being breathy-feminine; and there is a slight gravelly edge under the brightness that prevents the voice from reading “girl voice.” The qualities that make Elliot Page a Charlie comp—the androgynous quality, the unplaced-pitch zone, the light forward placement, the slight grain underneath—persist through the transition, which is part of what makes the comp load-bearing rather than tied to a specific lifespan window of his life. Testosterone changed the texture, but the placement and the unplaced quality remained recognizable.

Charlie is not trans, but his bio is doing a closely related craft move—a man whose body and voice never cooperated with what his culture demanded of male presentation, who was read as younger / read as a woman / read as not-quite-right his entire life—and the vocal architecture is recognizably the same. Elliot Page is the rare real-world example of a male-presenting voice that genuinely sits in the unplaced zone Charlie’s bio describes. Passes the load-bearing misgendering test definitionally (the voice was being read as a teenage boy in some contexts and a young woman in others; the ambiguity was the point and continues across his lifespan).

Rhythm and Cadence Comp

Anthony Ramos in quiet interview register (not his ‘’In the Heights’’ performance voice or his hyped-up press energy, which both push higher and brighter than his neutral). Ramos is Nuyorican, his speaking voice naturally light tenor, and his cadence carries the specific NYC-Boricua rhythm where Spanish phrasing shapes the English even when he is not code-switching. The lift at sentence ends, the bitten consonants, the way “you good or what” sounds different from how a non-NYC speaker would render it—that is Charlie’s rhythm. Ramos partially passes the load-bearing test (he can be read as light-tenor on the phone but does not get straightforwardly misgendered); use him for the rhythm and the Nuyorican accent shaping, not for the placement.

Texture Overlay

The chronic-illness rasp does not have a clean real-world comp, because it is a composite of three separate things layered onto the placement: a teenage-voice-change rasp that never cleared, an audible breath-management shift that comes from POTS and gastroparesis (a slight catch on the front of certain phonemes when his autonomic system is fatigued, a dry-throat thinning before his voice sounds tired in any other way), and the breathy-when-vulnerable register documented in his bio (clear voice when he is performing the conversation; breath-forward voice when he is feeling it). The closest single texture comp for the rasp alone is Sam Smith in interview register—the lightness with breath-grain underneath—but Smith is British, and his rhythm is wrong for Charlie. Use Smith for the texture only, not for the placement or the cadence.

Composite

Elliot Page’s placement (pre-transition or post-transition both fit—the androgynous, unplaced, light-forward quality persists across his lifespan), plus Anthony Ramos’s Nuyorican rhythm and accent, plus a chronic-illness rasp built from Sam-Smith-adjacent breath-grain. No single comp gives you Charlie. The composite does. A writer or audiobook narrator working from this triangulation should hear: a forward, light, slightly-raspy voice that sits in genuinely-ambiguous gender territory, carrying Jackson Heights NYC-Boricua rhythm at the sentence and prosody level, with Spanish phrasing shaping the English even when he is not code-switching, and breath audibility that increases as his body’s autonomic system burdens the breath cycle.

The shorthand calibration formula, as confirmed by Chloe: Elliot Page placement + Queens / Jackson Heights vowels and accent + chronic-illness rasp from gastroparesis and POTS. That formula is the canonical voice description for Charlie and overrides any single-comp simplification.

Lifespan Texture Modifiers

Charlie’s voice does not change tonally across his adult lifespan. The placement (light, bright, androgynous, forward), the rhythm (Jackson Heights Nuyorican), and the disposition (animated, fast, musical) stay stable across his life. What changes is the texture overlay: a slight deepening of the placement (very subtle, not much) and progressive accumulation of illness-related rasp as POTS, gastroparesis, EDS, and chronic fatigue progress. The composite anchor (Elliot Page placement + Anthony Ramos rhythm + Sam Smith texture) is stable across all stages; the modifiers layer on top.

  • Ages 16-30 (peak instrument, healthy baseline texture). Use the composite at its baseline texture: Elliot Page placement at the natural light-grain rasp, Anthony Ramos rhythm at standard Nuyorican brightness, Sam Smith texture overlay applied lightly. The voice is at its brightest and clearest. The illness-rasp is not yet a defining feature.
  • Ages 30-50 (chronic illness baseline, voice as instrument). Use the composite plus added breath-management audibility from POTS and gastroparesis. The placement deepens very slightly (juuuust a little—not a meaningful tonal shift, just a barely-perceptible thickening of the chest resonance). The Sam Smith texture overlay deepens. Bad days reduce the voice to a whisper; good days keep the bright forward placement intact. The wide pitch envelope across emotional states sharpens during this period.
  • Ages 50-60 (the worn-down beautiful version). Use the composite plus more rasp and slightly slower pace. The bio’s canonical phrasing applies: “this beautiful, worn-down version of his voice—raspy, soft, but still so him.” The same instrument played a long time. The Nuyorican rhythm remains intact; the brightness has not been lost; the underlying placement has not changed. Only the texture has accumulated weight.
  • Ages 60-73 (AAC integration, biological-voice silence approaching). Use the composite at maximum texture overlay (rasp, breath cost, near-whisper) for the moments when the biological voice still surfaces. The AAC voice bank, recorded years earlier, approximates the composite at his peak years; the texture in late-life AAC use is the AAC’s reproduction of his earlier voice, not his current voice.

The architecture: the composite anchor is stable across the lifespan. The texture modifies. This is the same Variant 3 architecture documented in the voice-builder skill—single-anchor (or single-composite) with lifespan texture modifiers—shared with Ezra Cruz - Voice Comp (which uses a single comp, Oscar Isaac, with rasp-depth modifiers per stage). Charlie and Ezra both use this architecture, despite their voices being entirely different, because both characters have voices that stay tonally stable across the adult life with only texture overlay shifting per stage.

Accent and Dialect Mechanics

Charlie’s English is Nuyorican English specifically—the variety documented under New York Latino English in linguistic literature, with strong Caribbean Spanish substrate features and additional shaping from contact with NYC English and African American Vernacular English in the Queens-Bronx-Manhattan corridor. The neighborhood-specific layer is Jackson Heights Queens, which differs in subtle ways from Bronx Boricua or Spanish Harlem Boricua. Charlie’s classical conservatory training at Juilliard adds an additional layer that distinguishes his speech from non-trained Jackson Heights speakers and is documented in the vowel system below.

