Trying to sound natural: Voice training tips
Charles Miller
edits this blog. Twitter: @chblm
“The secret of success is sincerity: if you can fake that, you’ve got it made,” said either Groucho Marx or the American comedian George Burns, depending on which quotations website you look at.
The thought came to mind last week when I found myself in a voice training session along with four of my fellow BBC Academy podcast presenters (below), under the guidance of Elspeth Morrison.
Roxy Ebrahim-Khan, Zayna Shaikh, Jack Burgess and Kris Bramwell join Elspeth in the studio
Elspeth is a specialist voice and presentation coach who helps people to use their voice to best advantage on radio, television or online. Since those of us who present the Academy podcasts have never had any training in that kind of thing (yes, yes, all right, no surprise there I’m sure), we decided to sign up for a session with Elspeth.
And since we are in the business of making a series of podcasts, we recorded the session as this week’s edition. Do please take a listen and hear us each risk making fools of ourselves by reading something we’d just written in front of the group and receiving Elspeth’s comments on our efforts.
To be fair, she offered only kind and positive feedback: there was no humiliation involved. Elspeth managed to find something good to say about everyone while, at the same time, pointing up areas where we could each improve.
One of the things I hadn’t expected was how much the session would be about writing rather than speaking. Elspeth’s approach is to emphasise that, for a podcast at least, if the script is written in your voice, then it will sound right when you read it out. You should read it aloud while you are writing it so you can actually hear how it will sound.
The idea, of course, is that you’re trying to avoid sounding like you’re reading. And that’s where the ‘faking insincerity’ thought comes in. Your script will only sound spontaneous if it includes little carefully crafted verbal tics that you wouldn’t normally write down.
For instance, in my case, Elspeth told me to start more sentences with words like ‘but’, ‘so’, ‘well’ or ‘of course’. My old English teacher would disapprove, but writing a script is not the same as writing an essay and those links help string the thoughts together.
The other thing I took from Elspeth’s feedback was that you can’t deliver a line conversationally if it’s pure information, because it’s got no natural rhythm or place to ‘land’ when you’re saying it. So, “A was talking to B at an event organised by C last Wednesday” might be the facts you need to include, but would work better with a tiny injection of personality: “A spilled the beans to B at a well-attended event organised by C last Wednesday” - or whatever you feel comfortable with.
On the question of accent and voice, Elspeth didn’t try to change anything. She celebrated our differences, saying that we each “appeal to a different demographic” and sounded as though we could be identified with different kinds of BBC output.
Finally, there was the question I had thought the whole session would be about: how you actually deliver your lines. Sometimes we should smile or frown appropriately as they have an effect on delivery.
For most people, Elspeth advises “10% more oomph” than in ordinary life, and to beware of letting nerves speed you up. Finally, in the notes she sent round afterwards, she suggested we should imagine that we are “talking in a respectful and jolly way toan older relation”. And that’s probably sound advice about how to talk to older relations too.
Listen to the BBC Academy podcast.
