By Peter
What would a band be without its horn section adding bright, concentrated sound? In the mix of vocal qualities, a little bit of brass provides a jolt of energy that can make you memorable. But when your voice is all brass, the effect can be just a wee bit … irritating.
What exactly do I mean by a brassy voice? Say the word brassy. Now say it again, this time holding the aaa sound. When you do that, you’ll probably get a rendition that has too much extra buzz. Listen to track 7 on the CD and you’ll hear my over-the-top demonstration of various brassy renditions that sound as though I’m hitting a buzzer when I speak. It’s the sound of a bratty kid or a person who can’t, or won’t, soften her sharp edges.
Brassiness happens when your vocal cords are vibrating fully, like the long strings of a piano. Under the right circumstances, that kind of vibration is the basis of a wonderfully resonant tone. Here, however, there’s not enough air flow to produce great resonance. Instead, your body is actually swallowing up the richness before it can come out.
Remember that there are two passages in your throat, one for air and one for food. When you swallow, one function of the larynx, the house of the vocal cords, is to rise, blocking the air passage so no food or liquid gets in your lungs. You can feel this happening if you put your finger on your chin and slide it backward down your throat until you get to the first bump, your Adam’s apple, which is the front part of the larynx. As you swallow, you’ll feel how it goes way above your finger and then back down. At certain times that “swallow, rise, block-the-throat” motion may be a lifesaver - none of us needs food in the windpipe - but when it happens at the wrong time, it cuts off the air passage and stops the production of great vocal sounds.
To find out if your larynx is rising too high, closing up your throat as you speak, try this. Put your index finger back on your Adam’s apple and read the next few sentences aloud. If the larynx jumps substantially above your finger, as it did when you swallowed, that’s too much movement. The larynx is allowed to move up and down between one-quarter and one-third of an inch as you speak, but any more than that places it in a blocking position.
A high larynx is one of the most common problems affecting speakers and singers, but it’s very simple to get the larynx to its proper position with a series of low-larynx exercises. Let me give you a quick hint here of how easy it is to lower your larynx. Listen to track 8 on the CD. The exercise I’m doing here is specifically designed to move your larynx down. As you imitate my sounds, you should feel your Adam’s apple move to a very low spot in your neck. You’ll be happy to know that the larynx is one of the parts of the body that has great sense memory. Once it gets used to sitting in its normal position, it stays there, even if you aren’t doing an exercise. And with the larynx in its normal, healthy speaking position, you will have effectively turned down the excess brassiness of your voice.
By Peter
I always used to laugh when I called my friend Jeff at his office and got his answering machine. He’d gotten his secretary to record a short message in breathy, Marilyn Monroe-like tones, and when she said, “Jeff can’t come to the phone right now,” it was easy to imagine that the reason had something to do with what was going on in the bedroom instead of the boardroom.
I became interested in studying the effects of using the breathy side of the voice in junior high, when a friend and I decided to make a documentary at a religious retreat in the mountains. As I interviewed the monks, I was immediately aware of how calming their light, airy voices were. They spoke so softly that the sound of my camera often seemed to drown them out, but they still somehow commanded attention. Read more »
By Peter
Apply the blacksmith’s homely principle when you are speaking. If you feel deeply about your subject you will be able to think of little else. Concentration is a process of distraction from less important matters. It is too late to think about the cut of your coat when once you are upon the platform, so centre your interest on what you are about to say??fill your mind with your speech?material and, like the infilling water in the glass, it will drive out your unsubstantial fears.
Self?consciousness is undue consciousness of self, and, for the purpose of delivery, self is secondary to your subject, not only in the opinion of the audience, but, if you are wise, in your own. To hold any other view is to regard yourself as an exhibit instead of as a messenger with a message worth delivering. Do you remember Elbert Hubbard’s tremendous little tract, “A Message to Garcia”? The youth subordinated himself to the message he bore. So must you, by all the determination you can muster. It is sheer egotism to fill your mind with thoughts of self when a greater thing is there??TRUTH. Say this to yourself sternly, and shame your self?consciousness into quiescence. If the theater caught fire you could rush to the stage and shout directions to the audience without any self?consciousness, for the importance of what you were saying would drive all fear?thoughts out of your mind.
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By Peter
You may have noticed that as you were reading the text for your progress tape, the quality of your voice varied. Sometimes it felt smooth, and at others the smooth, mellifluous tones seemed to break up into particles that crackled like a creaky old door hinge. I describe this sound as gravelly.
You’ll notice that as I read, using my gravelly voice, I seem to fall into a consistent pattern. I start out strong at the beginning of a phrase, as full of fuel and power as a jet at takeoff. But as I go on, the sound seems to peter out and get harsh. This tonality can actually take on a dark, even sinister, edge. If I use it through the entire course of a sentence, it’s about as appealing as the sound of paper being crumpled. It’s problematic, too, because the process of producing it makes the vocal cords red and swollen. Read more »
By Peter
There are a lot of misconceptions about how and why our voices sound nasal. Many people imagine that too much air being expelled is going into the nose, echoing around and giving their voices a nasal quality. And that’s partly right. As you go higher in the range, a certain amount of air is supposed to be directed below the roof of your mouth, and a certain amount is supposed to go above the soft palate into the sinus area. (Anatomy lesson: Put the tip of your tongue right behind your front teeth and run it over the roof of your mouth. The hard section you feel in the front is the hard palate, and the softer area toward your throat is, you guessed it, the soft palate.)
