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How to Improve Your Speaking Voice

Let's improve our vocal confidence. The science of vocal aesthetics, as well as tips, tricks, and exercises to make your voice a clear and compelling instrument.

By Angela VolkovPublished 3 years ago 14 min read
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Image by Krakenimages.com

On a day-to-day basis we give our speaking voice little thought; we are purposeful with our words but we are much less conscious of the quality of the voice which carries them.

Yet our voice reveals a lot about us. We can easily infer a person’s emotional state (Scherer, Banse, & Wallbott, 2001) and even personality just by hearing them speak. For example, it should come as no surprise that extraverts have, on average, louder speaking voices than introverts (Scherer, 1978).

Our voices also indicate a plethora of information about our physical appearance such as sex, age, and size (Lass, Hughes, Bowyer, Waters and Bourne, 1976; Ptacek and Sander, 1966; Van Dommelen & Moxness, 1995).

Other vocal characteristics have less of a basis in physiology, yet we make judgements regardless. For example, while there exists a stereotype of what a voice should sound like based on sexual orientation, categorisation tends to be inaccurate and heavily influenced by our expectations (Sulpizio et al. 2015). Scientists, however, have found two cross-cultural acoustic qualities—more modulation of pitch and a less breathy voice—which reliably distinguish gay men from straight men (Suire, Tognetti, Durand, Raymond, & Barkat-Defradas, 2020).

One of the most important judgements people make about our voice regards its aesthetic appeal, with a beautiful voice conferring an unfair advantage (Babel & King, 2015). Given that people will judge you more favourably for having an appealing voice, why not take the time to improve how you sound?

Below is the science of what makes a voice attractive (largely outside of your control), as well as tips, tricks and vocal exercises (relating to factors very much within your control). Feel free to skip ahead to this section if you are disinterested in theory, and keen to sink your teeth into something more practical.

What makes a voice attractive?

Typical and familiar voices

In psychology there exists this concept of perceptual fluency; across all domains humans prefer stimuli which are easy to process. A typical voice requires less brain power to process due to its familiar features, and is therefore more appealing (Babel & King, 2015). For example, a gender-typical voice facilitates ease of gender-categorization and for this reason is judged to be more attractive (Babel & King, 2015). (More on this later!)

Another reason we are predisposed to favour familiar voices is because these fall under the umbrella of the mere exposure effect. We have a tendency to judge a neutral stimulus favourably after repeated exposure to it. Having proved itself benign each time that it has appeared, such a stimulus is subsequently thought of positively (Zajonc, 2001).

Average is attractive, attractive is virtuous

Typical voices are average voices, and in matters of aesthetics, average is synonymous with attractive. As with physical appearance, voice is subject to the ‘halo effect’ wherein beauty is confounded with goodness (Zuckerman & Driver, 1989)… and competence, kindness, and trustworthiness (Pisanski & Feinberg, 2017).

Chimeric composite of multiple faces (Cellerino, 2003) and synthetically merged voices (Bruckert et al., 2010)— the more, the better — are both judged as much more attractive than any of their individual, constituent components.

Speaking of faces, you might have a voice for radio if you don’t have a face for one; if you are a woman, facial attractiveness modulates how appealing people find your voice (Valentova, Varella, Havlíček, & Kleisner, 2017). Although, dear reader, what doesn’t attractiveness modulate?

Sex-stereotypical voices are more attractive

Men and women differ in terms of vocal tract length, giving men a deeper voice i.e. one with a lower fundamental frequency or pitch. Back cavity length — another sexually dimorphic characteristic — in men is also a good predictor of vocal attractiveness. (The thoracic cavity is a large hollow space in our bodies, in men the volume of this space is greater than in women.)

Simply put, properties which play up these sex-based physiological differences make a voice more attractive (Babel, McGuire, & King, 2014). Therefore, the closer you are to the prototypical male or female voice (for both fundamental and formant frequencies), the more people will perceive your voice as being attractive (Babel, McGuire, & King, 2014). This is because it falls conveniently in line with their internal, mental representation (Babel, McGuire, & King, 2014; Pisanski & Feinberg, 2017).

