Chapter 2

Exploring the Amazing Human Voice

In This Chapter

Experiencing the full range of vocal sounds

Hearing voices that changed the world

Dispelling voice myths

Making meaning of what you hear

T he human voice is powerful. Throughout history, voices have moved people and swayed opinions. Although words are important, they aren’t essential. The voice’s power is in the sound. I’m sure that even before language, when prehistoric man shouted ‘Aaahhh!’ from a mountaintop, his tribe down below could tell from the sound whether it meant, ‘I’ve caught supper’ or ‘I’ve been attacked by a sabre-toothed tiger!’ – and responded by stoking the fire or rushing to the rescue.

Before the printed word, the voice alone carried a group’s history via spoken stories. Each telling of a story was a new telling; the different tones and variations played major parts in creating the story’s impact. People listened intently and were moved by the sound of words. Words were sounds. Even after the introduction of the printed word, the great speeches were what caught the public imagination.

In the following sections, I take a quick tour of the highs and lows (sometimes literally) of powerful voices. Along the way, I break through some unhelpful assumptions about voices, including your own, and set you on the path to developing your unique, powerful voice.

Discovering the Power of Voices

Talk is the currency in today’s world. People are talking more today than ever before. Just think about it. You chat on mobiles and Skype; you contact help-lines and call centres; you have access to YouTube, DVDs, film and TV; you listen to 24-hour news, chat shows, discussion groups and interviews on every subject under the sun.

Even with the rise of email and other forms of electronic messaging, business is conducted vocally. Managers spend more time in meetings than ever before. They talk to colleagues across the globe through video conferencing and webinars. Speaking is essential when approaching potential customers, launching products and making bids.

Politics today is about personality and sound bites. You listen to politicians in action on radio and TV. You expect these leaders to be articulate champions in interviews, debates and on the podium. People say that the issues are paramount, but most choose leaders based on how they look and sound. Memorable phrases and media gaffs alike are taken up and repeated endlessly. A leader’s televised speeches hold more sway than his or her party’s programme of reforms.

Spend a few minutes listening to YouTube clips of politicians – past leaders, current candidates, famous political creatures, whatever you fancy. However, don’t look at the images or pay attention to the messages as each clip plays. Cover your computer monitor, turn away your chair or close your eyes and listen to the voices. What impression does each voice give you. What is it that you like in each voice? What do you dislike?

A powerful voice doesn’t require a mighty sound. A simple authentic voice can be powerful, and have a great impact in private moments. You probably remember the exact tone of voice in which someone said to you, ‘I love you’.

Voices have the potential to move people deeply. It’s not the words themselves; they can sometimes be ordinary. It’s not the volume either; that can be quite soft. It’s the intensity and emotional truth. An amazing voice isn’t only something that has to be worked at from the outside; it happens from the inside too.

Hearing All the Sounds that Make Up Your Voice

The 21st century world is noisy, with many different ways to speak. Your voice differs from others’ voices in several major ways and for several noteworthy reasons:

Your language, especially your first language, influences how you speak. More than 6,700 distinct languages are spoken in the world, and each one uses the voice in subtly different ways. Compare the deep sounds of Finnish with the ‘nightingale’ voices of some Japanese speakers; the strong emphasis of German with the singing rhythms of Italian. Hear the subtly differing pitches of Vietnamese and the guttural sounds of some middle-eastern languages.

You probably retain at least a shadow of your childhood accent in your voice today. English is the official language of about 341 million people in more than 50 countries. However, its accents range from the commanding tones of the UK establishment to the questioning cadences of Sydney; from the confident fast talk of New Yorkers to the sing-song rhythms of Indo-Caribbean people. Even within today’s interconnected world, accents abound. Travel within 100 miles of London, and you come across the notably different accents of London Cockney, Surrey Received Pronunciation and slower rural Hampshire and Dorset with its faintly American drawl. Accents throughout the southern US are similarly rich and varied within a relatively small geographic area. Chapter 12 digs deeper into accents.

Accent refers to the distinct different pronunciations of words, the varied rhythms and ups and downs of pitch in different parts of the world. When people refer to dialect, they include accent but go beyond it to incorporate different grammatical usage and even vocabulary. Many dialect words are so wonderfully descriptive, they’ve slipped into general usage. But others remain impossible to understand: ‘Haud yer wheesht!’ says someone from Scotland for example – ‘Be quiet!’

Listen to someone who has always lived in the country and then to someone who lives in a city. For example, compare the voices in Sex and the City with those in Emmerdale. What differences do you hear? Country dwellers tend to have slower, more musical voices while city dwellers often speak more sharply and quickly. In fact, city people probably have more in common vocally with cosmopolitan speakers across the Atlantic than with their nearer country neighbours!

