For this week’s blog post I’m delighted to welcome back our PW voice coach, Jessica Cooper, as author, for a science-based assessment of how you produce your voice. Hint:  it’s not what you think.  

The voice is more than just sound.  It is the mouth, hands, face, nasal passages, and the auditory system.  And this understanding leads to a revolution in how we think about the instrument that is most essential to the success of public speakers.

As a classically trained singer, I learned early on through stage work and vocal coaching that the voice is much more than the vocal mechanism alone. While endless studies explore breath, vibration, and resonance, recent neuroscience now confirms what singers have long felt: the voice is shaped by an entire system — physical, emotional, and sensory.

Our emotions and physical expressions are not just accessories to our voice — they are actively shaping our sound, influencing not only how we feel, but how we are perceived. The body doesn’t merely reflect our inner state; it helps create it.

When movement, feeling, and expression are in sync with our words, the voice becomes more resonant, more credible, and more alive.

1. The Mouth: Where Thought Becomes Sound

Your mouth is the primary shaper of speech. It filters and amplifies the sound produced by your vibrating vocal folds, forming vowels and consonants that together carry both the structure and the emotion of your words.

But the mouth isn’t a passive instrument — it also mirrors what’s happening in your body. Tension in the jaw, tongue, or lips shows up in the voice almost immediately. Relaxation, by contrast, leads to greater resonance, flexibility, and freedom.

When we practice techniques to open the throat and allow the vocal tract to expand — lifting the soft palate, releasing the tongue, softening the jaw — the entire vocal instrument resonates more fully. This fuller resonance doesn’t just improve projection or articulation; it gives the tone a perception of “deepness,” that subtle, powerful quality that makes an audience pay attention.

Tone is what tells the listener what we feel, often before they even comprehend what we say. It’s shaped not only by the words we choose, but by the physical openness of the vocal tract and the emotional openness behind the sound.

Think of your mouth as a sculptor — shaping not only the meaning, but the emotional resonance of your words.

2. The Auditory System: Speak to Hear, Hear to Speak

Speaking is guided by a real-time feedback loop in the brain — known as the DIVA model (Tourville & Guenther, 2011) — where auditory and motor systems work together to continuously monitor and fine-tune speech. We don’t just send sound outward; we listen inward as we speak, making micro-adjustments we’re barely conscious of.

This system’s success depends on how we listen to ourselves.

• Attuned listening is sensory and responsive: you pay attention to the feel and flow of your sound without judgment. This keeps the voice flexible, resonant, and adaptive.
  In a musical setting, for example, a player might notice their instrument drifting out of tune and adjust naturally — taking in the auditory feedback and self-correcting in real time without disrupting the performance.
• Critical listening is evaluative and disruptive: instead of noticing and responding, you judge and monitor your sound for flaws. This short-circuits the feedback loop, causing tension, tightening the breath, and often collapsing tone. Using the same example, a musician who hears they are out of tune but reacts with criticism and frustration may actually worsen the issue — layering tension on top of the original mistake and making smooth correction nearly impossible.

As Miles Davis famously said, “There are no wrong notes — only opportunities.”

In speaking, just like in music, it’s not about producing perfect sound — it’s about staying connected to your internal sense of flow, adjusting in real time, and letting the conversation between intention and sound stay alive.

This is where audiation comes in — the practice of hearing and feeling your voice as you go, internally guiding the sound both before and during speaking.

Before we speak, the brain creates an internal blueprint — an imagined sense of tone, rhythm, and emotional shape. As we speak, the auditory system compares the real sound to that internal model, making tiny adjustments to stay aligned without breaking the flow.

When audiation is active, you’re not judging or second-guessing — you’re responding.

You’re letting the voice stay open, resilient, and alive.

Practicing this connection — hearing the sound inside and realizing it outside — is what strengthens the bond between imagination and production. Over time, the sound you imagine becomes the sound you create.

We don’t just produce sound — we experience it. And how we experience it — moment by moment — shapes how free and expressive our voices are.

3. The Nasal Passages: The “Pleasure Principle” of Resonance

In singing, there is an exercise where we pretend to “smell something good” before rehearsing a phrase. This isn’t just a mechanical trick for lifting the soft palate (it does)— it taps into something much deeper: that pleasure creates openness.

When you pretend to smell something delicious or lovely — a blooming rose, warm bread, fresh basil — the body responds as if it were real. The soft palate lifts, the nasal passages open, and the upper vocal tract becomes more spacious. This openness allows the voice to resonate more fully, creating what classical singers call “ring” or “bloom” — a tone that is easy, open, and warm.

But it’s not just anatomy! Imagining a pleasurable scent also activates areas of the brain linked to reward, memory, and emotional regulation — particularly in the limbic system. That internal sense of pleasure naturally relaxes the breath, softens the throat, and invites a freer, more radiant sound.