Vowel inventory

Following the documented features of New York Latino English (per Otheguy and Zentella’s ‘’Spanish in New York’‘, and the broader literature on Hispanic East Coast English):

  • The /aɪ/ diphthong shows partial glide-deletion with a preserved offglide. The body of the diphthong sits in the open position longer than General American allows, but the offglide /i/ is preserved at the close. The result is a flattened diphthong with a recovered tail: “ride” is closer to “rah’eed” than to either “ride” (clean glide) or “rahd” (full flatten). “Time” is closer to “ta’eem.” “My” is closer to “mah’ee.” This pattern is shaped by Charlie’s classical conservatory training, which trained him to preserve vowel-landing integrity in singing and which transferred unconsciously into his speech. Ezra Cruz, who lacks the classical vocal training (Juilliard trumpet rather than vocal performance), shows fuller flatten on the same diphthong; this is one of the audible differences between their voices in casual speech.
  • The /eɪ/ diphthong shows occasional glide-deletion—“say” approaches “seh,” “way” approaches “weh”—but inconsistently and primarily in fast speech.
  • The /oʊ/ diphthong shows the most consistent glide-deletion in his speech—“go” approaches “guh” but with slight rounding, “no” stays closer to “noh” than to “noh-oo.” This is the most audibly Latino-East-Coast feature in his vowels and one of the markers a linguistically attentive listener would catch immediately.
  • The COT-CAUGHT distinction is preserved (NYC English keeps these distinct, unlike Chicano English which merges them with a fronter /ɑ/). “Don” and “dawn” sound different in Charlie’s mouth.
  • The TRAP and DRESS vowels carry a slight Spanish-influenced tenseness—they do not relax into the schwa territory the way General American does in unstressed syllables.
  • Vowel reduction in unstressed syllables is less complete than in General American. “Information” carries four nearly-equal syllable weights instead of the typical iN-fer-MAY-shun stress pattern. This is the syllable-timed Spanish prosody leaking into English.

Consonants

  • /t/ and /d/ are produced as dental stops [t̪] and [d̪] rather than the General American alveolars [t] and [d]. This is a documented Hispanic East Coast English feature and a Spanish-substrate carryover. The tongue tip touches the back of the upper teeth rather than the alveolar ridge; the resulting consonant has a slightly different release quality that bilingual listeners hear as Spanish-textured.
  • /n/ is also dentalized, [n̪], for the same reason.
  • Final /t/ glottalization in Charlie’s speech behaves more like NYC English than like Chicano English—a sharp glottal stop on word-final /t/ in casual speech (“that” ends in a glottal closure rather than a released /t/). This is a NYC English feature reinforced by the Jackson Heights Queens substrate, not a Spanish-substrate feature.
  • Th-stopping is variable. In fast speech and casual register, /θ/ can shift toward /t/ (“thing” approaches “ting”) and /ð/ toward /d/ (“this” approaches “dis”). This is shared with AAVE and Caribbean English broadly, and Charlie does it under fatigue or emotional intensity but not in formal register.
  • Consonant cluster reduction is mild—final clusters mostly stay intact, though “asked” can become “ast” in fast speech, “best” can become “bes” before another consonant.
  • The post-vocalic /r/ is variable. Charlie is mostly r-ful in formal register; in casual speech the post-vocalic /r/ softens into something between a tap and a weakened approximant, never fully dropping to the r-less NYC working-class pattern.

Prosody and intonation

The lift at sentence ends is the most audible prosodic marker—statements rise slightly at the end where General American would fall flat, questions rise more sharply. This is a Spanish-substrate prosodic feature shared with most NY Latino English. The pitch range across a sentence is wider than General American’s, with more dynamic contour. Stress placement carries Spanish influence in unstressed syllables (less compression, more nearly-equal weight). The “ay” interjection—the Jackson Heights “ay,” not the Spanish island “ay”—is shorter, slightly more open toward “eh,” and lands in a different prosodic position than its island counterpart.

Lexical and discourse features

  • “You good?” / “you good or what?” as a check-in greeting—a NYC-shared feature, not specifically Boricua, but Charlie deploys it constantly.
  • “Mira” deployed as discourse marker (look, hey, listen) and as attention-getter (often tripled: “mira mira mira”)—a Boricua-Spanish carryover used inside English sentences.
  • “Oye” as sentence-starter meaning “listen” but also “I’m about to say something and you’re going to want to hear it.”
  • Diminutives in Spanish (“-ito,” “-ita,” “papi/papito,” “mami/mamita”) used in both languages.

Regional and Cultural Distinguish

Per Chloe’s prioritization, the three contrasts most worth rendering are: Mexican-American Chicano English, Lin-Manuel-style NYC-Latino-Broadway, and island-Boricua Spanish-English (Bad Bunny default). A fourth contrast worth rendering for in-universe purposes is Ezra Cruz, whose Miami-Boricua diaspora produces a different voice from Charlie’s Nuyorican one despite shared Puerto Rican heritage.

vs. Mexican-American Chicano English

This is the single most common confusion in AI-generated and pattern-matched renderings of Charlie’s voice, because training data heavily over-represents Chicano English in the “Latino in America” category. The differences are large and concrete:

