Voice modulationis an art. It’s a way of expressing things in
such a way that it creates an effective impact on the
audience. Sure, your content plays a role in what you
speak but HOW you speak matters more than anything.
Voice modulation is basically how you adjust your voice
while speaking. Fast or slow, high pitched or low pitched,
taking the right pauses, stressing on words, etc.
And Tonality is the way you sound when you speak.
Combine the two in your speech and your speech will turn
out to be extremely effective.
1. Adjust thePitch
Pitch is how high or low your voice sounds. It’s more of a horizontal projection of the
voice towards the audience. Pitch represents the frequency of the sound.
You can adjust the pitch according to the sentences in your speech. For instance, if you
have to say something that you are excited about or something that shows your
passion, use a high pitch.
If you have to say, “I am so excited to be a part of this organisation!” Try saying it in a
higher pitch and then in a lower pitch. You will immediately see the difference for
yourself.
Sound of excitement, action and passion can easily be conveyed when the pitch is
raised because that’s what we do when we actually are excited. We raise our pitch.
When you have to say a sentence, which is authoritative and important, use a lower
pitch and a slow pace. People tend to respond well to sentences that are important
and have a lower pitch.
Basically, the trick is to keep changing the pitch now and then and not stick to just one
kind of pitch. It will save a lot of monotony.
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2. Adjust YourVolume
You must adjust the volume of your voice according to the size of
the audience. You should speak loud enough for the person sitting
at the very end of the room to be able to hear you.
Speaking loudly does not mean shouting. It just means speaking in
a way that every single person in the room could hear you.
You should speak loudly or softly according to the sentences in
your speech. You do not have to be too loud all the time as it can
irritate people and you also shouldn’t speak so softly that people
do not understand what you say.
If you are a naturally soft-spoken person and find it difficult to
speak a bit loudly and clearly, there are some exercises that you
can try for being able to speak a bit loudly.
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3. Stress onKeywords
Whenever you speak, make sure that you stress keywords in
your speech to create a good impact on the audience.
For example, try saying “Climate change is real” in a plain tone
without stressing any word and then say the same sentence
with emphasizing on the important words in the sentence.
For example, if I add some emphasis on the important words in
the sentence like “CLIMATE CHANGE is REAL!” It immediately
creates an impact.
When you stress on the keywords, your audience starts
remembering these important words, which creates an
impact.
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4. Speak withClarity
A lot of times while speaking, people start with a really loud and clear
voice but as they reach the end of the sentence, their voice often
gets too low and unclear, and the audience fails to understand what
the speaker is trying to convey.
To avoid this, make sure you pronounce every single word as clearly
as possible. This helps in conveying the information effectively.
To practice this, what you can do is, as you are reading this blog,
read everything that is written loudly and focus on the last word.
Make sure that you are pronouncing the last word loudly and clearly.
See to it that you do not fumble and ramble while speaking. Speak
slowly and with clarity
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5. Keep anEye on Your Pace
The most common misconception that people have is that the best way to speak is
speaking very fast. But that is not true.
If you speak fast, your audience fails to grasp what you said and eventually lose interest in
your speech because they find everything that you say hard to process. You must give your
audience the time to process every word that you say.
Speaking fast often leaves a person breathless and the chances of fumbling or messing up
the speech are comparatively higher.
To avoid this, you should speak at a slow, controlled and natural pace. When you speak
slowly, you can also avoid the use of filler words like ‘uh’, ‘um’, ‘er’ etc. Take pauses
wherever necessary (more on this in the next point).
If at all you do have to speak fast, choose few sentences that show excitement and thrill
and say them fast and then pause so that it gives your audience the time to process what
you said, and it also adds a little emotion to your speech.
You can keep adjusting the pace of your voice however you want but just make sure that a
major chunk of your speech is not you speaking extremely fast and leaving the audience
confused.
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6. Pause
Many peoplewouldn’t believe this, but a pause of few seconds seems
completely natural to the audience. So, you don’t have to worry about the fact
that the audience will think that you have forgotten your speech.
And that makes us wonder, when exactly do we take a pause?
Pauses can mostly be used whenever a sentence has a comma or a full stop, or
when you are about to talk about something important and you want to
emphasize on something, pauses can be used when you want your audience
to process the information you shared while moving on to a new topic etc.
Pauses in public speaking are like verbal forms of punctuations.
An example of pause would be –
“How would you feel if..(pause)”
“For several weeks (Pause), Kerala has been reporting a maximum number
of COVID-19 cases in the country (Pause).”
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7. Tone ofYour Voice
The tone is how your voice sounds when you speak. It is crucial to
have a good tone when you speak. A good tone can be
developed by practicing.
People like a warm and friendly voice. A good tone of voice will
help you persuade and influence people in a much better way.
You must express your emotions through the tone of your voice.
Be it sad, happy, angry, anything. Make sure that you say it in
such a way that it conveys your emotions to the audience.
1. Counting Numbers
Start counting from 1 to 10 and increase your volume with every
number. 1 being the softest and 10 loudest and vice versa. This
exercise will help you with the volume of your voice.
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2. Humming
Keepyour hands on your chest and start saying ‘hmmmmmmm’,
and you will feel the vibrations of that sound in your chest and that
will help you understand the tone and range of your voice.
This exercise can help you get a deeper voice and it will improve
the tone of your voice with time.
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3. Say “huh”
While doing this exercise, make sure that the voice comes out from
your stomach and not just the vocal cords.
Say huh in a way as if you are throwing the voice outside.
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4. Breathing Exercises
Apart from the exercises mentioned above, some more exercises
you can do are breathing exercises. Try deep breathing and
pranayama or om chanting.
Breath in through your nose and fill up your stomach first. Hold the
breath for 10 seconds and then exhale slowly.
Breathing exercises are very effective for vocal training.