Set Your Voice Free: How to Get the Singing or Speaking Voice You Want

by Roger Love

If your natural speed is medium to fast. Nerves or excitement can easily push the pedal to the metal and accelerate your speech to a pounding pace. You might be fine one-on-one or in familiar situations, but when you step in front of an audience or prepare to confront a spouse with some bad news, adrenaline kicks in, increasing your pulse rate and releasing energy to prepare for the coming stress. If you don’t tune in to your body at this point, a number of things start to happen. Your voice, mirroring your body’s “tempo change,” rushes out. As your mouth, throat, and tongue work feverishly to articulate the words, you can fall into a dronelike monotone because there’s simply not enough time or breath to allow the voice to move around freely and produce varied pitches. In all likelihood, your breathing rate has increased and you’ve lost touch with diaphragmatic breathing altogether, which means the resonances of middle and head voice are less available to you, and chest voice is thin instead of thick. This is not the voice you want to use to tell your employees that layoffs are coming, or your spouse that there’s a huge new dent in the car—yet it may seem to be the only one available. Worse for the listener at times like this, your words and breath are probably not connected in any meaningful way. Pauses are important in speech because when they’re used effectively, they break information into units based on sense. They’re aural punctuation. If you give in to the tendency ...