Kate's Voice

I am a vocal practitioner.  I have observed and worked with voices for years and have developed theories about the way the voice works and how it affects listeners.  One of my conclusions is that I like expressive voices, and so do you.  But don’t take my word for it.

In a guest post on this blog, Sue Gaulke gave us the results of a survey she conducted, wherein she learned that the most “terrible turnoff” for audiences is a speaker’s monotonous voice.  Through scientific studies, T. Johnstone and others have shown that emotions in the voice do elicit a response in the brains of listeners.   Research by UCI professor and scientist, James McGaugh has shown that expressive voices are  more memorable.  In fact, evoking an emotional response may actually create memory.  And for those who wonder if you CAN evoke an emotional response (as if that isn’t obvious!), research now shows that “emotional information is represented by distinct spatial patterns that can be decoded from brain activity in modality-specific cortical areas. ”

The takeaway for you as a voice user should be that expression is important, even when you are discussing profit and loss via PowerPoint. As Dale Carnegie said, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”  Specifically, if you want to be interesting AND memorable , you must be emotional.

Emotional Recall: The key to an expressive voice:
Actors use a technique called “emotional recall” to bring up their personal experience and help create emotion in their voices.  Here’s how it might work for you as a public speaker.  Your company sold a lot of widgets.  You have to speak about your huge profits while showing a graph.  You are tempted to simply talk us through the report.  However, your report is good news so I suggest that to make it memorable and to keep our attention, you need to make it sound like good news by including “good news” emotions in your voice.   When you practice, do this:

• Think back to a time when you experienced good news personally.  Imagine the moment. How did you feel?  Bring back that feeling and now, when you talk about success, your mind brings up happy faces and the thrill of winning instead of just a report. We can hear it in your voice.

It may be that the strength of your emotional recall is linked to the intensity of your original emotion.  However, emotional recall may actually be linked to a gene.  Some people only recall extreme emotional memory while others recall even mild emotions intensely.

Try it:

To see how emotional recall works for you, recall how you felt in both big and small situations, negative and positive, and across the spectrum of emotional vocabulary.  For example, good news might feel like one of the following:

• Winning a swim meet
• Hearing your dog’s “hello” bark
• The feeling when you held your newborn child
• Playing Guitar Hero
• Winning the lottery

How does bad news feel?  Sadness? Anxiety?  Frustration? Determination? Dedication?  Find the emotion or emotions appropriate for your topic. Now speak through your presentation aloud,  using the emotions you have recalled.

Summary:
The trick is to remember a time you felt the emotion you want to convey, remember the physical sensations and recreate them so you feel them again.  If you had an emotional response originally, your brain will remember the emotion and the physical response along with the situation, so you can feel it again.  That recalled feeling has the ability to change the way you sound to others AND evoke an emotional response in them that they will remember. They will also be more likely to remember you and your message.

Related posts:

The Storyteller’s Voice is Everyone’s Business

Pause: Create a Powerful Presence through Silence

When You Must Read Aloud:  The Voice in Business

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Clark Harris (aka @SilentClark ) was only speaking using social media for the month of May in an effort to raise awareness and money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in memory of his mother.  June 1, he decided to continue the campaign, having fallen short of his goal of raising $100,000, using only social media to speak.  He will finally end the silence on August 7.  He has written some wonderful reflections on voice in his blog. I interviewed him here because of his insights, and also so that you can be aware of this campaign, and help him out. Please read on, and visit his blog , or follow him on Twitter.

Why silence your voice instead of raise it?

@SilentClark: I felt that silence would have a larger impact because it is the opposite of what people expect of you when spreading to spread a message.

You remarked, “ I concluded that social media, with its globe-spanning reach, could not extend to the same few feet as the human voice.” What do you think it is about the human voice that creates so much impact?

@SilentClark: The voice is a completely pure form of communication. Words on paper can be a very personal form of communication, but to hear the voice of the writer adds a greater impact to them. The voice is more soothing as well when consoling another.

On your blog, you talk about daily “biggest ups, biggest downs and most entertaining experiences.” Was there a “biggest up” and/or “most entertaining” to listening to others’ voices?

@SilentClark: It is most entertaining to see the way friends who I have known for a long time, interact with me. At parties especially, they know it is difficult for me to respond, so they say more statements and less questions. This is an unnatural way of speaking, so it leads to interesting topics that they might not have shared before.

What was the “biggest down” to not being able to speak?

@SilentClark: Missing the opportunity to share my thoughts on a regular basis. The Delay Factor in social media  makes it impossible to keep in tune with the rhythm of a spoken conservation between several people. I just have to accept defeat and know those thoughts will go unheard.

Did your silence affect your listening, and if so, how?

@SilentClark: My silence has caused me to change roles with people such as my wife in our communication dynamics. Before I was the talker and she was the listener for the most part. Now, through necessity, it is the other way around. I’ve been told I’m a good listener when people have something serious to share, but in the day to day interactions I did most of the talking. Now I can sit back and pay closer attention, knowing there is little pressure for me to comment or respond.

If you want to know more about The Social Media Experiment, please visit Clark’s web pages.  In the final hours,  he is offering a chance to win an iPad, so there’s even more reason to learn more.