Uncategorized – Vocular | How Deep is Your Voice?

Ignored, Left Behind, Not Taken Seriously? It Could Be Your Voice

Vocular — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 08:58:12 +0000

I’m a voice talent who specializes in voicing telephone prompts. It’s a fascinating occupation, with huge variety and opportunities to voice phone systems in a wide range of styles and for limitless industries.

It’s heartbreaking to me when I have a client – usually with a product or service pointed towards a younger clientele – who asks me for a Kardashian. Or a Valley Girl. Or even requests Vocal Fry – once the sign of actual (and serious) vocal pathology. Now it’s an artistic choice.

I’m endlessly fascinated with human speech – and not what necessarily *what* we say, but *how* we say it. I am particularly interested in the way women speak – it occurs to me that we are far more malleable in our speech patterns; we seem to be more prone to altering our speech to adjust to situation and circumstance. I’ve overheard receptionists who speak in a super-sweet, capable automaton voice while answering the phone at main reception – and then instantly swap to a normal (and lower) conversational tone when handing a document to a co-worker. Friends have talked to me in their natural register – then put on an almost child-like timbre for their husband. And yoga teachers! I’m a long-time yoga practitioner, and I have launched a vocal coaching business aimed at improving and enhancing the vocal approach of yoga teachers, many of whom I’ve heard make the conscious choice to come into to studio putting on their “mystical” voice; many have adopted a full-on Valley Girl cadence, or “embellish” their voice with vocal fry, which they perceive gives them an air of raspy-ness? Reality-Show star ennui? Kardashian wealth? And up-speak. How many times have I endured instruction in yoga class which sounds like this: “Make sure your hips are facing front? Because if you don’t? You’ll experience torsion in your spine? Which, over time, can create real problems for you?” (Can it? Will it? Are asking me, or are you telling me?) Nothing projects a lack of confidence or an absence of belief in what you’re saying like up-speak does.

We’re inundated with the message of authenticity. Finding – and projecting – the “real” you is always favored over adopting a character, or trying to emulate someone else. Acting or expressing yourself under the cloak of a “character” or “persona” works counter to all we know about human happiness – and yet, daily I hear people (and yes – primarily women) who willingly alter their voice and cadence to emulate their favorite celebrity – or to fit in. So as to not threaten. To get that promotion. To gain sympathy. To project cool. To appear smaller and more dear.

Tapping into your natural range; the tone, or “key” in which your voice falls in an unobserved or unguarded moment; is integral to not only staying true to yourself – you will be speaking in outward tones which are not derivative. Instead, your speech patterns will not be chasing trends or contributing to a cliché. On a more practical side, your voice will safely withstand many hours of talk when not forced to work outside of its normal parameters. When one of my clients worked on lowering her register, she not only found herself being able to teach back-to-back yoga classes, but to also teach a couple barre fitness classes in the same day – and not experience the vocal strain she was accustomed to feeling. Another client – whose focus was to eliminate up-speak from her cadence – immediately found that her yoga students experienced less confusion about how to get into a pose when she stopped speaking in questions – and instead, made clear, definitive statements which her students see as gentle but clear instructions. And yet another client of mine – who works in a corporate environment during the day when she’s not teaching yoga, decided to put our lessons of slowing her speech and talking in amore deliberate, metered way to work in her day job. During her company’s Monday morning meeting – which was akin to trying to get a word in edgewise at a large family dinner – she deliberately spoke slower, in a lower register, and embraced the “negative space” of silence in between her thoughts. To her surprise, they hung on her every word – she held the floor, which is something she could never do when she was raising her voice both in pitch and volume.

Your voice tells a lot about you. Women should be especially aware of the visceral effect their voice has on others, and take an honest look at the effect their voice has on listeners, and the story it tells about them.

Allison Smith can be heard on phone system platforms for Cisco, Mitel, Bell, and Vonage among many others. Her website is www.theivrvoice.com, and her coaching website is www.yogaandvoice.com.

The post Ignored, Left Behind, Not Taken Seriously? It Could Be Your Voice appeared first on Vocular | How Deep is Your Voice?.

