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Exercise: Pace
variation
Start with the simple concept that your voice has 3 gears: fast, medium and slow.
Pick a passage to read - it can be anything from a magazine or newspaper to a novel.
Read it a few times so you know it quite well. Read it naturally. Now mark sections
that you can read fast (for excitement) or slowly (for emphasis) and read it again.
Repeat this exercise as often as you like to get the feeling of varying your pace, and
see if you want to add a couple of extra gears to give yourself even more variability.
PITCH
Pitch refers to how high or low your speech is.
In simple physical terms, the process of our voice starts when air is
directed through our larynx, which contains the ligaments of our vocal
cords or folds. Men’s cords are 17-25 mm long, while women’s are 12.5-
17.5 mm, which is why men’s voices are deeper and women’s higher. As
we force air past these cords they vibrate, and we modulate this vibration
with attached muscles. This creates a fundamental tone of around 100 Hz
on average for men and 200 Hz for women.
Within your modal register, you have possibly a range of up to 2 octaves
to play with. You will naturally modulate your voice within this range
depending on your level of excitement or agitation. Try saying “Where did
you leave my keys?” in your regular voice. Now raise the pitch, keeping
the pace exactly the same. And again, raising the pitch even higher. You
see how pitch alone can indicate excitement?
The main reason for moving your voice down into chest register is to
lower the pitch, because people associate deep voices with authority.
Research shows that we vote for politicians with deeper voices (other
things being equal). The association is probably based on the fact that
larger things are potentially more important or dangerous than small,
and that larger animals make deeper sounds: lions have much deeper
voices than cats, which in turn are deeper than mice. As a result, higher
voices tend to sound more timid and less authoritative.
To optimise your pitch before you undertake any significant speaking, I
strongly suggest you do the warm-up exercises in Chapter 7 – or at least
the last vocal warm-up, called the Siren.
Now let’s look at the complex variation in pitch called intonation, or
prosody.
PROSODY
Prosody is the major way we communicate sense, emphasis and emotion,
and thus hugely important in powerful speaking. It includes intonation
(the sing-song variation in pitch that we employ while speaking), as well
as rhythm, emphasis and to some degree pace and timbre too. Lack of
prosody results in a speaking voice that sounds literally monotonous
(monotone being one note).
Prosody is probably older than language itself. It may have started with
‘motherese’ – infant-directed speech which is typically inflected in an
exaggerated way. We tend to speak in this way to babies and dogs, and
even to old people or foreigners if we think we are not being understood.
As with so many aspects of speaking, prosody varies from culture to
culture, and it’s important to be sensitive to this when spotting the
listening you are speaking into, and speaking in a way that people will
receive. Scandinavians tend to employ a restrained prosody that sounds
almost bored to other cultures, while Latins (especially Italians) speak
with unrestrained prosody, often all at once! When I visit Greece, I often
mistake conversations between people for arguments because of the
different local prosody.
Repetitive or forced prosodies tend to lose potency in speaking. A good
example of this is up-talk, or high rising terminal (HRT), where the
speaker raises his or her pitch on the last syllable of a statement, as if it
were a question? (I’m sure you can imagine this habit now.) West-Coast
USA and the Antipodes are typically accused of starting this trend in the
last few decades, although there are long-established dialects (such as
Northern Irish or the Scottish northern isles dialect I hear spoken at my
home in Orkney) where this way of speaking is typical. When it’s not part
of a regional dialect, HRT carries the same issues as vocal fry. It’s used
much more often by females than by males, and it is associated with
uncertainty, because it effectively embeds a checking question – the
unspoken “Is that ok with you?” It also robs the speaker of the richness
and variation of unrestricted prosody, which inevitably results in less
power in speaking.
Exercise: Prosody
To assess and then improve your prosody, record yourself reading some pages from a
novel or some stories from a news source.
Start by neutralising prosody to see what happens without it. Read the passage in a
flat monotone, with no stresses or pace variations. Listen back. It sounds robotic and
completely uninteresting, doesn’t it?
Now read the passage in your normal voice. As you listen back this time, score yourself
out of 10 for your natural prosody: to what degree are your intonation, rhythm and
stresses making the content more powerful and interesting?
If you detect that your prosody is on the restrained side, scoring yourself at less than
5, re-read the passage, exaggerating your prosody to 10, as if you were reading it to a
small child. Practice this until you feel you have extended your range and can naturally
turn yourself up to a natural 6 or 7.
A fun exercise that we do in my workshops is to express emotions or communicate
concepts to someone with no words at all, much as the prehistoric proto-hum
postulated by Steven Mithen might have sounded. You can do this on your own or
have fun swapping these with a friend.
Making sounds, but with no words, express the following:
- sadness
- joy
- anger
- surprise
Now some more complex tasks:
- ask to be given something that you can see
- say sorry
- say you feel ill.
To work on stress, try saying the sentences below, while stressing the words in bold
and seeing the difference it makes to the sense.
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