It should come as no surprise that what’s considered the prototypical female voice — the platonic, feminine ideal — is much farther from reality than the prototypical male voice (Babel & King, 2015). Standards for female attractiveness seem to be higher (and a little divorced from reality).

In matters of vocal aesthetics, women face another setback. While high pitched female voices are judged as attractive (up to a certain point, not exceeding 280 Hz), they are also perceived as being less dominant (Borkowska & Pawlowski, 2011). Masculine voices are viewed as more desirable for both men and women in leadership positions (Klofstad, 2016).

Vocal fashions

Like appearance, vocal aesthetics are subject to the whims and caprices of fashion. Historically, what has been considered an attractive voice has varied just as much, if not more so, than conventions surrounding physical appearance (Churcher, 2007).

Consider this description from an article published in the 1930s which lists the undesirable qualities of a female voice thusly, ‘thinness, huskiness, breathiness, harshness, stridency’ (McDowell, 1936). Marilyn Monroe popularised a breathy voice in the 1950s, and there are a fair few modern day actresses and singers (Miley Cyrus, Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone etc.) whose trademark husky voices, on the contrary, seem to bolster their popularity.

Or perhaps, such actresses are popular despite of a stereotypical tendency toward vocal fry (the creak in the voice at its lowest, natural register), which first developed among young, American women. At present, (extreme) vocal fry is considered neither attractive, nor is it associated with trustworthiness or competency (Anderson, Klofstad, Mayew, & Venkatachalam, 2014; Hornibrook, Ormond, & Maclagan, 2018).

Although low voices confer an impression of competency for both men and women, this does not seem to be the case with the crackling, ‘breaking up’ quality of vocal fry. This is likely because vocal fry is a speech characteristic primarily associated with young women and is therefore a socio-linguistic phenomenon suffering from sexist attitudes (Chao & Bursten, 2016).

Vocal fry is starting to spread beyond young, American women; across borders (Yuasa, 2010), and more importantly, to the male gender. For this reason, I think the speaking style will become normalised over time. (Or it’ll be replaced with some entirely new fashion!)

Vocal exercises to improve your speaking voice

The more I read about this topic, the more I’ve come to realise that what’s considered an optimal voice varies greatly according to context.

For example, men with a deep, masculine voice are perceived as good leaders, socially dominant, honest, trustworthy, and possessing physical prowess — all typically attractive qualities. However, women also rate men with such voices as more aggressive, likely to cheat and unlikely to invest in offspring (Pisanski & Feinberg, 2017) — hardly a prime mating choice. [Side note: The magical cut-off appears to be 96 Hertz — does that mean at 97 Hz a man could have the best of both worlds? The world is his oyster?]

What I’m trying to say is, don’t feel as though you ought to lower or raise the pitch of your voice to increase how attractive people find you. Likely you do that subconsciously anyway; both men and women modulate their pitch when in conversation with an attractive member of the opposite sex (Pisanski & Feinberg, 2017). (And as for what same-sex attracted people do in matters of courtship, given that sex-typical voices are preferred, it's possible that this sort of exaggerated femininity or masculinity might also the case. However, there is a paucity of research in this regard.)

Rather, you should focus on other important qualities of voice — do you want an attractive voice, or a compelling, effective one? (Well, probably both, but let's focus on what's within your control.) The following exercises will give your voice resonance, expressiveness, brightness and smoothness.

First, record your voice

Knowledge is power, France is Bacon. You can’t have self-improvement without self-awareness, therefore listening to a recording of your voice is beneficial. Not only will you be able to experience your own voice from other people’s perspective, but you will be able to pick up on various issues that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Further more, outside the reverberations of your skull your voice will have less resonance and a higher pitch — this is, unfortunately, what you sound like to others. Yes, how do they put up with you?