  • /s/ behavior. Chicano English / Mexican Spanish retains syllable-final /s/ fully. Caribbean Spanish (Charlie’s heritage variety) aspirates or deletes it. When Charlie code-switches into Spanish, his “está” becomes “ehtá” or “etá”; a Chicano speaker’s “está” stays “está.” This is one of the most discriminating features between Mexican-heritage and Caribbean-heritage Spanish bilinguals, and it shapes the English too—Charlie’s code-switching audibly carries the Caribbean /s/-aspiration on the Spanish words while a Chicano speaker would not.
  • /r/ realization. Chicano-English Spanish trills with the standard alveolar trill [r]. Caribbean Spanish (and thus Charlie’s Spanish) often produces a uvular trill [ʀ] at the back of the throat, especially on word-initial /r/ and intervocalic /rr/. “Rivera” carries a back-of-throat trill in Charlie’s mouth, “carro” with a uvular fricative-trill. A Chicano speaker would produce both with a front-of-mouth alveolar trill.
  • /r/-to-/l/ lateralization. Caribbean Spanish lateralizes syllable-final /r/ to /l/ consistently—“puerta” is “puelta,” “carne” is “calne,” “amor” is “amol.” Chicano Spanish does not. This is a stable feature of Charlie’s spoken Spanish, not a casual-register variable, and it is one of the most immediate audible signals that a speaker’s Spanish is Caribbean rather than Mexican-heritage.
  • Vowel inventory. Chicano English shows the COT-CAUGHT merger with a fronter /ɑ/; NY Latino English (Charlie) preserves the distinction. Chicano English shows monophthongal /eɪ/ and /oʊ/ as a stable dialect feature; NY Latino English shows variable glide-deletion that is more conditional. Charlie’s /aɪ/ glide-with-preserved-offglide pattern is unique to his classical-trained NY Latino English profile and would not be heard in Chicano English.
  • Rhythm and prosody. Both varieties show some Spanish-influenced syllable-timing, but the rhythmic feel is distinct—Mexican Spanish prosody (which underlies Chicano English) is more even and measured; Caribbean Spanish prosody (Charlie’s substrate) is faster and more dynamically shifting in pitch.
  • Cultural texture. Chicano English is Mexican-American identity, with roots in California and the Southwest, contact with regional Mexican communities, and a different cultural reference frame than Boricua Nuyorican. The vocabulary, the music substrate (norteño, banda, ranchera vs. bachata, salsa, plena, jazz), the family structures, and the relationship to language differ. A writer rendering Charlie as Chicano-adjacent will get the surface “Latino” texture but lose the Boricua specificity entirely.

vs. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s NYC-Latino-Broadway register

Lin-Manuel is Nuyorican-adjacent (his family is Puerto Rican, he grew up in Inwood/Washington Heights), so the Spanish-substrate features overlap with Charlie’s. But Lin-Manuel’s public speaking register is its own theatrical voice variety, not Nuyorican neutral speech.

  • Pitch. Lin-Manuel’s neutral speaking voice sits in mid-tenor to low-tenor territory, warmer and lower than Charlie’s. He does not get misgendered on the phone. Charlie does. This single difference, applied to the load-bearing test from the constraint checklist, is enough to disqualify Lin-Manuel as a placement comp.
  • Pace. Lin-Manuel is fast (the ‘’Hamilton’‘-era speaking voice is rapid and energetic), but the rapidity sits on a different prosodic substrate than Charlie’s. Lin-Manuel’s fastness is performative-articulate; Charlie’s is bilingual-cognitive.
  • Register. Lin-Manuel’s public voice is consciously theatrical, projected for an audience, hyper-articulated. Charlie’s voice is intimate even at performance volume; the intimacy is part of why his voice carries despite the small frame.
  • Vocabulary. Lin-Manuel’s Spanish is washed through Broadway musical theater and educated New York theater culture; Charlie’s Spanish is washed through Reina and Lourdes (“Uela Lulu”) and the Jackson Heights Boricua community.

A writer who reaches for “fast-talking Nuyorican composer” and lands on Lin-Manuel will get the demographic match correct and the voice wrong. Lin-Manuel’s voice is warm and projected; Charlie’s is light and ambiguous and carrying.

vs. island-Boricua Spanish-English (Bad Bunny default)

The most common wrong-region same-identity comp.

  • Spanish phonology baseline. Bad Bunny’s Spanish is unambiguously island Borinquen Spanish: full /s/-aspiration, uvular /r/, /n/-velarization, syllable-final /r/-to-/l/ (“puerta” → “puelta”), and the full Caribbean prosodic pattern. Charlie’s Spanish carries these features too, but in a partially-leveled diasporic form—the /s/-aspiration, /n/-velarization, and /r/-to-/l/ all stay intact (he absorbed them from Lourdes and Reina), while the uvular /r/ is partially fronted in his speech (an English-substrate effect on the back-of-throat trill). The whole system shows English-substrate influence in subtle ways: slight English tongue position carrying into Spanish phonemes, slight English vowel coloration leaking into Spanish vowels.
  • English phonology. Bad Bunny’s English (when he speaks it) carries strong island-Boricua Spanish substrate—the English is the second language, audibly. Charlie’s English is native, with Spanish substrate; the English is the first or co-first language and the Spanish substrate shows up as accent features rather than as second-language patterns.
  • Pitch and placement. Bad Bunny’s neutral speaking voice is chest-forward and lower than Charlie’s, in mid-to-low tenor or even high baritone territory. Bad Bunny does not get misgendered on the phone.
  • Cultural register. Bad Bunny is island-raised, Spanish-dominant, urban Puerto Rico, reggaeton/Latin trap. Charlie is diaspora-raised, English-co-dominant, Queens working-class Boricua, jazz/bachata/Latin pop. The class register, the cultural reference frame, and the relationship to Spanish are different.

A writer who reaches for “Puerto Rican composer” and lands on Bad Bunny’s vocal architecture will produce a voice that is recognizably Puerto Rican but not Charlie. The Bad Bunny mistake is the canonical wrong-region same-identity comp.

vs. Ezra Cruz (Miami-Boricua diaspora)

Within the Faultlines cast, Ezra Cruz is the most useful internal comparison for understanding what makes Charlie’s voice specifically Nuyorican rather than generically Boricua-diaspora. Both characters are Puerto Rican and both grew up in the U.S. mainland, but their voices are audibly different because their diaspora routes differ.

