Life’s Grand Mosaic

For public speaking and daily life vocal variety is the animation and vitality in your voice.

To increase the variety and impact of your voice, there are 4 aspects that you can improve:

• rate,
• pitch,
• force, and
• quality.

This article explains these 4 aspects and their relevance to public speaking.

If you listen to your voice (record yourself), you will hear the amount of variety you are able to achieve. These variable elements of voice should work together to achieve meaning and emphasis.

A monotonous voice is dull and impotent. However, too much variety is childlike.

Rate

Rate is simply the speed at which you speak. A normal rate of conversational speech is between 120 and 140 words per minute.

You have, no doubt, observed people with an extremely slow or extremely fast rate.

Consider the slow speaker. Did you note your reactions to this speaker? Did he seem interested in his subject? Probably not. Was his speech forceful? Highly unlikely. Were you impressed with his personality? Not much.

How did you react to the rapid speaker? Most likely, he made you feel a little on edge. Could you understand him? Was he likable?

You can see that a poor speech rate can severely impair your communicative ability.

You also have probably noticed that your own rate is rarely constant and that it varies greatly with the amount of emphasis and meaning you wish to employ. For instance, a slow rate is good when telling a very suspenseful element of a story. A fast rate can be effective to build excitement in the listener.

Pause is an important element of rate. A pause should be meaningful. A pause devoid of purpose will seem empty, will break up the rhythm of speech, and will indicate a hesitant, insecure personality.

Pause to gain the attention of your audience. You will find that an audience invariably reacts to silence.

Pause when you wish to emphasize a particular word or idea. Again, the audience will wonder at the reason for your pause; this increased attention gives emphasis to your word or idea.

You may use pause as a transition to a new thought. The small gap of time will adjust your audience to the advent of your new idea.

The length of the pause will be determined by its purpose. Logically, you will use short pauses at the ends of phrases and sentences. Pauses of greater duration must be adapted to the audience, the subject, and the speaker. A good speaker uses pause effectively because he is conscious of his audience’s reactions, the tempo and mood of his subject, and his own personality and speech rhythm.

Pitch

Pitch, essentially, is the frequency of vibrations (the number per second) produced by the vocal folds.

As you probably have noticed, most of your vocalizations stay within a certain frequency range. Moreover, although your voice may have a frequency range of an octave or even two octaves, within that range one frequency is predominant. This is known as the habitual pitch level.

The well-functioning voice employs the range of an octave or more. A poorly trained voice often spans no more than four full tones, producing a monotone. Most people who speak in a monotone have sufficient potential vocal range but do not use it.

In many cases, too, poor pitch variety is directly attributable to the amount of physical animation used by the speaker. If his body resembles a statue, more than likely he’ll have about as much pitch variety as a statue.

The subject of the speech also contributes to the amount of variety. If the speaker is interested in what he is saying, his pitch and his whole voice will invariably show it.

Observe yourself during an interesting conversation. Notice how your body and your voice work simultaneously for expression. Notice, too, how the voice and body seem to weaken when the subject becomes uninteresting.

Force

Force refers to the loudness of the voice. It is governed by the velocity of air exhaled through the vocal folds and is further amplified by air chambers known as resonators in the head and throat. Good breath control, then, is directly related to control of force.

Many speakers encounter difficulty sustaining tone. Usually, this weakness of voice is due to poor breathing habits. The speaker may, in the throes of nervous tension, lose his rhythm of breathing. He finds himself running out of air and gasping to draw it in, sometimes in places as inappropriate as the middle of a phrase. This gasp-type breathing, itself distracting, does not allow much air to enter the lungs, and the resulting tone produced is usually thin and weak.

My breathing tips are:

• The first breath you take establishes your lung capacity for the speech – make it a deep one. This will allow you to breathe less often through the speech.
• You should breathe as often as possible in appropriate places—at the end of a sentence, the end of a phrase, or at any purposeful pause.
• A warm-up exercise that will help is to slowly raise your arms above your head, then lower them, allowing your rib cage to remain high. Gently swing your arms back and forth, so that your rib cage feels as if it’s floating.
• An exercise to improve your breathing is to lie flat on your back, with an object on your stomach, and observe the object as it rises and falls.

Quality

Each speaking sound is composed of one fundamental or primary tone and a group of overtones. No speech sound is produced by just one tone at a certain pure frequency level. The overtones added to the fundamental tone determine the quality of your voice.

Imagine your voice to be an orchestra. A solo by one instrument can be likened to the fundamental tone. Add other instruments, as your voice adds overtones, and the quality of sound produced by the orchestra changes considerably.

Resonance, the intensification and enrichment of tones by supplementary vibrations, is also a determinant of quality. The resonating cavities are the mouth (oral cavity), the nose (nasal cavity), and the throat (pharyngeal cavity).

Thus, were a person to direct to his nose the sounds produced by his vocal folds, he would produce a nasal voice. Incorrect resonance can also produce a thin or weak voice, a harsh voice, a shrill voice, or a denasal voice.

Very few people employ variety of quality. The speaker is usually so used to his own voice quality he seldom varies it. Ask him, however, to imitate someone’s voice, and his quality will soar to unbounded variety.

Most likely, then, the best way to build variety of quality is through imitation of others. You will not find it hard eventually to expand this ability into your normal speech habits.

Remember, animation of voice—every element of it—describes, emphasizes, attracts and holds attention.

Tags: confidence, influence, speech, voice