Your voice is singular. Like a fingerprint, it’s unique – a vital link between your mind and your body. The way you use it, through pitch, tone, rhythm, and cadence indicates your mood, ideas, desires, and confidence level. And from your voice alone, people make assumptions about you, some good and some not so favorable. 

Many people are attracted to my industry, the voiceover arts, because they’ve been told they “have a good voice.” But success in my field is so much more than the instrument. The voice itself is only a small percentage of what makes a good voice artist. That said, it still is part of the equation. In working with my voice for over 30 years, I’ve picked up some exercises and practices that can help anyone sound better. Let’s explore some of them here.

Breath Control – Throat vs Diaphragm

Babies and young children naturally breathe from the diaphragm. As people develop, this often switches from belly breath or diaphragm to the throat or chest. Our bodies learn that sometimes we don’t need that much breath (sitting at a keyboard, or when wearing tight clothing for example), that other times we need rapid shallow breaths (like when we’re trying to catch our breath or are sobbing) and that still other times deep breaths and slow expulsion of air is preferred (as with swimming or singing, for instance). We may take a few short breaths followed by a longer, slower breath all in the same minute of breathing. Basically, we learn that we have lots of ways to breathe for any given occasion and we generally use them all.

Beginning voice artists often hear the terms throat and diaphragm regarding breathing and breath support of vocal production. They may seem unrelated – after all the diaphragm is the muscle that draws in air to the lungs and the throat is just a passage-way for the air. But here we’re generally referring to the amount of support for the air and therefore the freedom the voice has or doesn’t have to do its job.

Throat or chest breathing (in other words, taking shallow breaths that feel like the air doesn’t get past the upper airway), obviously limits the amount of air you can use to produce sound. It often leads to tightness in the upper body which in turn can lead to vocal tension. Speaking with very shallow breath support creates muscle tension that can be heard as broken, raspy, scratchy, or “throaty.”

Breathing from the diaphragm, however, that thing we were born knowing how to do allows for the entire lung capacity to be filled with air and for lots of good stuff like deep lung gas exchanging and blood enrichment to happen. Speaking with a much deeper, diaphragmatic breath support allows for much more freedom, reduces tension in the throat and upper torso and gives you more fuel for sustained vocal production. Diaphragm breathing also gives greater voice control. So it’s this type of breathing that voice over artists really need to master.

Impact of Posture on Your Voice

Another critical body part or system that impacts the sound of your voice is posture. Unless you’re making a performance-related decision to help create a character, hunching your shoulders, leaning to one side and other poor posture aspects close down your wind. I always sit with a straight back, slightly and comfortably forward and with my legs parted slightly. This keeps a nice open column of air and keeps me connected with all the muscles I want to engage in performance.

If you’re not sure if you’re sitting or standing with correct posture, try sitting or standing against a wall. Once there, pay attention to what parts of your back and shoulders are touching the wall. Check to see where your shoulders are – are they rolled forward away from the wall, or touching the wall when your arms are at your sides. If you’re standing, also check to see where your lower back touches. You want to be careful not to over-extend backward by pulling your arms and shoulders back further than necessary and cause your back to arch while trying to find the proper posture. The goal is to have most of your back from the back of your shoulders to your lower back comfortably touching the wall without causing tension to make that happen.

Breathing Exercises that Improve Voice Control

How to get there? There are many great breathing exercises that you can use to improve your voice control and breath support. Here are just a few.

Try some breathing games.  Sometimes it’s fun to make a game of your breath practice.  This could look something like: 

• Square Breathing – Counting slowly to 5 in your head, inhale.  Then, hold the breath for 5 seconds.   Count to 5 while you exhale.  And count to 5 with your lungs empty.
• One More Sip – Take a very large breath until you feel you can’t take in more air, then take one more sip of breath (and another).  Now exhale all of the air out of your lungs, really empty them, then push out one more sip of breath (and another).