Your profession and previous jobs most likely affect your speed, pitch, enunciation, tone and other vocal qualities. Think of the smooth flow of the barrister, the fast patter of the fish market auctioneer, the prayerful intoning of certain Christian priests, the rapid chatter of young students and the smooth spiel of the sales presenter.

Your voice changes with age. Listen to the uninhibited high calls of children in the playground, the flat tones of uncommunicative teenagers, the sharp quips of young adults, the stentorian tones of middle-aged officials, the frail murmurs and ‘pipes and whistles’ of old age.

Your health affects the way you sound. If you lack energy, your voice sounds less robust. If your breathing is affected by illness, people can often hear it in your voice. If you’re bouncing with health, your voice sounds vibrant.

How you approach voice development depends on your starting point and what you want to achieve (see Chapter 1 for more on goals). Working on your voice is an exciting project, one that can lead you to discover more about how you make sounds and more about who you really are. Whatever your goals, the journey starts with getting curious about people’s voices – and, of course, your own.

Listen to the voices of two different friends the next time you’re on the phone. Pay less attention to what they say – and more attention to how they say things. What information can you pick up from just their voices? To what extent can you hear where they come from? If you didn’t know them already, would you be able to guess from their voices what they do for their living? Do they sound their age – or would you guess they were younger or older?

Dispelling Voice Myths

The qualities of voices are important and much discussed in the current world. Yet oddly in everyday life, most people act as if they can’t do much about their own voice. Voices don’t change – or can they? Before I get down to the practical nuts and bolts of speaking, I need to clear up some all-too-common misconceptions about voices.

Myth 1: You’re stuck with your voice

Most people still think that the voice they have currently is the voice they were born with and that they can’t do much about it. Perhaps you think this too.

Whether you hate your voice, love it or struggle with it in some way, many people believe that they can’t use their voices differently – or that doing so is incredibly difficult. Furthermore, you may feel too that your voice is in some way you, and that changing your voice is a bit radical, like losing your identity.

Leaders and celebrities have long worked on their voices, and voice coaching is gaining in popularity over a wide spectrum.

In the early days of her leadership of the UK’s Conservative party, Margaret Thatcher’s voice in Parliament was piercing and shrill. Her advisers were keen for her to change it. She worked hard at her delivery with a voice coach and eventually acquired the deep breathy tones that characterised her television interviews. However, she was sometimes ridiculed in the media for it and the general opinion was that the new voice was artificial or pasted on somehow. However, her deeper tones gave her increased gravitas, and did increase the respect of the general public. Listen to the ‘Downing Street Years’ clips on YouTube, starting with the beginning of episode 1 from 1971, and then flipping quickly to episode 4. What a difference!

Today more and more people are developing their voices, sometimes significantly, sometimes more subtly. They’re changing regional accents, class accents, pitch and tone and appreciating the different response they get as a consequence.

You can change your voice – and when you change your voice, you get a better reaction from other people and a more positive feeling about yourself.

Myth 2: Your voice is out of your control

This myth links to the preceding one. If you believe that your voice is something you’re born with, you may also believe that your voice is out of your hands when things go wrong. You realise how important your voice is – and know how difficult life becomes when you lose it – but your voice does what it does regardless of your actions.

Changes in your voice, including negative changes, are most likely due to human factors:

If you sing karaoke in a crowded pub and then stand on a freezing train station for hours without a scarf, you may lose your voice!

If you produce your voice badly, you put a strain on your vocal cords and may eventually damage them permanently.

If you never rest your voice, it never gets a chance to recover and becomes more prone to damage.

Your diet may also affect your voice. Certainly, smoking and drinking to excess don’t improve its tone!

Chapter 19 has more ideas about looking after your voice.

You can do plenty about your voice. You can develop your voice just as you can build up your muscles or develop your dance moves. The entire process is about being interested, picking up the skills and practising them. Your original speaking was learned, so you can definitely learn how to talk differently – and better – now!

Myth 3: Words matter more than voice

Many people continue to believe that only the words matter, and that how you say them is of secondary importance. In today’s world of dynamic omnipresent audio and video, you encounter an enormous amount of communication in print – including emails, text messages, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, books and articles – which encourages people to think that communication is only about words.

When you prepare a speech – even just a short introduction at a meeting or dinner party – your first instinct is usually to write down on paper the words (or an outline of the words) you intend to say, and then as a second phase, work out how you’re going to say them. Within today’s heavily scripted, public-relations driven environment, the printed speech is the thing. The press often receives printouts of political speeches or corporate announcements before anyone actually delivers them, which enables the press to report bizarrely that ‘the Prime Minister will announce today that . . . ’ But the influence of the printed word is nothing compared with the influence of an inspirational speaker. How you deliver those words makes all the difference – and can even change emphasis and meaning without altering a word.

