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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The thermometer is pushing three digits and the idea of warming up anything is probably just not on your mind.  However, if you have to give a talk, you need to warm up your voice before you practice, and definitely before you go on stage or on camera.  The question is, what do you do to warm up a voice?  Vocal warm ups are a three step process.

1)    Get the vocal muscles warm by increasing blood flow and oxygen.

a.   Breathe deeply.  Expand the lower abdomen as you inhale and contract it to exhale. Make this kind of breathing part of your presentation as well. Practice with this audio file:  06-how-to-breathe;
b.    Align your body and awaken your support system. Stand tall, with your shoulders back and your chest high.  Stretch and walk as you breathe deeply.  A series of body warm ups will help here.
c.   Make funny sounds. You can’t exercise your voice without making sound, and the sounds are usually just as funny to the ear as my push ups are to the eye!  Nevertheless, get your voice going with  “mmmmmmmm,”  “zzzzzzzzzzzz,” “ney ney ney,” “mum mum mum,” and “nu me nu me nu me.”  Repeat several times.  Feel your face and nasal passages vibrate and buzz with those sounds.  Sigh a few times out loud sarting higher and higher each time.  Use your full range.

2) Get your brain working with your voice

a.    Use tongue twisters. Make a list of words that are difficult for you to say and practice saying them together in sentences.  Or use traditional tongue twisters from this list.
b.   Use mask resonance to speak through key points of your talk.  Mask resonance can be found by saying, “Mm-hmm.”  Feel the buzzy sensation in the front of the face.  Now practice speaking your outline aloud and emphasize the m’s and n’s as you do.  Example:  MMMMy nnnnnammmme is Kate.” For more practice, listen to this audio file08 Learning to Identify Mask Resonance and 09 Learning to Use Mask Resonance

c.   Speak your personal intention aloud. Everyone needs a personal intention as a speaker or presenter.  Perhaps yours is to inspire and uplift others.  Perhaps yours is to entertain, or create a safe place for others to express who they are.  Or maybe it’s to motivate people to buy your widgets so you can send your kids to college.  Whatever it is, write it down and then speak it out loud several times before moving on to the third step of warm ups.
3)    Align your voice with your content and your intention

a.   Speak your intention for the talk aloud. In step 2, you spoke aloud your personal intention as a speaker.  Here you will say your intention for this particular talk.  Perhaps your intention is to sell your widget to this particular customer.  Perhaps your intention for the talk is to provide the background for a project kick-off or it’s to introduce another speaker.  Whatever it is, say it out loud several times.   You can find more on intention here.
b.   Break down your talk into segments and create a new vocal color for each section. Let’s say the first section is the introduction, the second is the history of the situation, and the third is the challenge that has to be overcome.  Try a new “role” for each section by evoking pathos, so that you don’t sound the same all the time.  In this case, the first role may be light and friendly, the second, educational, and the third a bit more dramatic.
c.    Practice the conclusion aloud. Create a good closing and practice it as much as the opening.

Other suggestions for practice now that you’re warm:
Find a good place
If you are practicing at home or in the office, you will need to find a place that is resonant.  You want the sound to reverberate a bit because otherwise you will overuse your voice without even knowing it.  The shower is a great place to practice (and everyone knows we all sound better there anyway!), as are areas that have a hard surface and no curtains or carpeting. If all of your rooms are carpeted and draped, try finding a corner wall space that has no curtains on it.

Set aside time for your voice
It takes a good thirty minutes to warm up most voices.  Set that time aside before you go on.  In addition, spend as much time off stage practicing as you are going to spend on stage presenting.  That means, if your talk is an hour long, you need to practice an hour a day for a week or two before presenting. If you regularly give presentations that are four or more hours long, as trainers do, you need to make sure you keep your voice healthy with a daily work out, but you also need to make sure you get some vocal rest in between presentations.

Other resources for vocal warm ups:

Quick and Easy Vocal Warmups

The Voice and Swallowing Institute Vocal Warmups

Five Stealth Ways to Find Time to Practice from the Eloquent Woman blog