Some nasal sounds come about when a speaker tightens the back of his or her throat, which keeps the air from freely flowing into the mouth. With that escape route from the body blocked, unnatural amounts of air are directed toward the nasal area. That produces the rather harsh, trebly nasal sound of Jerry Lewis playing the Nutty Professor. Read more »
By Peter
There is a strange sensation often experienced in the presence of an audience. It may proceed from the gaze of the many eyes that turn upon the speaker, especially if he permits himself to steadily return that gaze. Most speakers have been conscious of this in a nameless thrill, a real something, pervading the atmosphere, tangible, evanescent, indescribable. All writers have borne testimony to the power of a speaker’s eye in impressing an audience. This influence which we are now considering is the reverse of that picture–the power their eyes may exert upon him, especially before he begins to speak: after the inward fires of oratory are fanned into flame the eyes of the audience lose all terror. –WILLIAM PITTENGER, Extempore Speech.
Students of public speaking continually ask, “How can I overcome self-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before an audience?” Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that some horses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at the thundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing a farmer’s wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse as the train goes by?
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By Peter
Whether you’re mainly concerned about your speaking or your singing, I’d like to look first at the speaking voice, because even if we’re professional singers, we spend far more time talking than we do singing. We draw sharp distinctions between what’s spoken and what’s sung, but interestingly, our brains don’t. To the brain, speaking and singing feel almost like the same thing. They use the same body parts, the same muscles, and when you sing, your brain simply thinks you’re speaking but sustaining words an unusually long time and using more pitch variation. Speaking is the jumping-off point for larger leaps into song, so it’s vital to be sure that this foundation is strong.
If you are primarily interested in singing, please don’t skip the tests that focus on how you speak. As I’ve mentioned, one of the greatest dangers to the singing voice isn’t singing but using your voice badly when you talk. By taking time to listen carefully to your speech habits, and correcting any problems, you are protecting your voice against some of its most insidious enemies. Read more »
By Peter
It will help a lot, as we begin, for you to have a basic idea of how your voice works. We all know that to play a violin you have to press down the strings on the neck with one hand and draw a bow over the instrument’s strings with the other. Playing an oboe involves blowing over a vibrating reed into a tube with holes we cover to create different tones. But the voice is often a mystery. For one thing, we can’t really see our vocal apparatus, and there’s no orchestral equivalent of the strange combination-wind-andstring instrument that resides in our throats and uses our whole bodies as a resonating, sound-shaping container. All we know is that we open our mouths and out comes our sound.
The relationships and dynamics that go into making music and words flow effortlessly from our throats are complex and fascinating. But for our purposes right now, you just need to know the bare-bones basics, which will help you visualize what’s going on as you run through the exercises.
- You’ve got a stringed instrument that you blow through. Inside your neck, two passages run side by side. At the front is the one that carries air from the nose and mouth into the lungs. And at the back is the tube that carries food and liquid to the stomach. Resting at the top of the air passage is the cartilage box called the larynx, which contains the vocal cords. The pair of cords responsible for producing the sounds we make are strong, fibered bands of mucous membranes. They move apart and together and vibrate in response to the air we push through them, making this odd little voice box a bit like a violin that you need to blow through to manipulate its pitch, tone, and volume.
The cords are amazing, with a unique way of vibrating. Small amounts of air build up behind them, and when the pressure of that air becomes greater than the air pressure above the cords, the cords open to release the air, then close. This process happens an astonishing number of times, creating the cords’ vibration. For example, when you sing the note A above middle C, the cords open and close 440 times a second to produce that frequency.
- The quality of your voice depends primarily on the way you position the cords and the amount of air you move through them, and great singing or speaking happens when the right amount of air meets the right amount of cord. Remember that phrase because it’s the basis of just about everything we’ll be doing together.
You’ll find that I’ll be explaining many of the sounds you make, particularly problematic sounds that cause you (and your listeners) discomfort, in terms of what’s happening in the crucial relationship between the vocal cords and the air passing through them.
By Peter
It’s time someone leveled with you about what your voice can really do and what’s reasonable to expect from your basic set of vocal equipment. I know old beliefs die hard, and what I’m about to tell you may sound counterintuitive (that is, impossible, silly, or fictitious), but the statements below are absolutely true.
- The human voice is set up to speak or sing twenty-four hours a day without getting hoarse or strained or creating any physical problems.
If yours can’t, it’s because you’re doing something wrong.
- The average (not the exceptional) person should be able to sing smoothly through two and a half octaves with no breaks, squawks, or squeals in his or her voice.
It’s a myth to think that high and low notes are for someone else, or that you’re doomed to sound like a wet alley cat when you sing the national anthem. Training, perseverance, and the techniques I’ll teach you can make every note of those octaves come to life.
- Less than 2 percent of the population is tone deaf.
Contrast that with the 40 or 50 percent of the people I meet who are sure that they “can’t sing” because of some inherent defect. Actually, tone deafness is a relatively rare condition that results from damage to the ear, for instance from a high childhood fever. If you’re truly tone deaf, you can’t sing on pitch because you can’t hear the pitch accurately to begin with. If you’re one of those people who cringe at their own, or others’, missed notes in talent shows or at karaoke bars, you’re not tone deaf, you’re just tone shy. I’m happy to report that your hearing is just fine, and even if you sing like an untrained Owen, the young man I spoke about earlier, we can fix the pitch problems.
By Peter
In the theater, the finest play by the finest playwright, from William Shakespeare to Arthur Miller, can be affected … for the good or for the bad … by the staging. So it is with a presentation. You could create an effective Power Presentation with a lucid story and vivid graphics that use every technique you learned in this book, only to have it all diminished by the presentation environment.
As the presenter, you bear the ultimate responsibility for your own presentation. To assure that you and your graphics have the maximum impact on your audience, it’s your job to optimize the environment. Here’s a check list: Read more »