Ray is an executive working for an international insurance company who had put immense effort into getting the words just right for an upcoming conference speech. By the time he came to me for coaching, he’d honed the text of his remarks and was pretty confident that his presentation was inspiring and his message upbeat. Then he read the speech to me. What a let down! His flat tone was so boring that I failed utterly to keep my mind on what he was saying. Inspiring words turned into lacklustre delivery; an upbeat message became a depressing experience for listeners. My reaction while listening to him showed him that communication is more than the words you choose. Ray worked with me on finding what really mattered about his message, and communicating his energy and passion to his audience. His delivery was transformed and on the important day his presentation provoked an enthusiastic response.

If you convey an upbeat message in a downbeat way, the impression is downbeat. Delivery always wins out over words. See Chapter 9 for more ways to awaken the enthusiasm in your voice.

You can tell that many people think in terms of the written word if you ever see a written speech with annotations. Speakers often include visual reminders to ‘express’ their written words in particular ways. They add exclamation marks, write in bold, italics, different sizes and colours, or even add instructions and performance markings in the margins. A few reminders can clearly be helpful, but with too many it’s as if the speech starts as written words and has to have the expression put on top. Certainly, a teleprompter instruction ‘Pause and smile here’ is more likely in the heat of the moment to produce an awkward grimace than a genuine warm smile! You can find more about preparing and reading from scripts in Chapter 14.

The trouble with the written word is that until you say the words aloud and your audience hears how you say them, you don’t fully understand their impact.

When you listen to others, the meaning of what they say isn’t the same as the words they use. The sound is what conveys the sense most accurately. In Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, Humpty Dumpty asserts: ‘When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ To this I say, ‘Of course it does, Mr Dumpty.’ Interestingly, without knowing my tone of voice, you can’t tell whether I agree or disagree. If I say it with a high-pitched energetic voice, I may be expressing genuine enthusiasm. If I say it in a slow drawl without a rise in tone, I’m probably expressing sarcasm. Try saying the phrase a few different ways yourself right now. Notice how changing your tone of voice can actually change the meaning of the phrase from one sense to its very opposite. Obviously, getting your tone to match your meaning is important; I cover the topic in more detail in Chapter 10.

When Sarah’s new boss asked her to come into the office at the weekend to clear the backlog of work, she quipped to him, ‘What a great way to spend a Saturday!’ She relied on his sense of humour to catch the irony in her tone. His response however indicated that the satire was lost on him. ‘I’m glad you think that way,’ he said earnestly, completely missing the nuance, ‘I think it’s really important to get ahead of the competition, don’t you? I’m thinking of starting a Saturday rota for the team. Great to know you’ll be behind me.’

Misunderstandings based on tone can occur particularly easily in cross-cultural exchanges where two parties interpret certain vocal qualities differently. British straight-faced jokes are often misunderstood by foreigners, who expect a different tone for humour. Indian tonal inflection can sound dogmatic to western listeners when no domineering attitude is intended. Find out more about cross-cultural concerns in Chapter 11.

Myth 4: Only looks really count

Think of this myth as the flipside of the preceding one. You may live in a world full of sound, but appearance is the real star of the show. In terms of time, money and attention, appearance wins out every time:

The fashion industry churns out clothes for every occasion, while the jewellery industry adds all those ‘essential’ details.

The beauty industry promotes make-up, creams and lotions, while hairstylists, beauticians, manicurists, and myriad other specialists tend to every part of your body.

The personal training and plastic surgery industries tend to every part that may not be keeping up – from kickboxing to Botox and beyond – all in the effort to look good.

Look at your own experience. Are you more concerned about what you look like than about what you sound like? Take a mental inventory of how much money, time and attention you spend on your appearance every year.

Think about how much you spend on clothes as well as grooming, make-up, haircuts, style magazines, facials, manicure, plastic surgery.

Consider how many hours you spend going shopping or trawling the Internet, looking after your clothes, having your hair cut, your nails done, your legs waxed, brushing your hair and just looking at yourself in the mirror.

Ponder what you do before leaving the house in the morning. Do you look at yourself in the mirror and check your appearance? Do you examine your complexion, your hair and your outfit?

Now think about your investment of money, time and attention in your voice. Do you spend any money or time to improve your voice? Do you check out your voice before leaving the house? Don’t be surprised if these questions sound odd. Nearly everyone focuses more on appearance!

And yet, the all-consuming importance of appearance is a myth. Yes, when you meet someone for the first time, you do tend to pay conscious attention to appearance and general presentation. And yes, in sounding out others initially, you probably only pick up their accents or notice if a voice is especially beautiful or particularly unpleasant. But your deeper, subconscious reactions to others’ voices are massive and powerful. You may not consciously give what you hear from another person your complete attention, but you’re making meaning from people’s sound all the time, as I explore in the following section.