Nasal… is good

I don’t mean that you should emulate Fran Drescher or Michelle Wolf (unless you’re looking for a career in comedy). However, giving your voice a little bit of a nasal positioning is beneficial.

By humming a long series of ‘mmm’s and ‘nnn’s through your nose you can train your voice to sit forward in a more ‘assertive’ position, giving you a clearer tone. To test whether you’ve achieved the correct positioning, pinch the bridge of your nose whilst humming — you should be able to feel the vibrations there.

Posture

Make sure your back is straight and your shoulders are back, down and relaxed. Your head should be retracted a little, rather than tilted downward or tipped back. A useful trick is to imagine a helium balloon is attached to your head, pulling it upward.

Breath

People often breathe in the reverse of the optimal manner. When you inhale it should be an expansive, outward motion, it’s only on the exhale that you should be drawing in and tensing your core. Together with good posture, this will aid in projecting your voice.

Breathing shallowly, as is common in high-stress situations such as presenting to a large group, results in the disruption of the smoothness of speech. Instead, breath slowly and deeply, from your diaphragm. My singing teacher often told me to breathe from ‘the pelvic floor’, although I gather that was more of a metaphor as I’m quite sure there’s no breathing apparatus down there!

Poise

Apart from affecting breathing, stress also causes a breakdown of coordination within the larynx (‘disorganised laryngeal muscle activity’), and between the ‘breathing apparatus and the muscles involved in phonation’, resulting breathiness, a break in rhythm and cluttered articulation (Anderson, 1977). Stress will also cause tensing of the resonator muscles giving your voice a strained quality (Anderson, 1977).

Relaxation is vital to good speech, so why not try meditation to get over your stage fright? Having a realistic appraisal of your likely performance, rather than catastrophising will also serve to reduce your stage fright from overwhelmed to pumped (Steptoe & Fidler, 1987).

Adopting the ‘Superman stance’ as a confident posture will help calm you. Box breathing (a technique used by Navy SEALs) is another great technique to reduce anxiety. Breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, then repeat. If all else fails, there’s the old standby of picturing everyone in the audience naked.

Pitch

Make sure the pitch of your speaking voice stays in a fairly minimum range, with just enough variance to keep things interesting. A monotonous drone is far from what we’re after — a good speaking voice is necessarily an emotive and expressive one (as long as its not too pitch-y!)

Speed

The CEO of an organisation I once worked at was able to hold the floor long enough at after work drinks to tell us the entire plot of Shantaram (now a 43-hour audio book!), whereas I’m often not sure if I’ll be allowed to get the end of my coffee order without interruption. Hence, I talk fast.

Although you might be able to remind yourself to slow down some of the time, attempting to remain conscious of your speaking speed at all times is failure-bound. Instead, cultivate a habit of deliberately inserting pauses after each phrase to act as speed bumps in your speech. This way you’ll be replacing an old habit, and habits are easier to replace than they are to extinguish (Duhigg, 2013).

Replacing “um” and “ah” in your speech will also lend clarity and an aura of confidence to your speech.

Mouth full of marbles

I sing while brushing my teeth, and I’m sure learning to be at least somewhat comprehensible through my mouthguard at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu has also done me good. If you can enunciate through a mouthful of walnuts, you’re doing something right.

Tongue twisters

My singing teacher used to have me warm up with, She sells seashells by the sea shore but the shell she sells aren’t seashells I’m sure until I taught her a much better one about the fig plucker and his helpful son. (I’ll leave you to Google that one yourselves!)

Here are a couple of (safe for work) tongue twisters to train your voice to be nimble, each focusing on a different group of sounds:

  • My mum makes me mash my mini MnMs on a Monday morning
  • Round the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran
  • Thistle sticks, sixty six thousand and six thistle sticks
  • Barren Beacon Beckons Bacon Baron

Now you and your honeyed tones are ready to take on that TED talk… and conquer the world.

