The Reality Method 2.0

Subcommunication I: Vocals

There’s a lot to be said for non-verbal communication. Different studies have suggested that between 65% (Ray Birdwhistell in Knapp, 1972) and 93% (Mehrabian, 1971) of all communication is nonverbal.

I use the word “subcommunication” a lot on this site, so I thought it was important to clarify what exactly I mean, and how the use of “subcommunication” can help you succeed in having good interactions with women.

Basically, “subcommunication” = nonverbal communication. So, as per the statistics above, it is a HUGE part of our everyday social interactions.

The two basic categories of nonverbal / subcommunication are Body Language and Vocal Subcommunication.

Vocal Subcommunication can further be broken down as follows:

• Vocal clues, called paralanguage
• Tone
• Pitch
• Rhythm
• Loudness

and,

• Stress

I can already tell that this is going to be one of those posts where I wish I was a podcaster, because so much of this stuff is easier to demonstrate by showing than by telling. It’s hard to demonstrate different pitches and timbres of voice, for example, through text.

Why Study Subcommunication?
All of the categories above are subcommunications. You are constantly relaying information to everyone around you by all these “channels” of nonverbal communication.

If your subcommunications are OFF — in other words, if they are saying BAD THINGS about you — you will have a hell of a tough time interacting with women (let alone your boss).

Like Passing Shit Tests, getting your subcommunications in line and speaking congruently with your verbal communications is a HUGE step towards having better interactions with everyone you meet.

There is another reason to become fluent in subcommunication; and that is, so you can better “read” the information being broadcast by everyone else around you.

Women are master communicators. They are sneaky, intuitive, and subtle as hell. Not malicious — subtle.

Women everywhere are SHOUTING at the men around them what they want, how they want it, when they want it, and who they want it from. SHOUTING. Constantly. With their body language, with their eyes, with the way they laugh and talk, with their style of dress, accessories and pets.

Everything you see a woman do has a direct, translatable meaning for the men around her.

The problem is, men, having never been trained as subtle sub-communicators, are blind and deaf to these earnest entreaties.

I bet it drives women crazy!

I know I would have a HUGE problem living as a woman, having to walk into nightclubs hoping the “right” cool guy would come hit on me, and having to basically just stand around all night looking stupid, dancing obsessively, throwing off the right vibe at all the guys I liked and just HOPE they would pick up on it, come over and talk to me.

So these are the two reasons to look deeper into subcommunications and understand them — at least on a rudimentary intellectual level.

1. To be able to selectively choose what information about yourself you will project to the world;

and,

2. To be able to “read” people around you in a more deep, “intuitive” way.

Vocal Subcommunications: Paralanguage

Paralanguage is, among other things, what we *don’t* say.

Quick example. If my sister-in-law invites me to go to a church service with her, and I say

I wouldn’t be opposed to that,

I’m agreeing, right? I wouldn’t be opposed to going to a church service, therefore I am willing to go. But look at the difference in what I said above, versus what I say when my girlfriend asks me if I want to go to a swinger’s ball:

Are you serious? Hell yeah I wanna go to a swinger’s ball! When?!

In the second example, it’s pretty clear that I ABSOLUTELY DO WANT TO GO. In the first, I am merely saying, “I wouldn’t oppose going,” but because I am NOT showing any enthusiasm, the subcommunication is “You can twist my arm. I guess I’ll go. But I’m not excited about it.”

So, if my sister-in-law is a really keen communicator, she will pick up on my LACK OF ENTHUSIASM and say something like, “Well, you don’t have to go. Just a suggestion. We just want to spend more time with you. How ‘about a movie Sunday afternoon instead?”

In that way, she has clarified her actual intention (just to spend time with me, regardless of the venue) and offered a scenario I might be more enthusiastic about.

This is what subtle communication is all about. Reading paralanguage is all about reading people’s hidden intentions and meanings behind the mask of words they say. The words are important, but EQUALLY important are the words they don’t say, and the way they structure the words they DO say.

Another common example. You’re chatting with a woman at a martini bar. The night is getting on. There is a lull in the conversation. She says:

Yeah, I’m pretty bored tonight…I don’t know what I’m doing after this.

A guy who isn’t well-versed in subcommunication may take this literally, and think, “Oh God, I’m boring her…she has no reason to continue talking to me.”

A guy who understand subcommunication, on the other hand, will (probably correctly) interpret that statement to mean

There are no obstacles to us hooking-up. Please take me home and fuck me soon.

Of course, whether or not she actually means that depends on some other circumstances, like her vocal tone, pitch, intonation, etc etc. But I think the general idea is there; for a woman to say she’s “bored” and “doesn’t have any plans” is basically the equivalent of a guy saying, “I would love to take you on a date RIGHT THIS SECOND.”

Women are master communicators, in spite of (and probably because of) the fact that they can’t be explicit in their wishes or desires — especially when it comes to men. Because being explicit would, again, identify them as “slutty”.

There’s more to paralanguage, but that’s enough to get you started thinking about it.

Tone
Did you ever hear your Mom say, “Don’t take that tone with me, young man!” when you were a kid?

That’s because your tone was telling her, “Fuck off, Mom. Get off my back.”

As a guy who was actually physically hit as a kid for using the wrong tonality with my mom, I can fully appreciate the power of Tonality, and the very real emotional impact it has on other people.