Add some voice into your practice.  Stand up straight with your legs solidly under you and inhale to the count of four. Now exhale on an “ssssss” to the count of four and then cut off the exhale abruptly (it’s ok that you have breath left). Now inhale to the count of four again and exhale on an “ssssss” for a count of eight (or ten, or twelve, etc).  Change up the sound on the exhalation to use “ah” or other vocalizations.  The practice is to get to where you can sustain the exhalation longer and longer and replenish the air you use with just a four count inhalation.

Try lying on the floor.  For this exercise, lie on your back with your knees bent and feet on the floor.  Exhale all of the air out of your lungs. Really get it all out of there.  Then try to relax and allow your diaphragm to reflexively fill your lungs with air. This can help you isolate the muscles that are used for breath support and practice what full, relaxed breathing feels like.

Use touch to isolate the diaphragm. Stand in front of a mirror. Place one hand flat against your upper chest, in the center, just under your collarbone. Place the other flat against your torso, just under your sternum – this is where your diaphragm is. Try to inhale to move only your lower hand. Your upper hand stays stationary. 

Relaxation

Once you are breathing from your diaphragm and using good posture, you should notice other benefits that help overall vocal performance. Relaxation and releasing held tension are essential for being able to speak or sing for long periods of time in a healthy manner. But getting there, especially for beginners, doesn’t happen without practice. I recall feeling frustrated the first few weeks I switched to diaphragmatic breathing. I felt I had lost control of my voice, when I was actually learning a better way of using it. 

There are other ways to exercise the breath and body-mind connection without making sound. Meditation, for example, is a wonderful way to pay attention to the breath –  in fact, with meditation often the goal is to focus solely on the breath and letting go of thoughts. It is also a great way to clear the mind which brings so many other positive benefits. Yogic breath is another good practice to incorporate – both breath with and without voice.

Confidence

We all find confidence is an attractive attribute. In a voice over artist, confidence is one of the most important tools they have in their arsenal and is an important layer in any nuanced voiceover performance. Learning how to combine deep diaphragmatic breathing, posture, relaxation with confidence can help in all kinds of challenging situations in which voice artist may find themselves – from nerves or excitement over a new opportunity, to vocal stress from a taxing session (like with long narration or gaming), to mental stress from trying to deliver a voice over that satisfies everyone in the room from client to creatives to director and engineer. 

Confidence comes from a grounded mental outlook and is also a bi-product of good vocal practice and a factor of breath support, posture, and relaxation. The Genard Method, a public speaking training method, brings confidence full circle back to the breath. It says breathing from the diaphragm:

1. Slows your heart rate and calms you physically
2. Provides oxygen to your brain
3. Aids your stance and appearance, avoiding a “caved in” look (promoting good posture)
4. Creates the sound of authority
5. Supports sound to the end of the sentence, where the important words come
6. You appear confident and in control (rather than gasping for breath).

How High is your Sound Emotional Quotient?

Sounds, like smells, stir memories and evoke emotions. Peeping pond frogs, fireworks, summer cicadas, thunderstorms, and rain falling on a lake, the trigger of a coffee machine gurgling that last bit of liquid signaling that it’s ready in seconds. These sound effects all trigger different emotional responses. Human communication, verbal and non-verbal, also triggers certain emotions. Music is said to soothe the savage beast, but anyone at a rock concert can attest to its power to rouse and ignite as well. Apparently, our brains bundle sound with emotion. Singers and voice actors study the myriad subtleties and shifts in tone, pitch, rhythm, and cadence that convey different emotions. Both from a technical and a performance-based perspective.

Neurologists also study the emotional effect of sound. Knowing more about sound itself and how it affects humans helps deepen that understanding from the artist’s and the listener’s (audiences) perspectives. As voice actors, the higher your SEQ (sound emotional quotient), the more successful the VO performance.