Ezra grew up in Miami, a Spanish-dominant city where Boricua identity exists alongside Cuban, Dominican, and South American Spanish-speaking communities whose phonology overlaps with Boricua heavily (especially Cuban, with shared /s/-aspiration, similar /r/ behavior, similar /n/-velarization). Charlie grew up in Jackson Heights, Queens, where Boricua identity exists alongside Mexican, Colombian, Ecuadorian, and South American communities whose Spanish is non-Caribbean and treats Caribbean features as marked or “wrong.” The audible consequences:

  • Ezra’s Spanish phonology is fuller-Caribbean than Charlie’s because Miami’s Caribbean-Spanish-saturated environment never pressured him to level toward standard Spanish. Ezra never made the accommodation Charlie made (see Cross-Language Phonology section); his Caribbean features are intact and unselfconscious.
  • Ezra’s English vowels show fuller flatten on /aɪ/, /eɪ/, and /oʊ/ than Charlie’s because Ezra lacks Charlie’s classical-vocal training. The training that gave Charlie the preserved-offglide pattern is absent in Ezra; Ezra’s diphthongs flatten the way non-trained NY Latino English speakers’ do, despite Ezra being Miami-raised rather than NY-raised.
  • Ezra’s pitch sits lower than Charlie’s, in mid-tenor territory. Ezra does not get misgendered on the phone. The androgyny that defines Charlie’s voice is absent in Ezra.
  • Ezra’s prosody is more typical Caribbean-Spanish-substrate-shaped English; Charlie’s prosody carries the Jackson Heights Queens NYC layer that Ezra’s Miami substrate doesn’t.

The two voices belong on the same shelf (Boricua diaspora, U.S.-mainland-raised) but are recognizably different speakers. Writers should not interchange them.

Code-Switching Mechanics

Charlie’s code-switching is not an alternation between two languages—it is a single bilingual cognitive system in which Spanish and English coexist and surface based on what each language is best at saying in a given moment. The architecture has several documented dimensions.

The mid-sentence switch

Charlie code-switches mid-sentence rather than mid-clause, and rarely at the sentence boundary. The switch happens at the word that wants to be in the other language—“ay coño that’s not what I meant,” “okay pero look at this,” “te quiero so much it hurts.” The grammatical English continues on either side of the Spanish word; the Spanish word does not require an English clause to complete it. Bilingual listeners hear this as natural; monolingual English listeners hear “Spanish words sprinkled in,” which is approximately right but misses the cognitive integration.

The trigger words

Specific Spanish lexical items always stay Spanish in Charlie’s English speech, regardless of audience or context. They include: “ay coño” (the panic/exasperation default), “ay bendito” (the sympathetic exclamation, inherited from his abuela), “Uela Lulu” (never translated, never anglicized), “papi” used affectionately (toward Logan, toward beloved children, toward his father in tender moments)—though “papi” can shift to “Dad” or “Pop” when distance is being maintained, and the choice is information. Endearments scatter freely: “belleza,” “bellezas,” “mi gente,” “mira mira mira,” “oye,” “Lolo” (Logan’s name, never anglicized). Family terms (mami, abuela, Tía, Tío) stay Spanish. Curse words tilt toward Spanish under emotional pressure—“carajo” and “coño” land harder in Spanish than their English equivalents would.

The reverse switch

When Charlie is speaking primarily Spanish (with Reina, with island-Boricua relatives, in moments of high emotion that pull him toward his heritage language) English words surface in the same architecture. Technical and professional vocabulary defaults to English—music theory terminology, medical terminology, music industry language. Pop-culture references default to English when the source is English-language. The pattern is the inverse of the English-with-Spanish-trigger pattern: the matrix language carries the grammar; the embedded language carries the words it owns.

The triggering function of emotion

When Charlie is vulnerable, frightened, in physical pain, deeply tender, deeply angry, or grieving, the Spanish surfaces faster and more frequently. This is not a choice; it is the cognitive substrate. Spanish was the language of his body’s earliest care—Reina’s voice, Lourdes’s hands, the diminutives that carried specific warmth in Spanish—and his nervous system reaches for Spanish when his nervous system is reaching for comfort or safety. Logan learned Spanish in part to be able to be present with Charlie in this register; once Logan was fluent, Charlie’s emotional Spanish landed in a partner who could meet it.

The rhythmic reorganization

When Charlie code-switches, the rhythm of his speech reorganizes within the switch. English’s stress-timed prosody compresses unstressed syllables; Spanish’s syllable-timed prosody distributes weight more evenly across syllables. A code-switched phrase like “ay coño I can’t believe he said that” carries syllable-timed weight on “ay coño” and stress-timed weight on “I can’t believe he said that.” The transition is audible to a bilingual ear; a monolingual listener hears a smooth flow without identifying the rhythmic shift. This rhythmic-reorganization layer is one of the things that distinguishes a real bilingual speaker from a monolingual speaker mimicking code-switching.

The audience-calibration dial

Charlie modulates his code-switching frequency based on his interlocutor’s bilingualism: maximum density with Reina, with Lourdes, with island-Boricua family, with bilingual Boricua friends; medium density with bilingual non-Boricua Spanish speakers; lower density with monolingual English speakers who would lose meaning in heavy switching; lowest density with audiences in formal English-only settings (interviews on English-language press, recording-studio meetings with non-Spanish-speaking engineers). The dial is automatic, not deliberate—Charlie does not consciously turn it; his cognitive system reads the room and calibrates.

The Logan-specific register

With Logan, the code-switching density is high but the trigger pattern is specific to their relationship. Spanish-with-Logan includes the endearments (Lolo, papi, mi amor, cariño), the comfort phrases inherited from Reina (“mi vida” for moments of grief, “tranquilo” for moments of regulation), and the explicit private vocabulary they developed together over fifty years. There are Spanish-language phrases in their relationship that exist nowhere else and that neither would translate even to closest family.

Voice Under Emotional and Physical States

Charlie’s voice was an instrument that could not be made to lie about his body. The bio establishes a wide pitch envelope that responds to emotional and physical state with almost autonomic precision; what follows renders the SOUND of those shifts beyond the C3-G4 baseline.

