Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [43]
When you hold the back of the throat open, there will be no vibration in the nasal cavity.
LISTEN TO YOUR VOICE
Become a voice critic. Listen to your own voice and decide how you want it to sound the rest of your life, not just when you are speaking in public, but also in your day-to-day life.
Listen to the voices around you to ascertain if they are pleasant or hard to listen to. Record the voices of actors or broadcasters you admire and figure out what they do with their voices. You will discover how clearly but unobtrusively they pronounce the sounds and syllables. Visualize the way they breathe to produce their vocal tones. Analyze their inflections and emphasis points.
Record a voice you do not like—one that always irritates you, such as a comedian or someone on television. Listen to the placement, the pace, the inflections. What is the obstacle between you and that voice? What unpleasant habit interferes with the message so that you tune out what is being said?
The other day, I heard a lengthy interview on the radio with a singer/songwriter. He expressed himself very well, but how he expressed himself was irritating. Every minute or so, in searching for the best words to use in answering a question, he would pause and then say, “I ... I ... I,” “uh ... uh ... uh,” “well ... well ... well,” and similar words. This repeating a word in threes was so obvious that I found myself no longer listening to his answers, but instead anticipating the next triple word and even counting them.
The bottom line is that the voice has only one basic function—to communicate. When a mannerism comes between you and the message, then the speaker has missed the chance to be articulate.
CHANGING YOUR VOICE
You are not stuck with the voice you were born with. Your voice is the result of many factors: your ethnic background, the part of the country in which you were born or raised, the speech patterns you heard as a child, the schools you attended, how your best friends spoke as you grew up, and often the teachers who influenced your speech.
As an adult, your voice is affected by the people you work with, the person you married, what part of the country you may have moved to, and maybe even your neighbors. If you have lived abroad for some years, particularly in countries such as England or Ireland, you may have unconsciously picked up a bit of the local accent or intonation.
People born in the Midwest may have a nasal placement; those born in New England may say “paak” instead of “park”; those born in the South may use a soft “r”; those born in New York City might have a distinctive twang. An Englishman may inherit the beautiful broad “a” or a Cockney accent. Someone born in Germany, Italy, Australia, or Japan may pronounce certain vowels or consonants with a foreign accent even though that person has lived in the United States for many decades.
Having an interesting accent can be an important part of your persona. For example, early on in my experience as a voice coach in the early 1960s, I worked with Congressman Carl Albert, who was later to become the powerful Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was born in Oklahoma and wanted to improve his speaking voice, but in our sessions together, he admonished me to “only take out half of the Bugtussel.”
I never did find out where “Bugtussel” was located (I couldn’t find it on a map of Oklahoma), or even understand if it really existed or was just part of a local expression. But I did understand what he was telling me about the importance of retaining part of his normal speech cadence and patterns.
Needless to say, it didn’t hurt him with his constituents back home that during his bids for reelection he kept the local hometown flavor in his speech.
Americans do not habitually place a premium on vocal elegance. By the time you enter professional life, your speech pattern is usually set and is a direct result of all of the influences around you.
Very few people in the normal course of life see