Loudness, Pitch and Timbre – Your Brain on Sound

Let’s get science-y for a moment. The three psychological characteristics of sound are loudness, pitch, and timbre. Your brain perceives the physical structure of sound interpreted into these characteristics.

Measured in decibels, loudness depends on the amplitude, or height, of sound waves. So the “taller” the wave, the higher the amplitude, the louder the sound is perceived by the brain. With every 10-decibels, the loudness doubles. A whisper chimes in at around 20 decibels, a regular conversation is in the 60-decibel range and someone shouting at close range could be as high as 115 or do damage, as anything above 120-decibels can do.

Pitch is the psychological perception of the frequency of sound waves.  The more often the sound wave cycles from high point to low point, the higher the frequency and perceived pitch. Think of the sound associated with a car gaining speed.  The sound of the engine starts low and gradually rises in pitch the faster the engine moves its pistons. This is the same with sound waves – the more rapidly it cycles through high and low, the higher the sound.  Hand in hand with amplitude, this frequency can affect the perception of loudness as well. Frequency is measured in hertz, or cycles per second and the human ear can hear between 20 and 20,000 hertz.

Timbre, is a little bit more esoteric as it refers to the quality of the sound.  The complexity of the sound wave has a lot to do with timbre.  Pure tones have single frequency sound waves where most other sounds are a mixture of different frequencies. This messiness and jumble of frequencies is to some degree up for interpretation by the brain perceiving it.

The Emotional Connection

A large amount of research has been done on the emotional connection that humans make to sound.  This connection can be quite powerful – a mother’s heartbeat and then eventually her voice are the first sounds a baby hears and then associates with primal needs for safety and sustenance. Mirror neurons in the brain have been proven to be activated when someone laughs, causing others to laugh. Communication through tears can often trigger feelings of sadness in others. An incredible shift happened when movies introduced sound. Actors needed to have nice sounding voices or be able to improve the sound of their voice quickly. Composers and sound engineers were able to experiment with orchestral and foley sounds to elicit fear, wonder, or a happy ending in movies, literally toying with the audience’s emotions.  

And not just emotions are touched by sound. Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, describes how sound is a physical touch: “It’s just waves of vibrating air, it’s just your voice, beginning in your voice box, compressed as air. That air travels through space and time, into my ear, waves of diffused, vibrating air, focused and channeled into my eardrum, which vibrates a few very small bones, and the little bones transmit the vibration into this salty sea, where the hairs are. And the hair cells are fascinating; they become active, literally bent by a wave. They bend like trees in a breeze.” Which explains why researchers at McGill University in Montreal found a correlation between subjects observing that a piece of music “gave them the chills” and the physical release of dopamine, as observed by PET scan. Sound physically touches the listener and causes the release of feel-good chemicals in the brain.

How Music Helps Us Remember

Scientists and researchers believe that the human brain developed structures to respond to music earlier than the structures to respond to language, thereby allowing music to help humans recall information. In an article for CNN Health Daniel Levitan explains “many of our ancestors, before there was writing, used music to help them remember things, such as how to prepare foods or the way to get to a water source. These procedural tasks would have been easier to remember as songs”. This additionally explains why some songs, like the ABC song from early childhood, stick with us throughout our lifetime.

Music can also evoke memories. Certainly, songs with other significance associated with them, such as weddings or breakups, rites of passage, or significant times of growth can take the listener back to that time period in their lives. Alzheimer’s patients have been known to respond to music when verbal communication isn’t as effective. Seemingly underscoring that non-verbal sound response is etched onto our brains first. 

Unwanted Sound or Noise

In addition to allowing humans to develop emotion and memory, sound responses are closely linked to other survival mechanisms, such as fear, joy, and fight-or-flight instincts. But unwanted sound or noise can also cause overwhelm in some brains as in misophonia. I first became aware of this condition when my daughter, who suffers from misophonia, came home in tears explaining she couldn’t deal with the kids in her kindergarten class at lunch who chewed noisily and talked with their mouths open. Triggered by her sensitivities I began to notice my own personal pet peeves, like the slurping of soup, the sucking on a straw at the bottom of a milkshake, or repeated scraping of a spoon on a bowl. 

