What techniques can improve your vocal variety during presentations?

Ideally your ‘resting pitch’ will be your most resonant tone, somewhere in the middle of your chest voice pitch range, where you can feel a bit of buzzing in your nose and cheeks. Rest here and you will find your voice tires less quickly. And from there, use pitches above and below - higher pitches for excitement or emphasis, lower pitches (especially as part of a falling cadence with a slowing pace) will give weight to your words. No one wants to listen to a monotone! (For great use of pitch, listen to comedians, who tend to use much more variety of pitch than most people in their speech.)

Just as with pitch you want to speak largely in your mid-pitch resonant tone and then use pitches above and below, with pace you want to develop a clear and measured rhythm to your words, and then add variety. The ideal measured pace probably sounds a little slow to you, but will be the right pace for an audience to hear and understand what you are saying, and then from there you can pick up the pace for anecdotes or excitement, and slow down the pace for key phrases that you want to be remembered. Pitch and pace together go a long way to creating variety in your vocal performance.

The key to pacing is to decide which pieces in your presentation are -important (slower pace for emphasis) -important only because they’re necessary to get to whats important (quicker pace) What do you do with the pieces that you realize are unimportant? -Cut them out ??

A pause is like a lull/silence in a conversation - it creates a space thats hearer wants to be filled. Longer pauses put your listeners back into their minds than on your words. -Highly effective to introduce/highlight variety (new topic, direction, pacing, etc) -Increasingly uncomfortable the longer they last Easy way to start using pauses: after you ask a question Longer pauses emphasize to listeners you want them to really think about the question (you’re communicating: fill the space with your thoughts) Shorter pauses to highlight how obvious a point is (you’re communicating: not much thought required to see how obvious my point is)

An easy, relaxed flow of breath, properly produced, will support any length of presentation. If you have too much breath pressure or your breathing is too shallow, you will tire your vocal folds. In addition to being essential to support your voice, you can also use the breath to create different tones - for example, add more breath through the tone (and a quicker pace) to make what you are saying sound more exciting; reduce the breathiness and focus the tone to sound more in control and confident.

If you find it difficult to conceptualize any of these concepts, you can find great examples by watching clips from stand-up comedians. As a group, they are the masters of using all of these techniques to great effect. 1. Find a few 2-5 minutes clips from your favorite comedian 2. Pick something to observe (ie their pitch, pacing, etc) 3. Focus only on that aspect of their delivery while you watch each video 4. Repeat steps 1-3 for another favorite comedian for comparison While you’re likely not trying to make your audience laugh as much as possible with your speeches, seeing how stand ups can use these facets in their deliveries can help you understand the concept and brainstorm how best to utilize them for your public speaking.