Your voice is one of the chief ways you have to give vent to your passion as a speaker.  Heck, as a human.  To be effective, you should care for and use your voice properly.  Following is a quick primer in the care and use of the voice; you can spend a lifetime practicing these techniques and improving your vocal tone.  If you don’t take care of your voice, fatigue and wear will make it less and less attractive to others as you age – and less and less useful as an instrument to you, the public speaker. 

Passion comes from freeing up the voice to sing like Martin Luther King’s. 

There are lots of ways to indicate passion in the voice; chief among them is a rising tone, but a faster pace and a louder volume are also important.  And in contrast, you can pause dramatically and get very quiet. The point is to establish a normal voice and then vary it to indicate emotion.

Watch a clip of Martin Luther King Jr.’s  “I Have a Dream” speech, which I quoted from in an earlier blog in this series.  It’s widely available on YouTube.  King used all three of these vocal means to telegraph his passion.  Most remarkable about his voice was the range in pitch:  his voice rose in tone so much that it is almost as if he sang his words.

Even as King’s voice rose, he did not lose his authority.  That’s an important point to note because so many speakers end their sentences as if they were asking questions. They use a rising tone at the end of every sentence. They introduce themselves, for example, by saying, “Hi, my name is Nick?” as if they weren’t sure. The effect is to reduce the information that’s coming through the vocal channel. We have a hard enough time as it is to understand each other, and when we can’t tell the difference between a question and a statement, it’s that much harder.

The authoritative arc will put you firmly in charge. 

Instead of adopting the annoying habit of rising tone at the end of sentences, use the authoritative arc. That’s what great public figures do (King did it particularly well), and it’s essential if you’re going to be an authoritative communicator. In the authoritative arc, your voice starts on one note, hopefully one where your voice is resonant (more about that later), and then rises in pitch through the sentence to indicate your passion. At the end, it drops back down, at least to the note you started from and perhaps even lower. The effect is to remove all doubt from what you’re saying.

If you try this, you’ll find that people accept your utterances without question – most of the time. If you speak with authority, other people will accept what you say by and large.  Try it the next time you want a better room at a hotel, and you’ll be surprised at the results. Say, “What do you have that’s better than that?” but drop your voice in pitch at the end and watch the clerk jump to offer you an upgrade.

Resonance and presence are essential to be heard, and to be heard happily.

Voices also need resonance and presence. Resonance makes voices pleasant to listen to, and thus persuasive. Presence is that nasal quality of the voice that allows it to be heard.  You need both. 

For resonance, take a deep bellyful of air, and hold it in with your diaphragmatic muscles, the ones that curve along your rib cage over your navel. Watch opera singers and yoga instructors; they breathe this way. Don’t move your shoulders up as you breath in; rather, the motion should be in your belly. It should move out as you take air in, because it’s expanding to take in the air.

Most people who don’t sing at the Met or bend their bodies in elegant pretzels breathe with their shoulders, and as a result they take in only a quarter or half of a lungful of air.  The result is a voice without resonance that’s flat, uninspiring, and unpleasant to listen to. Fight that with belly breathing.

It’s also calming and grounding to breathe in this way.  Before you go into an important meeting with your boss, say, take a breath or two from deep in your belly. You’ll be surprised at how much it calms you, and it has the added benefit of giving your voice resonance, which sounds more self-assured and strong. It will get your meeting off to a good start.

For presence, put your hands alongside your nose, open your mouth wide, and make a noise like a sheep bleating:  Baaa. Baaa. Baaa.  You’ll find that your nasal passages vibrate, and you’ll feel the vibration through your fingers. That’s good presence, and it’s what allows a voice to carry.

You want a little of that in your voice whenever you’re meeting with more than two people so that they can hear you.  A quiet voice that people can’t hear will be taken as either timidity or incredible confidence, à la the Godfather. Don’t take a chance. Get some presence in your voice, and be heard.

Next time I’ll talk about how to find your unique pitch.  If you’re in Boston next week, I’ll be talking about voice and other matters live at our first Public Words Speaker Forum 2010.  Please join us!