Vocal Aspects of Speech Delivery

Sometimes it isn’t what you say but how you say it that matters in public speaking. In addition to writing and organizing speech content, the most effective speakers use a tool box consisting of physical and verbal delivery skills. Vocal variety is the key to making sure the audience stays connected to the speech. Without variety, the audience fails to engage because the speaker’s voice comes across as monotone (absent from pitch variety) or bored. The elements of vocal delivery are breath control, articulation, pitch, rate, emphasis, volume, and pauses.

Breath Control

Take a deep breath in and hold it while you count from one to five. Exhale and try to control the amount of air being let out as you count backwards from five to one. Did you have any air remaining? Having control of one’s breath while speaking is a critical component to speech effectiveness. The breath controls the quality of sound produced by the voice. When a speaker lacks breath control, it results in audible breathing, shallow breath, and unsupported sound that is so quiet it doesn’t project very far into the presentation space. There are three major types of breathing that speakers use during public speaking: clavicular, thoracic, and diaphragmatic.

When a clavicular breather inhales, their shoulders go up and down and the sound of their voice comes out sounding breathy or shallow. It will not allow the speaker to get many words out with full voice support and is not ideal.

The thoracic breather moves their chest up and down often taking many inhales because they run out of breath from speaking so fast and then try to inhale more air and the vicious cycle continues. This also produces a shallow breath that is audible and one in which the speaker trails off at the ends of sentences without enough breath support to get the ends of the words out.

The last type of breathing is the diaphragmatic breath, which is the best for public speaking. The breath is inhaled using the diaphragm muscle which expands with air, slightly pushes the stomach out upon inhalation, and slowly relaxes back down during an exhale.

This is a controlled breath resulting in full sound which is supported and NOT breathy sounding or shallow. If you find yourself running out of breath when speaking in public, the good news is that the diaphragm is like any other muscle and it can be trained with practice. Try lying down on a floor on your back and put the largest book you can find on your abdomen, right around the belly button. As you inhale, the book goes up towards the ceiling. When you exhale, it pulls back down to the floor. Practice pushing the book up with an inhale on a count to ten and then controlling the exhale on a count from ten to one. You can work to extend how long you are able to inhale and exhale for, thus increasing your ability to speak with full sound. ALWAYS take a breath when you need it. The right type of breathing will not make you dizzy. When you’re comfortable with controlling your breath, try counting out loud as you exhale and stop when your voice trails off or becomes unsupported.

In this TEDx talk, singer and actor Gina Razón talks about the importance of breathing.

You can view the transcript for “Learning to Breathe Again | Gina Razón | TEDxCambridge” here (opens in new window).

Here is the video with accurate captions: Learning to Breathe Again | Gina Razon | TEDxCambridge (opens in new window).

Articulation

In addition to controlling your breath as you speak, also consider how you speak. If you have ever had someone ask you to repeat a word, you may suffer from poor articulation. In a public speaking situation, a listener cannot request a repeat and therefore poor articulation can make a listener tune out. Articulation (sometimes called diction) is what helps the listener not just hear the spoken word but also understand it.

Articulation deals with how clearly you pronounce words. When some sounds are slurred together or dropped out of a word, the word may not be understood by the audience. To use proper articulation, use your articulators: tongue, teeth, and lips. It is important to say all parts of the word in order to speak clearly. This often requires slowing down your speaking pace in order to use your lips, teeth, and tongue to their full capacity.

Tongue twisters are a great way to force yourself to slow down and pronounce each part of the word. Try saying, “Seven silly swans swam silently seaward” three times quickly. If that was easy for you, s’s may be your forte! Each individual speaker will struggle with certain sounds specific to them, or have developed a regionalism that makes them pronounce a word the way they’ve always heard it, but that doesn’t work in other parts of the country. A technique to making sure your speech isn’t affected by problem words is to note which sounds are struggles and circling the parts of the word on the speech outline. This serves as a reminder to take extra care when speaking that word out loud. Working on articulation will improve the understanding of the audience and give polish to your speech.

Pitch

In addition to speaking clearly, finding vocal variety in your speaking voice will help the audience stay awake. A voice that lacks variety can be described as monotone. When the audience hears a monotone voice, they don’t stay engaged.

Much like a keyboard, your voice has many notes to it called pitches. Your voice can speak on higher notes and lower notes much like when someone sings. To explore the notes in your voice, try this exercise. Stand up on your toes and lift your hands in the air. Say “ah” at the highest point of your voice, which makes sound come out, and drop your wrists, elbows, and head over as you slide down to your lowest note. Reverse it and come back up trying to go higher and lower each time. Having discovered how much pitch variety you have to work with, you can now put arrows into your speech outline reminding you to raise the pitch or lower it on some words or phrases to be more effective.

Rate

Next to being loud enough, the most commonly identified speech problem is speaking too quickly. Have you ever been told you’re a fast talker? Controlling the rate at which you speak is often one of the most challenging things you have to do. When nerves kick in, it can be really hard to pull back on the speed that you’re talking at as sometimes you just want to finish and get out of the spotlight. Speaking too quickly can also make your audience stop listening to the speech.