Good news: you don’t need a literal rose or a loaf of bread in your hand — pretending is enough. The body doesn’t distinguish between real and vividly imagined sensory experience. A simple, playful sniff of something you love — even just in your mind — can transform your voice from tight and thin to open and blooming.

Pleasure relaxes the breath, softens the throat, and lifts the resonance spaces of the vocal tract — allowing sound to travel with more freedom and warmth. The voice blooms when the body remembers pleasure.

Try it: Close your eyes for a moment. Cup your hands, raise them to your face, and pretend you’re taking a deep sniff of something you love — a rose, fresh-cut grass, warm cinnamon bread. Really let yourself imagine it. Feel how your breath naturally deepens and lifts the space inside your head.

Now, while holding that sense of pleasure, speak a single word — something simple, like “Wonderful” or “Lovely.” Notice the difference in tone?

Pleasure isn’t an indulgence for the voice: it’s a portal.

Pleasure opens the voice through sensation, but it can also open it through expression.

If imagining a scent softens the breath and lifts the resonance spaces from within, smiling with the eyes invites the same openness from without — gently shaping the body and the voice at once.

4. The Face: Expression Shapes Resonance

My first voice teacher told me to smile with my eyes. I didn’t fully understand it then — but now I do.

When the eyes engage — when the smile reaches into the muscles around the eyes and cheeks — the face lifts and opens. This isn’t just about looking pleasant. It’s a physical invitation.

A genuine, internal smile lifts the soft palate, relaxes the facial muscles, and opens the resonance spaces of the head and throat, enriching both the clarity and the warmth of the voice.

When the face stays neutral, the voice can lose vibrance and energy. But when the face responds — when the eyes see the meaning and the muscles lift with it — the voice opens, and the listener feels the presence behind the sound.

This effect is partly explained by what scientists call the Duchenne smile — the genuine smile that activates not just the corners of the mouth, but the orbicularis oculi muscles around the eyes. A Duchenne smile lifts the cheeks, softens the tissues around the nose and eyes, and subtly widens the space behind the nose and in the soft palate area.

And here’s the fascinating part: Opening the nasal passages for singing or speaking also depends on lifting the soft palate, widening the nasopharyngeal space, and creating subtle upward expansion in the midface. In other words, smiling with the eyes — truly engaging the upper face — naturally supports the same physical openings that let the voice resonate more freely.

It’s the same pleasure principle at work! Just as imagining a beloved scent invites openness through pleasure, softening the gaze and lifting the face gently coaxes the body into a more resonant, expressive state — without force or over-effort.

As I practiced smiling with my eyes, people on the street started smiling back at me.
Connection invites connection — whether through voice, expression, or presence. (Thank you, mirror neurons!)

5. The Hands: Your Brain’s Super-Secret Voice Partner!

Of all the elements that shape the voice, gesture is perhaps the most underappreciated — and also the most scientifically grounded.

Research in embodied cognition shows that our hands don’t just express what we think — they help us think. When we gesture meaningfully, we offload some of the brain’s cognitive load, allowing for clearer speech, better recall, and more fluid language production (Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Hostetter & Alibali, 2008).

In short: your hands can help your brain find your words.

Meaningful gestures — those connected to inner imagery or felt understanding — activate not only the language centers of the brain, but also the motor system and parts of the mirror neuron network, helping your listeners simulate what you feel. When your hands move with purpose, your audience doesn’t just see your meaning — they feel it.

Speakers who gesture meaningfully are rated as more compelling, more confident, and more trustworthy. And perhaps most fascinating: audiences retain more of what gesturing speakers say.

The Whole System in Sync

Each of these components — the mouth, auditory system, nasal passages, face, and hands — works like a piece of a larger puzzle. When they come into sync, the voice becomes more than sound. It transmits meaning, energy, presence — and something even harder to define: charisma.

But this kind of speaking doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from practice — and from building a relationship with your own body as an instrument.

At its core, the voice is an aerodynamic, myo-elastic instrument — breath pressure and vocal fold elasticity working together to create sound. Warming up the breath, the face, and the voice lays the mechanical foundation.

But the deeper magic happens when we go beyond mechanics — when the mouth shapes not just words but feeling, when the auditory system is attuned to the flow of sound and meaning, when the nasal passages and face lift with pleasure, and when the hands and gestures anchor the speaker more deeply to what they intend.

This is where neuroscience comes alive — where mirror neurons fire and connection moves between speaker and listener.

It may sound like a lot to take in — and at first, it is.

But each time you notice your breath, your face, your hands; each time you relax the jaw, imagine the rose, smile with your eyes, listen without judgment — you are strengthening the very systems that allow your voice to be free, credible, and fully alive.

You are building the foundation for a voice that doesn’t just carry information — it carries you.

And in time, all of this work folds into something simple and natural. In time, it becomes as effortless as:

Think. Breathe. Speak.