Neutral, engaged

Pitch sits in the working zone (D3-E4), placement forward and bright, breath supporting the tone without showing through it. The Nuyorican rhythm lifts the ends of sentences slightly, the bitten consonants sharp, the pace somewhere between the General American conversational tempo and faster—Charlie talks fast when he is healthy and present. The voice carries across rooms despite his frame; people who have only heard it on the phone or on record are visibly startled when they meet him in person and discover he is 5‘5” and a hundred pounds.

Flirting, playful

Pitch climbs into head voice (E4-A4), placement moves slightly farther forward, and a small vocal fry enters at the ends of sentences—not the constant fry of a contemporary American speech tic, but a deployed fry that punctuates a teasing line and lands like a wink. The voice gets airier, breath comes forward, sentences shorten and end on rising contours that aren’t quite questions but aren’t quite statements either. This is the register reserved exclusively for Logan in adulthood, and Logan’s body responds to it before Logan’s brain processes the words.

Animated, excited, telling a story

Pitch range widens, pace accelerates, the voice sometimes overshoots the head-voice ceiling momentarily and comes back. Vocal onomatopoeia surfaces—the dying-saxophone “BWAAH,” the chair-squeak imitation, the drum-fill mouth-sound—delivered with full commitment, the body folding over with laughter while the mouth tries to simultaneously tell the story and be the story. Code-switching frequency increases; Spanish words pop in for emphasis, “ay coño” lands at the punchline, “mira mira mira” climbs in pitch with each repetition.

Anxious, panicked

Pitch shoots up to D4-B4 without warning, the breath shortens, the pace becomes breathless and clipped, sentences race and trip over themselves, code-switching becomes rapid-fire because the bilingual brain is not stopping to choose languages anymore. The voice loses some of its musicality and becomes thin—the breath support that makes the neutral voice carry is the first casualty when his autonomic system spikes. POTS panic and emotional panic produce similar vocal signatures, which is part of why people who love Charlie learn early on to listen for the thinness rather than the emotion.

Fatigued, fatigue flare

Pitch drops to B2-D3, the lowest register he ever sits in, and the voice slurs, sluggish, mumbly. The breath support is gone—not because he is breathless but because his body is rationing energy and the diaphragmatic recruitment that produces the bright neutral voice costs more than he can spend. Sentences shorten, words slide together, the Nuyorican rhythm flattens because the prosodic rise-and-fall takes more effort than the flat affect.

In this register, genuine word-retrieval failure surfaces—distinct from the confident bilingual lexical strategy described in the Cross-Language Phonology section. Charlie’s chronic-illness brain (POTS-related cerebral perfusion shifts, gastroparesis-related fatigue, the cumulative cognitive cost of dysautonomia) loses access to specific words he absolutely knows in both languages. The healthy-register pointing-and-English-dropping that is fluent and confident becomes a search-and-substitute that is halting and apologetic. He stops mid-sentence, gestures toward where the word should be, sometimes gives up and says “the—you know what I mean” without finding either the Spanish or English word. Logan especially can hear the difference. The healthy version is part of how Charlie talks. The illness version is a flag that the day has cost him.

The shorthand “you good?” delivered into a phone call is a diagnostic question more than a conversational one in this register. Logan can hear the consonants and know the answer before Charlie has time to give it.

Sick, post-vomit, post-faint

Pitch in the A2-C3 range, voice hoarse and dry, raspy with a dry-throat catch on the front of consonants. Hesitant starts, long pauses between words, the breath audibly pulling itself together before each phrase. Word retrieval failure is at its most severe here—the body has shut down its lexical-access pathways alongside everything else, and Charlie struggles to find common words in either language. This is the voice that comes through the AAC tablet’s recorded backup in late life when his biological voice cannot sustain even short conversation; the post-vomit register became one of the audio samples his voice bank could approximate, because it was the register he knew his loved ones would need to hear when his body was the worst.

Crying, emotionally exposed, vulnerable

The breath comes forward, not the pitch. Charlie’s vulnerability does not climb—it opens. The voice gets more breathy, not less, the chest-and-head balance shifts toward head-voice resonance, the pace slows. He does not lose the words; he releases them into a thinner column of breath. The crucifix from Lourdes is often touched in this register, the small thunk of ring-against-pendant audible if a microphone is open. The breathy register is information for Logan and for Charlie’s chosen family: a clear-voiced Charlie is performing the conversation; a breathy-voiced Charlie is feeling it.

In Spanish only

When Charlie shifts entirely into Spanish (with Reina, with Lourdes, with island-Boricua relatives, when emotion overrides English) the voice changes shape: the pace slows slightly because Spanish phrasing carries the sentence differently, the rhythm reorganizes from stress-timed to syllable-timed, the pitch range narrows because Spanish prosody lives in a tighter pitch envelope than NYC English, and the placement shifts very slightly back because the Spanish phonemes are produced with a marginally retracted tongue position. A bilingual listener hears the whole instrument reconfigure; a monolingual English listener hears “his voice changed” without being able to articulate how.

Audible Artifacts

Beyond the speech itself, Charlie’s voice as a body produces it carries a constellation of small audible artifacts that recur across his life. Writers and audiobook narrators rendering Charlie at the sentence level should be aware of these; they are not always foregrounded, but they are part of the texture.

The rings

Charlie wore rings on most fingers from his late teens onward—a silver thumb ring, assorted bands from festivals and gifts, sometimes a borrowed band of Logan’s. They functioned as fidget objects as much as ornaments. He spun them, twisted them, clicked them against surfaces, clicked them against each other. A microphone catches the faint metallic clicking as a baseline texture under any close-mic recording or any in-person conversation in a quiet room. Logan, sitting beside Charlie, learned to read the click frequency the way some partners read leg-bouncing—faster meant something building, slower meant settled, paused entirely meant either deeply engaged or deeply unwell.

The Pandora bracelet

Logan gave Charlie a Pandora charm bracelet for his nineteenth birthday in 2026, and Charlie wore it for the rest of his life. The charms accumulated—birthdays, anniversaries, milestones, small markers Logan added without announcement. Charlie turned the bracelet on his wrist between sentences during emotionally exposed conversation, and the charms clinked softly against each other and against the wrist bone. The sound was barely audible in a room but consistently present on a recording.