It’s a little hard to describe in text, but there are probably several million different “tones” of voice that you can adopt in any one interaction; all of them mean different things, and convey different information.

Tonality is the reason that a girl can say

Why don’t you take me up to my room and fuck me?

And it can mean either, “Why don’t you take me up to my room and fuck me” or “Fuck off, you pathetic asswipe.”

Try playing around with tonality in this way: take a perfectly innocuous sentence and say it with a tonality that will give it the exact opposite meaning as it has on paper; then switch back. See how many different messages you can convey with the same sentence.

BANAL ACADEMIC NOTE: Tonality is also sometimes confused with intonation (which is often mistakenly referred to as inflection, which is actually a grammatical term that has nothing to do with tone or intonation). Because of the confusion of intonation and inflection, I refer instead to tonality here, for clarity’s sake. Both Intonation and Stress are part of branch of acoustic linguistics called prosody (as opposed to melody), and I deal with Stress further down.

Pitch: Not Just for Choirs Anymore
Like a lot of people, my first exposure to the idea of “pitch” took place in choral practice and voice lessons when I was young; the teacher always had that funny little thing called a “pitch pipe” that enabled the choir to know what key to start in. I remember being fascinated with pitch pipes (don’t ask me why; I still haven’t figured that out).

Pitch is just a fancy way of saying what octave your voice is in when you speak. Don’t worry if you don’t know what an octave is; it’s just a unit of measure of “high” or “lowness” of a sound (made by an instrument, or voice, or whatever).

Without getting into the physics definition of base and treble, and how it’s really all just a function of the wavelength of the frequency vibrations, it’s enough to say that a high-pitched voice is generally considered less persuasive and less attractive than a low-pitched voice.

Pitching your voice too low, on the other hand, can make you sound like a creepy stalker. When talking to women, I generally advise to try to pitch your voice one to two octaves lower than your normal speaking voice.

What I really advise is singing or music lessons so you understand octaves and pitch more holistically, but if you haven’t had them or don’t have the opportunity to get them, just practice at home until you find a range that sounds masculine (more masculine than your normal speaking voice, which for some men is quite high) without sounding creepy.

Why do women like lower voices? Without getting too detailed, it’s because a lower, resonating sound is caused not only by greater testosterone levels, but by a larger, more barrel-shaped chest (and resulting air cavity).

I Got Rhythm
If you want to learn to add rhythm to your voice, you can do worse than to study videos of political figures, gospel preachers, or rappers.

(Rappers, incidentally, also typically have a very strong “vibe” quality going on in their speech, of which more in my article on vibing).

Making your speech rhythmic is a way of entrancing your listeners. Human beings have evolved with constant rhythmic influences, from the pounding of wildebeests hooves to the chirping of crickets. Rhythm is in our blood (well, for most of us, anyway).

Rhythmic speech can also be a way to lead your listeners through a journey; pacing their expectations and leading them to the proper destination, while augmenting emotional impact along the way. The best advice I can give here is to listen to very good storytellers and how they tell stories. Both Paul Harvey and Garrison Keilor have good, rhythmic speech which augments their story-telling.

Reading Shakespeare aloud also forces you to speak in a rhythmic fashion because of iambic pentameter; which, incidentally, also mirrors the rhythm of the human heart.

Loudness
Have you ever seen that guy at a bar who is trying to talk to someone, but is speaking way too loud, so everyone in a 20-foot radius can overhear the conversation? That guy’s overcompensating, and his listener is probably embarrassed. Speaking loudly is a way of forcing people to pay attention to you: and although there are some circumstances where you want to do that, there are many more circumstances where it is seen as overcompensating and obnoxious.

Loudness is a double-edged sword. You want to be loud enough to be heard, but not so loud that you annoy people. The biggest problem I’ve seen in guys who are just starting out getting their subcommunications in order is speaking too softly — and this usually has to do with self-image issues, i.e. not wanting to appear too dominant or take up too much “air”, trying to give others more importance than oneself, etc.

If you are one of those guys, all I can say is: OFF with the damned self-sacrifice. You are a man, you have a right to be heard: so speak at a volume where people can HEAR you. Overcompensate for a little while if need be, so you can tell what’s TOO loud and come back into a more “acceptable” range.

Be careful about speaking loudly if you don’t know how to do it properly, as well: I will cover the proper method of Projection and Vocal Cutting in an upcoming post.

Stress
No, I’m not talking about the amount of physical stress you are feeling while talking to a beautiful woman; I’m talking about word stress.

Most people are painfully aware of the different meanings that can be derived from the same sentence based on where the stress is placed on different words. A simple example should suffice:

You should come over sometime.

As opposed to

You should come over sometime.

Or even

You should come over sometime.

I think that one example is enough to get the point across. Listen for where the stress is placed in the sentence, both on words and syllables, not just the words themselves.

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And that’s it for Vocal Subcommunication; hopefully it has been informative (as opposed to boring). Body language coming soon!

Related Articles:

• Art of Conversation: Vocal Strength & Projection
• How to Talk to Complete Strangers Without Anxiety
• Approach Women vs Opening Women
• What is "Chick Logic"?
• Subcommunication II: Body Language
• What Nightclubs are Good For
• Art of Conversation: Part III, Managing Threads
• Art of Conversation - Part II, Vibing
• Art of Conversation - Part I, Opening