When you don’t have to sing or speak for a living, you don’t really need to think about how your voice sounds or how it’s perceived by the people who listen to it day in and day out, do you? Well, most people don’t. But, if you do use your voice professionally, it is crucial that you learn the 5 Pillars of Your Voice and how these pillars come together to make your voice work for you rather than against you.
PITCH
The first pillar of your voice is pitch. Do you usually speak high or do you speak low? Do you speak using just a couple notes on the scale or do you use a wide variety of notes to express yourself? Most of us would agree that we’ve all heard a boring speaker only pull from a couple different pitches and put us to sleep, and on the contrary, we’ve heard an incredibly dynamic speaker utilize all the different pitches or tones he/she has available to him/her. How do you do this?
DYNAMICS
When we refer to dynamics, we are talking about how loud (ff) or how soft (pp) a person speaks/sings, and most of us have our volume set on a certain number most of the time. Ever hear a loud speaker in a restaurant or movie theater who forgot to turn off his “outside” voice while he’s talking on the phone or with the person he is with? Ever hear a soft speaker try and tell you something in a crowded room and for the life of you, you just can’t hear her? As speakers, we want to know how to turn up our sound when we want to say something important and we want to turn down our sound to draw people in and make them listen. The thing we never want to do is stay on one volume level and wear out the person listening to us.
TEMPO
Are you a fast talker or a slow talker? Do you take a lot of pauses or do you jump right into the next thought without a break? When we are listening to you speak, it is important that you pay attention to how fast or slow you are speaking, because, like all the other pillars, only talking in one tempo can make us feel like we can predict what you are saying, and it can put us to sleep or make us antsy or nervous. Remember, when we speak, we have the power to make people feel a certain way. They pick up on our cues and unconsciously react to us. Big responsibility, right? You bet! So, we need to understand how this works. If you speak with the same tempo, you will lose even the most supportive people who are really interested in your content. But, if you speak with varied tempo and pace yourself wisely, you will keep people engaged and interested in what you have to say.
TONE
Is your voice nurturing in nature or does it have an icy, cut-to-the-chase vibe? Is it pingy and brassy or is it velvety and warm? Easy to listen to or annoying AF? While a lot of our vocal tone is genetics, we can alter our vocal tone and pull from the colors we have available to us — if, and only if, we know they are there. Once we understand where our voice lies naturally, we can utilize facial expression and the inside of our mouths to make our sound more appealing to the ear. We can unlearn nasal habits and embrace a higher soft palate to convey sounds that are “like buttah” to the ear!
RESONANCE
Much like tone, resonance has to do with the acoustic qualities of your voice, but this time, we are more concerned with how your voice carries within a room. Please do not confuse resonance with dynamics (loud or soft). I like to think of resonance in terms of how clear and forward a sound is versus how muffled and far back it is. Resonance has more to do with sound penetration and how well you are heard over a crowd rather than how your voice is drowned out by other sounds. When we think of resonance, we have to always think of vocal placement. Is your voice far back in your throat and hollow or is it forward and clear? Our resonating chambers, mouth, nose, head, chest, all play a vital part in how our sound resonates, and the good news is, regardless of where your voice currently is, it can be altered for optimal resonance.
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list of all the areas of the voice we build upon when we work together, but this gives you a mental picture of the areas we will focus on the most. While it may seem daunting to read a list of things you’ve perhaps never even thought of in terms of your speaking voice, rest assured that you can and will learn these fundamentals as if they are second nature to you and master the art of speaking!