The Lourdes crucifix

A silver crucifix on a chain from his maternal grandmother Lourdes (“Uela Lulu” in Charlie’s interior register and dialogue). Charlie wore it under his shirt most days; it surfaced during recording sessions, performances, and emotionally exposed moments. He touched it before takes (the small thunk of fingernail against silver), held it during prayer, and rested his hand against his chest in moments of grief or gratitude with the crucifix under his palm. In domestic settings the chain occasionally caught against another piece of jewelry or against a microphone with a faint ring.

The breath-catch

As gastroparesis progressed and POTS-related autonomic dysfunction stacked on top of it, Charlie developed an audible breath-catch on the front of certain phonemes—usually the bilabials (/p/, /b/, /m/) and sometimes the high front vowels (/i/, /ɪ/). The catch is not a stutter; it is the moment his autonomic system pauses fractionally before producing the airflow the consonant or vowel requires. In healthy years it appears only when he is fatigued or recovering from a flare. In late-middle and late life it becomes a baseline feature of his voice that listeners adjust to without consciously naming.

The dry-throat thinning

Before his voice sounds tired in any other way, the consonants get drier. The /s/ and /z/ thin out, the /t/ and /d/ get drier on release, the lips and tongue work against insufficient saliva. This is the earliest auditory signal that he is past his energy budget for the day. People who love him learn the sound; Logan and Mo can clock it across a phone line.

The fast inhale before vulnerable speech

When Charlie is about to say something difficult, his inhale is audibly different from his neutral conversational inhale. It is slightly longer, slightly louder, and lands fractionally before the first word in a way that in his musical recordings the engineers leave in. In conversation the inhale is the warning his loved ones get that something matters about what is coming next.

AAC-tablet sounds, late life

When Charlie’s biological voice cannot sustain conversation in his late sixties and seventies, he uses an AAC tablet with his custom voice bank. The voice bank was recorded during his peak years and approximates his neutral and breathy registers; it cannot reproduce the panic or fatigue states. The audible artifacts of AAC use—the small electronic delay before output, the slight digital edge to the consonants, the absence of breath at sentence beginnings—become part of his late-life voice, layered with whatever biological voice he can still produce. In the very last stretch he is almost entirely AAC, and the small click-and-tap of his fingers on the tablet becomes the audible precursor to every spoken sentence.

Cross-Language Phonology

Charlie’s Spanish and his maternal grandmother Lourdes’s Spanish are both Puerto Rican Spanish, but they are not identical. Lourdes is island-born, raised in Borinquen, still living on the island, and her Spanish is full island Borinquen Spanish with all the Caribbean phonological hallmarks intact and unselfconscious. Charlie is Queens-born and second-generation diaspora; his Spanish absorbed from Lourdes and Reina is a partially-leveled diasporic Boricua Spanish that retains most island features—his Spanish came through his abuela’s mouth, not through formal schooling, so the spoken inventory came in mostly intact—but shifts some features under English-substrate influence and the cognitive bilingualism of a Jackson Heights upbringing.

Rendering both registers in a single contrastive section makes the differences load-bearing. Lourdes is the constant; Charlie’s deviations from Lourdes are the diaspora signature.

Syllable-final /s/

Lourdes: full Caribbean aspiration, consistent and unconscious. “Está” is “ehtá,” “los niños” is “loh niño,” “mis amigos” is “mih amigos.” There is no version of Lourdes’s Spanish in which the /s/ is restored; the aspiration is not a register-variable feature but a stable phonological reality of her speech.

Charlie: aspirates /s/ as his default speech, the same as Lourdes. With other Boricuas, with family, in his interior thoughts, with bilingual Boricua friends—the /s/ is dropped without thinking. The aspirated form is his real Spanish.

The trajectory of Charlie’s /s/ is more complex than Lourdes’s because Charlie was raised in a NYC environment where non-Caribbean Hispanic peers (Mexican, Colombian, Ecuadorian, South American Spanish speakers) treated Caribbean features as marked, and where the gatekeeping pressure of “your Spanish isn’t real” produced a documented sociolinguistic accommodation phase. Through adolescence and his early Juilliard years—roughly ages 13 through 22—Charlie attempted to “clean up” his Caribbean features for non-PR Hispanic interlocutors. He tried to add the /s/ back, to soften the uvular /r/, to mute the lateralization. The accommodation was not just /s/ but the entire Caribbean phonological inventory. It was driven by the social cost of being read as “wrong Spanish” and by the compounding self-consciousness of a young man whose body and voice were already getting read as wrong on multiple axes.

The accommodation phase ended in his mid-twenties, after CRATB broke through and Charlie’s artistic identity consolidated around an unapologetic Boricua-Nuyorican public presentation. The combination of professional confidence, the chosen-family Boricua context the band gave him, and the energy economics of escalating chronic illness—the position Charlie eventually reached, as Chloe rendered it: “I have to spend so much energy on existing, so fuck that”—ended the accommodation. From his mid-twenties through the rest of his life, he speaks his Spanish without trying to clean it up for any audience. With non-PR Hispanic interlocutors who pull rank on his Spanish, the response is no longer a register-shift but a refusal—he speaks his Spanish, and the listener can choose to hear it or not.

Ezra Cruz, the in-universe contrast, never made the accommodation. Miami’s Caribbean-Spanish-saturated environment never manufactured the stigma Charlie experienced in NYC; Ezra’s Caribbean features have always been intact and unselfconscious. The two characters are both Puerto Rican, both U.S.-mainland-raised, and both retain their Spanish phonology—but Charlie’s retention is the result of a political and energetic refusal earned in his twenties, while Ezra’s retention is a default he never had to defend.

Word-final /n/

Lourdes: velarized to [ŋ] consistently. “Consideran” → “consideraŋ,” “pan” → “paŋ.”

Charlie: velarizes word-final /n/ in casual register, reliably. This is one of the features that survived his diaspora most intact and was never a target of his accommodation phase (less stigmatized than the /s/-aspiration or the /r/-to-/l/, less audibly “wrong” to non-Caribbean ears).