According to The National Center for Voice and Speech, the average speaking rate for English speakers in the U.S. is around 150 words per minute. In a public speaking situation, you’ll want to speak slower than average, around 125–150 words per minute. (Note that Chicago rapper Twista can say 280 words per minute, or 598 syllalbes in 55 seconds, which is a Guinness world record). Don’t try to do this in your speech.)

One of the ways to control your rate of speech is to make sure you are taking enough breaths. As we discussed above, if you lose control of your breathing, your rate of speech also gets out of control. One of the ways to make sure you breathe enough is to place a mark next to the word in a sentence on your outline to remind yourself to breathe there. A backwards slash (/) is a good signal to use. In order to see if the breath locations work, say your speech out loud. If you find yourself gasping for air at the end of that sentence, there should be another breath added. Punctuations are the clues for where to breathe in a sentence too, so let those be your guide.

Recording yourself is one way to get a sense of your rate of speech. Play the recording back and listen to see if you can hear and understand every word. If not, write notes on your notecards that say SLOW DOWN or BREATHE to remind yourself to do so. Once you’ve mastered a controlled rate of speech, then you are able to play with speeding up and slowing down certain sections. Finding this variety of speed will further engage your audience. Sometimes you speed up to tell a story to develop audience momentum. Sometimes, at the the climax of a story, you pause to build suspense. Incorporating variety in the rate at which you deliver your speech helps engage your audience and create a memorable speech.

Emphasis

One of the things your voice does naturally is emphasize certain words in a sentence. This emphasis tells the listener what’s important in the sentence and brings clarity of meaning. For example, in the old tongue twister “Sally sells seashells by the seashore,” you decide what is most important for the audience through the emphasis in your voice. You could get louder or go up to a higher pitch on certain words, which creates variety and calls attention to the important words of a sentence.

If you want to emphasize who is selling the seashells, you’d say “SALLY sells seashells by the seashore.” (This inflection assumes the audience knows Sally and will go look for her.)

If you want to emphasize where Sally is selling the shells, you’d say “Sally sells seashells by the SEASHORE.”

Practice saying these sentences using the emphasis techniques above. Generally, there are at least two important words per sentence. You can underline or bold the words you want to emphasize in each sentence on your speech outline. Again, if your voice lacks such variety, you may sound monotone.

Volume

Have you ever been talking and seen the person you were talking to cup their ear and ask, “what?” to whatever you were saying? Most likely, this action means they couldn’t hear you. In addition to being fast talkers, some of us are also quiet speakers. This quietness happens for many reasons, from shyness to hearing loss, but is usually something that can be adjusted. To find your optimum volume, it is usually best to get into the room where you’ll be speaking and ask a friend to sit in the back row and see if they can hear you. The other way you can know if people can hear you is by reading the body language of the audience. When listeners can’t hear a speaker, they often lean forward and turn their ear toward the speaker.  If you see that, take note and just raise your voice volume until you see them settle back down into their seat.

If being loud enough is difficult for you, go back to working on your breathing. When you are breathing correctly from the diaphragm, the sound quality is projected naturally from the stomach area and can more easily travel out of your mouth to the back of a room. As you speak, think about your voice being a ball that hits the back wall behind the audience and aim for that wall.

Volume can also be varied to give some energy and excitement to your speech. Just as you can choose to talk slower or faster with your rate of speech, you can also pick words or phrases to be louder or softer when you speak. Raising your voice can perk up an audience. Going softer can also make them lean in to hear what you are saying. Be careful when using a soft voice to not be so soft you can’t be heard. If you use proper, and even a bit overly done, diction when being softer, the audience will still hear you. Mark in your notes or speaking outline where you will get louder or softer.

Pauses

One final note about pausing. Instead of using the filler words such as ah and um, try to take a breath to pause instead. Speakers sometimes feel the pressure to fill dead air with sound. Resist this urge. In fact, while you may be looking through your notecards for something you wanted to mention, a pause gives the audience time to catch up and absorb what you’ve just said. Our nervousness often makes us want to fill the space so the audience doesn’t get bored. There’s no need to do so. Ahs and ums can also make a speaker sound unprofessional and lacking in confidence, so do the best you can to eliminate those vocalized pauses from your speech.

Combining all these vocal practices will make you sound like a polished speaker!

The following two videos talk about different aspects of vocal delivery.

MIT voice expert and researcher Rébecca Kleinberger talks about the three voices humans have: the outward voice, the inward voice, and the inner voice. Kleinberger’s account here helps to explain why our own voice—which we hear all the time—sounds so unfamiliar to us when we hear it in a recording. It also speaks to the need to practice listening to your voice in recordings.

You can view the transcript for “Why you don’t like the sound of your own voice | Rébecca Kleinberger” here (opens in new window).

In the spoken part of the following PopTech talk, improvisational performer and musician Reggie Watts manipulates various aspects of vocal delivery: pitch, rate, emphasis, volume, and pauses, to make total nonsense sound like the kind of speech you’d hear at a conference like PopTech or TED. This is a long talk.  One important part for the purposes of public speaking starts at 12:28, where Watts does a remarkable imitation of TED or PopTech style speeches. The words are ridiculous, but the loaded pauses and changes in pace and pitch make this nonsense sound profound.

You can view the transcript for “Reggie Watts: A send-off in style” here (opens in new window).

Here is the video with accurate captions: Reggie Watts: A send-off in style (opens in new window).