Further reading

Anderson, V. A. (1977). Training the speaking voice. Oxford University Press.

Anderson, R. C., Klofstad, C. A., Mayew, W. J., & Venkatachalam, M. (2014). Vocal fry may undermine the success of young women in the labor market. PloS one, 9(5).

Babel, M., McGuire, G., & King, J. (2014). Towards a more nuanced view of vocal attractiveness. PloS one, 9(2).

Babel, M., & McGuire, G. (2015). Perceptual fluency and judgments of vocal aesthetics and stereotypicality. Cognitive science, 39(4), 766–787.

Borkowska, B., & Pawlowski, B. (2011). Female voice frequency in the context of dominance and attractiveness perception. Animal Behaviour, 82(1), 55–59.

Bruckert, L., Bestelmeyer, P., Latinus, M., Rouger, J., Charest, I., Rousselet, G. A., … & Belin, P. (2010). Vocal attractiveness increases by averaging. Current Biology, 20(2), 116–120.

Cellerino, A. (2003). Psychobiology of facial attractiveness. Journal of endocrinological investigation, 26(3 Suppl), 45–48.

Chao, M., & Bursten, J. (2016). Heard but Misunderstood: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry.

Churcher, M. (2007). Essay What is a Sexy Voice?. Voice and Speech Review, 5(1), 260–262.

Duhigg, C. (2013). The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do and how to change. Random House.

Hornibrook, J., Ormond, T., & Maclagan, M. (2018). Creaky voice or extreme vocal fry in young women. The New Zealand medical journal, 131(1486), 36–40.

Klofstad, C. A. (2016). Candidate voice pitch influences election outcomes. Political Psychology, 37(5), 725–738.

Lass, N. J., Hughes, K. R., Bowyer, M. D., Waters, L. T., & Bourne, V. T. (1976). Speaker sex identification from voiced, whispered, and filtered isolated vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 59(3), 675–678.

McDowell, E. D. (1936). Acquiring Good Speech Habits in Early Childhood. Childhood Education, 12(4), 168–172.

Pisanski, K., & Feinberg, D. R. (2017). Vocal attractiveness. In The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception.

Ptacek, P. H., & Sander, E. K. (1966). Age recognition from voice. Journal of speech and hearing Research, 9(2), 273–277.

Scherer, K. R. (1978). Personality inference from voice quality: The loud voice of extroversion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 8(4), 467–487.

Steptoe, A., & Fidler, H. (1987). Stage fright in orchestral musicians: A study of cognitive and behavioural strategies in performance anxiety. British Journal of Psychology, 78(2), 241–249.

Suire, A., Tognetti, A., Durand, V., Raymond, M., & Barkat-Defradas, M. (2020). Speech acoustic features: A comparison of gay men, heterosexual men, and heterosexual women. Archives of sexual behavior, 49(7), 2575-2583.

Sulpizio, S., Fasoli, F., Maass, A., Paladino, M. P., Vespignani, F., Eyssel, F., & Bentler, D. (2015). The sound of voice: Voice-based categorization of speakers’ sexual orientation within and across languages. PloS one, 10(7).

Valentova, J. V., Varella, M. A. C., Havlíček, J., & Kleisner, K. (2017). Positive association between vocal and facial attractiveness in women but not in men: a cross-cultural study. Behavioural processes, 135, 95–100.

Van Dommelen, W. A., & Moxness, B. H. (1995). Acoustic parameters in speaker height and weight identification: sex-specific behaviour. Language and speech, 38(3), 267–287.

Yuasa, I. P. (2010). Creaky voice: A new feminine voice quality for young urban‐oriented upwardly mobile American women? American Speech, 85(3), 315–337.

Zajonc, R. B. (2001). Mere exposure: A gateway to the subliminal. Current directions in psychological science, 10(6), 224–228.

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About the Creator

Angela Volkov

Humour, pop psych, poetry, short stories, and pontificating on everything and anything

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