These personal tolerances (or intolerances) are something all voiceover artists need to be aware of, and science has demonstrated it’s especially important for e-learning narrators. Studies show that “noise”, or the brain’s perception of noise can have a negative impact on learners, and even something as small as mouth clicks in excess can be extremely distracting for learners. 

Voice Actors and Emotions

So how does this sound emotion quotient help voice actors? Understanding how your audience is going to respond emotionally and physically to your performance can have a large impact on how you bring a script to life. Uncovering the subtext as well as the content of the message is key to tapping into your emotional palette to create impactful performances that resonate with listeners.  

Again, let’s loop in the science. It takes just one-tenth of a second for our brains to begin to recognize emotions expressed by vocalizations, according to researchers from McGill. In their study, they had subjects listen to nonsensical phrases intentionally lacking any emotional word cues and asked them to assess the underlying emotion based on non-verbal elements (back to loudness, pitch, and timbre). The results were obviously telling. Additionally, Professor Albert Mehrabian and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), conducted studies into human communication patterns in 1967 and came up with Mehrabian’s Rule: communication is only 7 percent verbal and 93 percent non-verbal. (And of that non-verbal element, 38 percent was tone of voice).

Knowing how to vocalize the script can have as much or more impact than what words themselves convey. This helps voice actors create performances that resonate (in more ways than one). The higher your SEQ, and the more tools in your actor’s toolkit, the easier it is to have a meaningful impact.

How to Get the Most Out of Group Voice Over Classes

With the whole world moving online in the span of two months, remote is the new normal. We’re zooming, jumping on GoToMeeting and GoogleHangouts. We’re also taking this time to up our education and skills, or taking classes online. If you’re in the performance arts, and particularly in the realm of voiceover, private coaching and custom learning from a mentor is the gold standard, but the classes may cost more than you can commit to right now.  Group classes like “The Voice Over Study” that I successfully beta-tested in March and April, are an affordable alternative. But how can you get the most out of them?

In this post, I dive into how to get the most out of group classes and explore a few that are out there including my new offering.  

What is The Voiceover Study? 

This 6 week online performance-oriented course is an opportunity to gain weekly practice in a variety of lucrative voiceover genres with homework assigned between classes. The goal is noticeable improvement in performance and a greater awareness of what you need to get there. We cover targeted script analysis, connecting with the message, tapping into your best reads, and finding optimal ways to show your range. 

It begins with a three-hour intro to commercial voiceover, the most lucrative of the VO gigs. Before putting a booth in my house and bringing my business online, 60-70% of my biz was in commercials and about one-third of that commercial business was in national spots. One of these spots won a Cannes Lions, an even dozen of them helped win Addys and Clios and three others were nominated in SOVAS Commercial categories. My partner in the Voice Over Study, Lisa Suliteanu (also my daughter and a fulltime millennial VO) voiced her first regional commercial at the age of seven, her first national gig a year later and last year voiced a Telly Award-winning spot. 

Taking the skills introduced in ad work altogether, we then split the group in two and each week focus on a new element of performance expanding into explainers, elearning, docs and audiobooks, always with a view to commercials. We keep in touch between sessions to stay on track with homework,  and share inspiration, ideas and successes. I’ve run an annual weekend government-sponsored ACTRA workshop for three years for local actors that resulted in directing and producing voiceover demos for them. The VoiceOver Study is longer and is focused on honing skills. The course adds up to a total of 12 hours, which is spread over 6 weeks with 10-12 people split into two groups. We set it up this way to ensure each participant has time to perform, get feedback, make the adjustment, try again, learn and grow. 