The /r/

Lourdes: uvular trill on word-initial /r/ and intervocalic /rr/. “Rivera” with a strong back-of-throat trill, “carro” with a uvular fricative-trill.

Charlie: uvular tendency present, but partially fronted compared to Lourdes. His /r/ on “Rivera” sits between alveolar and uvular—a Caribbean back-of-throat trill that has migrated slightly forward under English-substrate influence. This is one of the audible diaspora features in his Spanish; an island speaker hears the /r/ and clocks Charlie as not-island-raised. It was a target of his accommodation phase (he tried to front it further toward the standard alveolar trill in his teens and twenties) but reverted to its natural Caribbean position once he stopped trying.

Syllable-final /r/-to-/l/ lateralization

Lourdes: consistent lateralization. “Puerta” is “puelta,” “carne” is “calne,” “amor” is “amol.” This is not a casual-register variable but a stable feature of her speech, characteristic of Puerto Rican Spanish and especially common in island-resident speakers.

Charlie: consistent lateralization, the same as Lourdes. He absorbed his Spanish from her mouth (and from Reina, who carries the same feature), so the lateralization came in with the rest of the phonological inventory and stayed. Like the /s/-aspiration, it was a target of his teens-and-twenties accommodation phase—he tried to restore the /r/ for non-PR Hispanic interlocutors who marked it as wrong—and like the /s/-aspiration, it returned to its default position after the accommodation ended in his mid-twenties.

Vowel inventory

Both speakers preserve the standard Spanish five-vowel system (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/). Lourdes’s vowels are slightly more open and back; Charlie’s vowels show a slight English-substrate fronting, especially on /e/ and /o/. The difference is subtle but audible to a bilingual listener and is one of the most reliable signatures of his diaspora.

Prosody

Lourdes’s prosody is full Caribbean Spanish—syllable-timed, with the dynamic pitch shifts characteristic of Boricua speech, faster than Iberian Spanish or Mexican Spanish. Charlie’s prosody is Caribbean-with-English-shaping—mostly syllable-timed but with occasional English stress-timing leaking in, especially on cognates and on words he learned through English first (“computadora” carries slight English stress patterning even when he says it in Spanish).

Lexical strategy

This is one of the most diaspora-specific features of Charlie’s Spanish, and it is genuinely trifurcated rather than a simple loan-word-friendly / loan-word-resistant binary.

  • Hispanicized English borrowings. For some concepts, Charlie reaches for Spanish verbs that have absorbed English roots and conjugate as native verbs. “Lonchar” for “to lunch” is the documented case in his speech. The English verb gets a Spanish infinitive ending and integrates into the grammatical system. Lourdes does not use these forms; Charlie does.
  • Untranslated heritage retention. For other concepts—particularly basic-vocabulary household words that came in early through Lourdes and Reina—the Spanish word survives intact. “Techo” for roof. “Mesa” for table. “Cocina” for kitchen. These are not under pressure from English because Charlie absorbed them in Spanish before he had English alternatives.
  • English drop-in with article, or pointing. For everything else—the long tail of nouns and concepts where neither the Spanish word feels right nor a Hispanicized loan exists—Charlie reaches for the English word with a Spanish article (“el truck”) or simply gestures toward the referent and lets the gesture carry the meaning (“el—points”). This is the most diaspora-bilingual move of the three. It is not failed Spanish; it is the cognitive economy of a true bilingual who treats both languages as available simultaneously and uses gesture as a legitimate completion of a sentence.

The pointing-as-completion is a load-bearing texture for Charlie’s Spanish in dialogue. A scene of Charlie in the kitchen with Reina, saying “ay coño, mami, where’s the—el thing—?” with a hand gesture that lets the referent live in the gesture rather than the word, is the lexical voice in its healthy form. Confident bilingual cognitive economy. Not “broken Spanish.”

A separate phenomenon, distinct from the trifurcated lexical strategy and easily confused with it, is the genuine word-retrieval failure that surfaces when Charlie is sick, fatigued, or in pain. In the healthy register, the pointing and the English drop-ins are choices. In the illness register, they are failures—the chronic-illness brain not finding the word it knows is there. The audible signature is different: the healthy version is fluent and forward-moving, often delivered with a laugh; the illness version is halting, frustrated, often apologetic. Logan can hear the difference and clocks it as a state-marker. See the Voice Under Emotional and Physical States section for the rendering of the illness register specifically.

The audible payoff

When Charlie speaks Spanish to Lourdes, she hears her grandson, but she also hears the diaspora in his voice—the slightly fronted /r/, the English-shaped vowels, the Hispanicized English borrowings she would not use, the English drop-ins for words he absorbed through English first. She loves him completely; she also knows that the island has not reached him in full. The /s/-aspiration, the /n/-velarization, and the /r/-to-/l/ lateralization are intact—those came through her—but the cognitive bilingualism is unmistakable.

When Charlie speaks Spanish in front of island-Boricua relatives at family gatherings, the same recognition happens in reverse—they accept him as familia, and they also clock him as the Queens kid, not the island kid. This is the cognitive and cultural texture the section is meant to render.

Lifespan Evolution

Charlie’s voice did not evolve linearly. It moved through identifiable stages, and those stages map to body events as much as to chronological age.

Ages 4-10 (childhood voice)

Already loud, expressive, and impossible to miss in any room. Pitch sat in the typical pre-pubertal range but with the unusual quality of carrying further than his frame suggested. Bilingual from birth, with Spanish dominant in the home with Reina, Lourdes, and the extended family, and English dominant once he started school. The Nuyorican accent was already forming by school age—he absorbed Jackson Heights English from his peers and his Queens-public-school environment, while his Spanish absorbed from Lourdes was full island Borinquen Spanish (his abuela’s variety, with all its phonological hallmarks intact).

Ages 10-13 (pre-change brightness)

The childhood voice deepened slightly but remained high. Musicality became audible—he was already drawn to bachata, salsa, jazz, R&B by age ten or eleven, and the rhythms of those genres started shaping his speech prosody as much as his musical ear. Pitch peaks during excitement reached into D5 territory. The voice carried the same bright forward placement that would persist into adulthood.