Digging Deeper into How You React to Voices

Spend a few minutes in a space with other people, just listening for a moment to the array of different voices around you. What pitches, speeds, and rhythms do you hear? Can you tell anything about people’s energy level or moods?

While listening to others’ voices, have you ever:

Cringed when a high-pitched shrieking voice assaulted your ears?

Squeezed your lips together in irritation when someone made a request of you using a hard-edged dominating tone?

Been moved to tears when someone stated their feelings simply or honestly?

Become galvanised to do something based on a friend’s confident tone?

Had an initially positive estimation of someone quickly shatter when he or she started to speak?

Felt disconnected when a person’s voice clashed with his or her appearance? Perhaps you met someone slim and petite with an overpowering voice, or someone who looked fighting fit with a thin and strangulated voice. How did you feel talking to that person?

Other people’s voices affect you – profoundly and usually to a much greater degree than you realise.

Experiencing sound’s physical power

Sound has a physical impact on you. If you’ve ever stood on a train station when a fast train shot through, you’ll recall the thunderous roar of the engine and the vibration you felt in your body. Sound moves you. You can’t separate sound and vibration.

In the same way, when people speak, the timbre of their voice – their particular vibration – enters your ears and creates sympathetic vibration inside your body as well, creating a pleasant or unpleasant effect. You can’t avoid the resonance inside yourself. You can’t shut yourself off from sound as easily as you can shut your eyes against something you don’t want to see. If the vibration is unpleasant, you have a negative reaction to the person; if the vibration is pleasant you feel positively towards the individual. Sound touches you, deep within your body. Sound is feeling in a literal way. So when you react spontaneously to a voice, feeling informs your reaction.

Responding to sound’s vibrations

Because voice sounds vibrate inside you, voices can move you. (The word emotion is a reminder that feelings include a sense of motion or vibration.)

You may warm to a voice or get turned on by a voice. You may respect, believe or trust a voice; and equally mistrust, fear or disbelieve a voice.

Listen to the American actor James Earl Jones. Many clips are available online. Rich and deep tones resonate from his huge frame. People who’ve worked with the actor report that his sound seems to come from deep within him, right from the heart. They report that they hear his voice deep within themselves too. Yet for all its power, Jones’s voice also has the potential for laughter. His voice is ‘a voice that can melt butter’ in the words of one commentator.

For contrast, listen to the actor Vincent Price. Well known for his scary voice, he played dozens of villains and creepy characters throughout his career. Listening to his meaningful emphases and chilling lighter tones literally makes people’s hair stand on end.

A practical joker, Price once attended a showing of one of his horror films and sat directly behind an unsuspecting couple. When the part came up where he spoke with his scary voice in the film, he spoke from behind the couple in that very voice. Talk about inner vibration; they leapt out of their seats!

With such a strong largely unconscious reaction to people’s voices, it isn’t surprising that it plays an important part in our response to celebrities.

Think of three or four celebrities – for example Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama and Catherine, The Duchess of Cambridge (Prince William’s wife). Imagine each celebrity speaking with someone else’s voice. Imagine Margaret Thatcher speaking with the squeaky voice of the airhead Bubble in Absolutely Fabulous. How about Barack Obama speaking in public with the small high voice of David Beckham? Now try Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge with the raucous voice of the cockney journalist, Janet Street Porter. Some people report that the examples feel so wrong that they’re impossible to imagine. Certainly, after doing this exercise, you’ll find it hard to maintain that tone of voice doesn’t make a difference. The voice is such a mark of the person that a change of voice seems to alter fundamentally their identity. With a changed voice, they come across as a different person.

Perhaps people respond unconsciously to your voice. How might people regard you differently if you developed your voice and sounded different? Would they take you more seriously? Warm to you more? Prepare to change people’s assumptions about you!

Making meaning from voice sounds

When you have a physical reaction to someone’s voice, you instantly make meaning from your reaction. For example:

If people have robust voices, you tend to consider them confident.

If they have deep voices, you’re more disposed to take them seriously.

If they speak quite fast and energetically, you consider them quick-witted.

If adults speaks with very high pitch, you’re likely to consider them silly or naïve.

If they speak driving the voice hard into the nose, you think of them as insensitive or boorish.

If you hear hesitation in the sound, you assume you’re speaking to an unconfident person.

People interpret voices in a myriad of different ways, and most of this happens in an instant without you giving it conscious awareness.

Your voice is amazing because of what you can do with it in terms of sound, not only because of the words you choose. Take the time to familiarise yourself with the ways that people typically react to different vocal qualities and develop your ability to use your voice effectively!