Other Great Group Classes, Workshops and Webinars

Another great ongoing class led by industry expert and Las Vegas actor Melissa Moats is VoiceActors Studio.  She has a weekly course on performance among other elements of the voiceover industry. Led by top quality coaches with classes capped at 15 participants, they recently switched this course from in-studio to online. They have options of four weeks ($349) or eight weeks ($549) with a one session drop-in rate of $99. Melissa’s ongoing classes are one of many great courses her creative team offers. Her (one-off) speciality courses are even more popular. 

A one-off class is chock full of notes and ideas. Plus, the time commitment and price point are lower. They are offered through GVAA, GFTB, VoiceoverXtra, Edge, VO Peeps, Get Mic’d, Syllabus, and others. Some are webinar-type, some are participation-oriented. Most are led by industry coaches or leaders (J. Michael Collins, Anne Ganguzza, David Rosenthal, Elley-Ray Hennesey and a host of others) in the field who have either signed on to work with these organizations or created their own.  For more insight into what’s available, check out Stephane Cornicard’s voiceover training Facebook page.

Mentorship is another offering. For example, GFTB holds monthly script reading sessions with direction. The mentors are all successful industry professionals who coach or know how to give direction as well. Sometimes there is an opportunity to perform and get critiqued or to audit and watch others do the heavy lifting. 

Then there are peer-led performance sessions. These sessions can be free and ongoing, like The Mic Check VO Workout hosted by Nathan Cundiff and Michael Montes, or paid like Larry Hudson’s VO Heaven which is $25 a month. Both are twice weekly. So, how do you know what’s right for you?

Make sure the Group Voiceover Class is a Good Fit

The coach is critical in making your decision. Like other voiceover veterans, taking coaching sessions and classes is how I’ve stayed current and successful. I look for people who have been successful in the industry or who have been intimately involved in casting and therefore have insight into what books. Over the past few years, that’s included courses from casting agents, fellow voiceover colleagues, directors, and even a standup comic. Your coach’s credentials are as important as their ability to teach and direct. They need to be able to impart info in a constructive way and guide you to where you need to go.

This profession is a long game. There are many things to learn along the way. Does the class you’re considering investing in meet your current needs? You need to know where you are in your voiceover journey and what you need to improve to answer that. This knowledge is not always a given, as we don’t know what we don’t know.  Questions to suss out: Does the class match your level of experience? In other words, is it for people who are brand new, those with a little experience, or a lot of experience? Is it geared toward actors (theatre and film) who want to transition into voiceover? Can the coach help you if your background is in broadcasting or teaching or something entirely different? Are you new to VO?

Tips for Getting the Most out of Your VO Class

• Active Listening – More than a critical technique to give nuanced theatre and film performances, active listening is a great technique for learning too. Hopefully, your leader or coach has control over the room and is able to keep over-sharers at bay and draw introverts out to participate.
• Take Notes – Take handwritten notes, it has been shown to help with conceptual learning more than typing. It helps you synthesize what you’re learning immediately and keeps you actively engaged and focussed on what’s being taught. Reviewing notes afterwards solidifies what is new and serves as great reminders moving forward.
• Structure – Does the structure meet your needs? As artists, we can forgive some creative rambling if we can pick up enough shiny pearls of wisdom along the way. The best classes are given by those who can deliver good content on time.
• How interactive is the class? Is it a lecture or interview or do you get to participate throughout? The best learning comes from being active within the class. If the class is performance-based, do you get to perform? How much and how often? For how long?
• What is the Quality of the Feedback? This speaks to your coach. Are they able to direct you? Can they give you insight into how to get where you need to go again? Feedback is critical to helping an actor improve. What is said and the way it is said can engender “aha” moments or lay flat.
• Does the Class Give you Homework or other Takeaways? Did you get tips or strategies to implement after the class or between classes? In The Voice Over Study, each participant learns new performance techniques to access every week. As with all the voiceover classes I teach or coach, I offer “homework” – things to implement and work on after the session – craft is an element we must ever-polish in order to book, to stay relevant and to keep performing.