Ages 13-15 (the change that wasn’t a drop)

Per the bio’s canonical line: “his voice just shifted, it didn’t drop.” The change arrived sometime between thirteen and fifteen, and rather than falling an octave the way most male voices do, Charlie’s voice gained adult resonance and breath control while staying in the register it had occupied since childhood. What changed was texture: a slight rasp entered, the boyish clarity gave way to a more complex tonal palette, the breath support deepened, the falsetto register became accessible as a separate instrument. Strangers on the phone began misgendering him as a woman starting around this age, and the pattern persisted for the rest of his life.

This is also the period when the /s/-aspiration accommodation phase began. The gatekeeping pressure of “your Spanish isn’t real” landed during these adolescent years, and Charlie tried—not always successfully—to clean up his Caribbean features for non-PR Hispanic peers.

Ages 16-22 (LaGuardia, early Juilliard, peak instrument)

The voice settled into the high tenor / androgynous-quality register that defined his adulthood. The Queens-Boricua rhythm intensified rather than smoothing as Charlie became more conscious of his identity as a Nuyorican artist; he leaned into the Jackson Heights texture rather than away from it. The classical conservatory training at Juilliard added the vowel-landing-integrity layer that produced his preserved-offglide /aɪ/ pattern. Code-switching crystallized into a deliberate craft tool. The /s/-aspiration accommodation phase continued through these years, especially in the mixed-Hispanic Juilliard environment where Charlie was sometimes the only Boricua in a room of Mexican, Argentine, and Spanish-from-Spain Spanish speakers.

By the time he met Logan in 2025, the voice was the voice that Logan would fall in love with: light, bright, ambiguous, musical, fast, capable of shifting registers within a single sentence.

Ages 22-30 (CRATB rises, accommodation ends)

CRATB broke through in this period, and with it, the consolidation of Charlie’s public Boricua-Nuyorican artistic identity. The combination of professional confidence, the band’s Boricua chosen-family context, and the early stages of chronic-illness energy management ended the /s/-aspiration accommodation phase. From his mid-twenties onward, Charlie’s Spanish is unselfconsciously Caribbean—aspirated /s/, lateralized /r/, uvular trill, full inventory—regardless of audience. The shift is permanent.

Vocal-instrument-wise, the voice gained the early audible breath-management layer described in the texture overlay section. The fundamental register did not change.

Ages 30-50 (chronic illness baseline, voice as instrument)

As POTS, gastroparesis, EDS, and chronic fatigue progressed, the voice gained more pronounced breath audibility. The fundamental register did not change, but the breath support became a daily negotiation. Bad days reduced the voice to a whisper; good days kept the bright forward placement intact. The wide pitch envelope across emotional states sharpened during this period—Charlie became more readable, vocally, because his body had less reserve to mask its state. Word-retrieval failure during fatigue flares became a more frequent feature of the illness register.

Ages 50-60 (the worn-down beautiful version)

The bio’s canonical phrasing for this stage is exact: “this beautiful, worn-down version of his voice—raspy, soft, but still so him.” The rasp deepened. The pace slowed slightly. The pitch envelope narrowed because the high-energy excited register cost more than it had in his twenties. The Nuyorican rhythm remained—“Fifty-two years old and you still sound like a bodega cashier with a jazz degree,” Logan would say, and Charlie would mutter “That’s Doctor Bodega to you, Lolo” without missing a beat. The voice was still recognizable as the same instrument; it had just been played a long time.

Ages 60-73 (AAC integration, vocal silence approaches)

The biological voice reduced to whispers and short phrases, with AAC carrying most communication. The voice bank, recorded years earlier when his vocal strength allowed, took over the conversational load. Charlie’s speech in this stage is bimodal—some words from his biological voice (greetings, names of loved ones, the small phrases he wanted to keep saying with his own breath), most words from the AAC. By his final weeks the biological voice was almost entirely silent, the AAC his only reliable communication channel.

The end (2081, age 73)

The voice that had betrayed his body’s state for seventy-three years went quiet. The AAC tablet stayed by his bedside until the last hours; Logan kept Charlie’s recorded voice playing softly during the preparation of his body, the engineer Grace having arranged for the speakers in the preparation room to play Charlie’s own recordings during the work.

Do NOT Use as Comp

  • Frankie Grande. The expressive-high theatrical affect reads as “high voice” but his actual placement is mid-tenor with bright affect; he does not get misgendered on the phone. Charlie does. Charlie’s voice is genuinely ambiguous, not theatrically expressive in a male-tenor register. Frankie fails the load-bearing test.
  • Lin-Manuel Miranda’s default register. Too warm and mid-placed. Loses the ambiguity. Lin-Manuel sounds like a man with an animated NYC voice; Charlie sounds like a person whose pitch the listener cannot quite place. Lin-Manuel’s ‘’Hamilton’‘-era Broadway register is its own NYC-Latino voice variety, not Nuyorican neutral speech.
  • Oscar Isaac. The Hollywood-leading-man baritone the bio is explicitly NOT. Readers default-cast Charlie as a warm masc-tenor because of the “composer/conductor, married to a man, Puerto Rican from Queens” pattern, and Oscar Isaac is the projection. Resist it.
  • Bad Bunny speaking voice. Wrong placement (chest-forward, lower) and wrong cadence (Puerto Rican island Spanish, not Nuyorican English-with-Spanish-shaping). Bad Bunny is the wrong Boricua reference for Charlie—the canonical wrong-region same-identity comp.
  • Ezra Cruz (in-universe). Same heritage, different diaspora, different voice. Ezra is mid-tenor not androgynous, Miami-Boricua not Nuyorican, no classical-vocal training so fuller flatten on the diphthongs. Writers should not interchange them just because both are Faultlines Puerto Rican characters.

Singing Voice Cross-Reference

For Charlie’s singing voice (Romeo Santos as primary, Sam Smith and early Miguel as secondary), see Charlie Rivera - Voice Style. The singing comps are dispositionally different from the speaking comps because the vocal instrument and the speech instrument are distinct registers in his self-perception (saxophone is identity, voice is vulnerability, per the Voice Style guide).