How to Tell if You Have Vocal Fry (and why does it matter)

Vocular — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 18:09:07 +0000

Vocular now does vocal fry, so I wanted to answer a few questions about that today – what is it, what does it mean, how can you tell how much you speak with, etc. Here we go.

What is vocal fry?

That’s that low-pitched, creaky, pulsating sound you hear most famously in the voices of women like Kim Kardashian and Zooey Deschanel.

This isn’t something limited to women though. In fact, Bill Clinton has the most vocal fry of anyone on our database.

How can you tell how much vocal fry you speak with?

Just like anything else, all you have to do is open the app, hit the record button and speak for about 30 seconds. The algorithm then analyses your voice to tell you how much vocal fry it finds. Anything over 15% is a lot, and anything under 6% is very little – although the app explains all this anyway. Check it out below.

(Just as a note, this doesn’t really work if you’re a guy with a deep voice. That kind of vocal fry is too low to detect well, although we should be able to do this in the future once we can analyse the smoothness of voices.)

Why is vocal fry important?

In theory, vocal fry should be a good thing. Deep voices are rated as being more authoritative. People are more easily persuaded by speakers who lower their pitch whilst making a point. Even CEO salaries rise as their pitch falls. So talking in vocal fry, the lowest register of the human voice, should be a good thing.

But studies tell us a very different story. Recent research looked at attitudes towards vocal fry using pairs of voices – both made by the same speaker – one with fry and the other without. The main finding: listeners were several times more likely to rate the fry voice as less trustworthy, less educated and less competent. They also claimed to be significantly more likely to hire the other voice.

And this wasn’t just about old people hating new ways of speaking. Every demographic shared the same prejudice against vocal fryers, although old women showed the greatest aversion to them.

How do you stop speaking with vocal fry?

You just do, really. Vocal fry is like any other bad habit, so unless you’ve got some rare vocal chord condition, you should be able to consciously keep your voice from falling into that lower register. Then it’s just a case of practising until it become second nature to you.

Vocular can help you with this by giving you a clearer idea of how much fry is in your voice. Breathing deeply and diaphragmatically should also make it easier to keep your voice up in the modal register.

Why do people find vocal fry so annoying?

Well, there are some people who seem to want to put all this down to misogyny, like vocal fry is actually just a conduit for criticising women’s freedom of speech. Even a recent episode of Things You Should Know went down this route.

A lot of people are trying to dance around this or prove that it’s sexist – it’s like no, on its face, this is a sexist argument that’s going on right now.

This might be true for a few weirdos who write in to these shows, but it ignores basic differences in the way men and women speak. Female voices tend to be roughly twice as high as male voices, so it’s far more jarring when they keep dropping into registers down in Morgan Freeman territory. Some men, on the other hand, have voices deep enough that it’s really difficult to separate from their vocal fry. Even I have trouble doing this with myself.

Also, it’s not as though all female presenters are being chastised for their voices on the internet. Kirsty Young hosts Desert Island Discs, a show with an audience probably similar to something from NPR, and Twitter is awash with people announcing how much they love her voice. The difference? She has almost no vocal fry at all in her voice. She actually has the least of any woman in our database.

The anti-fry reaction isn’t limited to female voices either. The study I mentioned before found that vocal fry was equally disapproved of in male voices as it was in female ones.

There are other reasons why fry might generally be something people don’t like to listen to. I’ve said it a few times before, but the most attractive voices are usually the breathiest, huskiest or smoothest ones. Vocal fry tends to be the opposite of that. Actually, you need only look at a spectrogram to see what a harsh kind of sound it is.

It also sounds weak, in my opinion. A croaking, creaky voice isn’t something you naturally associate with a high level of fitness – it can be caused by bad breathing technique or vocal fold pathology. So it may also be that the most attractive voices tend to sound the healthiest.

So what’s the bottom line?

Bottom line is that vocal fry seems only to carry negative connotations, so it would be a smart move to learn to speak without it. Aiming for 0% is unrealistic, since some level of fry is natural and unavoidable, but keeping to the single figures should give you a stronger, more authoritative and more attractive voice.

The post How to Tell if You Have Vocal Fry (and why does it matter) appeared first on Vocular | How Deep is Your Voice?.