Kate’sVoice

Dressing up in a costume on Halloween is great fun!  Sometimes, a costume requires a vocal disguise as well.  There are three basic ways that most people try to disguise their voice.  They lower their voice or raise the pitch of their voice, or try an accent.

I recommend another method which is far more effective.  For this technique, you have to change your mind.  Here’s what I recommend:

1. Know your intention..what you want to sound like, a particular attitude you want to convey, or an emotion. Study your character and imagine what it feels like to be them.

2. Align that with your content, which is what you want to say.  Perhaps your character has some signature phrases that he/she uses.  Learn them.  You actually don’t need to say much.  You can give an impression of your character with only a word or two.

4.  Speak, keeping these two things in mind. It’s even better when you can hear your character speak in your mind as you speak out loud. This approach is an oversimplification of the Stanislavsky method of acting.

Finally, make sure that you keep your vocal health in mind when you disguise your voice.  Never speak too low or too high.  Rest your voice if you feel it getting tired.  And remember that too much candy just isn’t good for you!

For some great ideas on Halloween costumes that may also give you some fodder for vocal disguses, please click here.

The American Lung Association says that professional singers have an average life expectancy that is 25 years greater that the rest of the population because of the way they breathe.  I have an image in my head of the world ending on a high note.

I am constantly grateful for the set of lungs I’ve developed over the years.  I was asthmatic as a child and have had little of that since developing my voice!  But as a singer, and maybe because of my asthmatic condition, it took me a while to get the technique of good breathing.  I finally sat down with several books, tapes and songs and tried everything I read until I got the results I wanted.  The results I wanted were

1.  Lots of air for long phrases

2.  Effortless appearance

3.  An improved sound through improved breathing.

I got all of the above and also better health and great abs!!  If you’d like to try what I learned, I have included an audio track of a lesson in breathing here  06-how-to-breathe.  Please download it and try it out!  Let me know how it goes.

My father was a man of few words; my mother was a woman of many.  They had been married for nearly 50 years at the ti me of my father’s death.  The miracle of their marriage was that they were in love to that day.  When asked the secret of their successful relationship, both would answer, “Great communication.”  I became acutely aware of the problems that poor communication can create in a relationship when I went through a divorce.  The experience created an urgency in me to discover the priciples of effective conversation and coflict resolution.  I was probably trying to find a solution that would mean I would never have to go through that kind of pain again.  Of course, life isn’t like that.  There is no fix that fixes it all.  But understanding how we communicate and making it more conscious at least makes it possible to meet life with some tools that can help.

To this end, I highly recommend the work of Dennis Rivers, and his book on Co-operative Communication Skills. He gives it away free as a download and it is a great resource for anyone who works in teams, supervises others, has children, is in a relationship or argues a lot…lol  It is great!!  We’ll talk about his ideas from time to time.

Just a quick note today as football season gets in motion.  Bottom line:  Yelling just isn’t good for your voice.  I know you want to show support for your team,  but it really is possible to damage your voice with just one scream, or one too many for those with tougher vocal cords.  So, take it easy.  If you value the health of your voice, wave your arms, stomp your feet, whistle, jump up and down, but leave the screaming to others.  And if you do find that you have forgotten this sage advice and yelled anyway, here’s what to do to recover:

1. rest your voice as much as possible
2. raise your speaking voice to take some of the stress off of it while it heals
3. and drink lots of warm or room temperature liquids, instead of iced drinks.