One of my friends is really good looking and very fashion savvy. He knows how to match the colors of his trousers with his shirt, and he knows how to make his hair look really good. Most girls that meet him, they consider him a visual candy.
We went out the other day and we were sitting at a bar drinking our beer nicely, nicely. Two pretty girls, around 25 years old, were sitting next to us. They kept throwing quick glances at my friend and one of them was even holding her eye contact. At some point, maybe because of the beer, maybe because I pushed him to, he decided to go and speak to them. I was sitting back, drinking my beer and watching the whole interaction take place.
Because of the music, I couldn’t hear the conversation.
It was like watching a silent movie.
He arrives. The girls look at him, all big eyes. He leans over them and opens his mouth. And from that point on, everything goes wrong. Girls look at each other. One smiles a bit and soon after that, they start turning their body language away from him. Boom. It was over before it even started. He picked his pride up from the floor and joined me back to finish our bloody beers.
Because my friend has a very particular speech pattern.
Equipped already with a high pitched tone voice, when he is in stress, he pushes that even higher. Even if that was not enough… he speaks FAST. And when I say fast, I do not mean, I just-had-a-coffee fast; I mean I just-had-a-speed *blitz* fast.
Seriously John… you sound dreadful.
Voice
One uses it and becomes a politician; another misuses it and can’t order a pizza over the telephone properly.
But as for most human tools, your voice is also OPEN to improvement and development.
Diaphragm
Most people think that it is just the vocals that produce the sound. Others believe that the more hard you push the air out of your lungs, the better your voice sounds.
Hell, no.
Your voice is produced by a combination of organs. Your lungs and your diaphragm push the air, which meets the vocal chords, and they all together start a series of vibrations.
These vibrations expand through your lungs and mouth cavity. The key word here is resonance. They way you move your mouth, the way you expand your throat and more important, how deeply you breath, is what makes the resonance sound high or low.
With the same air speed, you can resonate high, or you can resonate low.
You might want to try an experiment. Say “yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh” long enough. Now try bringing your voice down from the higher pitch to the lowest tone you can. Keep your air speed steady. You will be able to notice that your voice will resonate in three different places as you go from high up the frequency scale to deep down low. First you will resonate at the nose, then you will resonate at your throat, and last and more important you will resonate down at your chest. There is where the bass lies.
Pavarotti, the tenore, sings well because of his much trained diaphragm.
By doing some vocal training, you may learn to move your resonant point further down your body. That is a good thing. People will pay attention to you more often because of that.
There was a test once, and it was found that people that have a deep bass voice, people that know how to make plenty of pauses, and people that take their time when they speak, are way more attractive than all the rest.
Notice also that what you do here, is that you control a whole series of organs to bring out an end result: Keep the point of you resonance down to your chest and away from your head.
This is done, by trying to breathe deeply from your diaphragm and not shallow from your upper lungs.
You see, all babies and animals breath using the diaphragm. As we stress and move on in life, we make the error and start breathing shallower. There is a misunderstanding in western society. For some bizarre reason, the image of a fit man is one with a strong chest. So, many people when asked to take a deep breath, they start by expanding the upper part of the lungs. My friend, if you want to have a big chest, go to the gym. Breathing high, will not only make you less calm, but will also make you seem more defensive.
Normally, a high pitched voice reminds us of being less calm. Remember the first time you spoke in public, or the last time you were defending your self about something. Your voice was a pitch higher than normal.
If you want to stay calm: keep your breathing deep and your voice as bass as it can go. This will stop any unwanted positive stress feedback phenomena.
Exercises.
In order to be de-programmed of this bad way of breathing, you will need up to several months. But it can be done. There are some exercises that do exactly that.
Strengthen your diaphragm awareness exercises.
1) Inhale from your diaphragm. Push your stomach up like a balloon. Count silently 1-2-3-4 while inhaling. Count 4-3-2-1 silently while exhaling. This should not be done more than 6 times per day.
2) Inhale from the diaphragm deeply. Exhale slowly. So slowly that, if there was a candle in front of you, you wouldn’t blow it.
Resonance
1) Inhale deeply again. Exhale slowly while resonating from you chest. You should feel the resonance down to your belly. Avoid the nose or the throat. Your exhale should be stable with no tone changes and with no added effort.
2) Perform the same, but this time start visualising that the resonance point looks like an elevator going up and down, as it travels from your nose to your chest.
3) Perform the same, but this time say all the different vocals in the alphabet, until all of them sound with the same tone. You may spot some that are less bass than others. Work them.
Speech rhythm
4) Try and find something to read. Read it out loud, while you are able to read at about 160 words per minute.
5) Give feelings to your words. Hit at least two tones. A monotone is a *not* an EXCITING voice, to listen to.
Here is a very emotional and inspirational speech. Listen to all the above in action.
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