Tuesday 2 July 2013

I can't hear you...

A little summary of my attendance at a voice coaching taster workshop:


The course was offered via our in-house Staff Development team and it was of interest to me because my voice is 'little' - I'm not naturally loud and booming. Sometimes my voice whispers away in the background trying to be heard over the din made by 200 students in the lecture theatre and I hoped to develop some techniques to help me project my voice. During the year I deliver a number of talks in an old ballroom-type space at a partner institution where I have to stand on stage and talk to 50 people without the aid of a microphone in a two storey high space - it was this session I had in mind when I decided I needed to attend this course.

 
The first activity was to lay on the floor and practise breathing from the belly not the shoulders. This is an activity much-practised by actors. We had to feel our breath going in and out of our bodies to get in tune with how our body relaxes when we breathe in this way. The intention of breathing from the diaphragm is to calm yourself and avoid higher breathing in the chest which tenses you up and can make your voice sound stressed.


The only way I can think to describe activity two is as 'wiggling and jiggling' our bodies. We started on all fours (!) to stretch out our backs then gradually began to stand up and continued by stretching our arms and rib cage. This was still about feeling the breath go in and out of our bodies although heaven knows what the people in the meeting room opposite thought we were up to. We also practised a spine roll and whilst our heads were dangling by our knees we had to shake our shoulders side to side, let our arms swing loose and babble - I kid you not.  Still, in for a penny, in for a pound - I was certainly beyond the boundaries of my comfort zone but not in a scary way as we did all these activities as a group.
 

Babbling was quite appropriate for me as one of the other presenting quirks that happens to me at the start of term is that I often babble some fluffed words for the first few talks of the year. I think I go a bit rusty over the summer and then can't articulate the words as well as I'd like to (after the third/forth talk this disappears and I'm ad-libbing away). We spent a while doing some humming, tongue twisters, stretching our mouth/jaw/face and talking with our thumb in our mouth. Thankfully for me we weren't asked to sing and all the talking out loud/humming stuff was done as a group so we were all idiots together. We did a lot of saying 'ahh' as if we were in the dentist's chair and then attempting to project the sound across the room. All this was about opening up our mouths to get our tongues around the words and to give the sound a wider hole to escape from.


Then it was time for some Shakespeare. The breath is the start of your communication (words/speech). Taking a breath means you have time to pause and connect with your space and audience. A good tip for public speaking be it meetings or lectures is to think 'new thought / new breath'. To practise this we read a section from A Midsummer's Night Dream - reading aloud then taking a breath at each point of punctuation. It's quite difficult but it works. Taking a breath keeps your audience engaged as they are subconsciously thinking - they are about to breathe, there must be more talking to come, therefore I must keep listening…


The final set of activities involved the group splitting in two and standing opposite each other like tram lines. We picked a partner and had to talk to them and then every few minutes we had to step further away from each other and keep projecting our voices to our partner. The technique I picked up from this segment was the most valuable to me. As my voice is fairly little I should stop trying to talk over noise and instead imagine I am bouncing my words along the floor to my intended audience. Hopefully this technique will help me conquer the battle of trying to project my voice the next time I’m in a lecture theatre and the microphone ceases to work.

It was a challenging course in terms of getting over the embarrassment of being on all fours with your colleagues (not something I'm recommending for our next staff meeting although it was an effective icebreaker). In future I shall be attempting to bounce my voice of the floor so that it projects to my audience and I might (behind closed doors) try warming up to make sure I can articulate my words clearly for the first talks of the year.