The Reality Method 2.0

Art of Conversation: Vocal Strength & Projection

Due to popular demand, below is the summation of the best quick tricks and concepts I know with which to strengthen your voice, and make it louder and clearer.

You might also call this post “How to Yell” but really, yelling as we think of it (as a baseball game, or when angry) is typically associated with extra effort, strain on your voice, or even getting hoarse — the very opposite of what I want to teach here.

A few years ago I took time off work to see a voice coach. I was lucky enough to find a guy in my local city who had done vocal coaching and training for big choirs as well as established operatic singers. He taught me a lot, and I’m going to share the best and most practical bits of what I learned in this post.

Your Voice is an Instrument
Think of your voice as a wind instrument, just like a trumpet, bassoon, saxophone, or whatever. Just like a wind instrument, your voice needs to be taken care of, tuned regularly, and used well (i.e. not abused).

Here are some tips on how to take proper care of your voice.

#1 - Drink plenty of fluids. If you’re dehydrated and your throat isn’t lubricated properly, your voice won’t sound it’s best, and speaking will take more effort (especially speaking loudly). Staying hydrated also has numerous health benefits. The average person needs to drinks 1-2 liters of water per day to stay hydrated.

#2 - Don’t force-whisper or stage whisper. Anytime you feel that the force of your speaking voice is coming from your vocal cords or your throat, you’re putting unnecessary strain on your vocal cords. Don’t try to make a whisper “carry” — instead just talk at a regular volume. Save the whispering for when someone is actually very close to you.

#3 - Warm up your voice before you’re going to need it. If you know you’re about to go into a noisy environment where you’ll have to shout to be heard — a noisy club, or a loud factory floor — do some humming exercises, or talk to yourself out loud, to get blood flowing to your vocal cords. I used to have a sales job that required lots of phone calls, so before I started in on my calls for the day, I would spend 5-10 minutes “warming up” my voice so it was ready to be used as a sales tool over the phone.

#4 - Don’t use your voice improperly, and we’ll look in the next section at exactly how to use your voice PROPERLY, but the general rule of thumb is: if your voice hurts, stop doing whatever it is that is making it hurt, whether it be screaming, a weird noise, an odd imitation, etc.

How to Use your Voice Properly
Your voice is a lot like a jumbo jet: it is strong yet delicate, and it has the power to transport hundreds of people to entirely new worlds.

Laugh if you want, but as cheesy as it is, it’s a good analogy. It’s hard to overestimate how powerful a really well-used and well-trained voice can be, in this age of wireless microphones and other amplification technology, where almost nobody takes the time and energy to improve their speaking voice.

Before electric power and sound equipment, there were great orators — especially some Revivalist preachers — who would speak to crowds of thousands or tens of thousands — unaided. I can only imagine they must have taken advantage of some of these techniques, as well as natural geography (punchbowl-shaped natural amphitheaters and so forth).

Going back to the jet example, your vocal cords are sort of like the ailerons (or elevators, or any other control surfaces) of that jet. They are therefore the most important part of your voice; they literally steer your voice and allow you to modulate tone, pitch, frequency, and loudness.

See, the vocal cords are really just that — a set of two cords that flutter in the breeze generated by your lungs as your breath is expelled up from your belly, past your cords, out past your tongue (which helps shape the breath into speech) and past your teeth and lips (which put the final spin on your words).

The cords, you see, really don’t generate power on their own — instead, they shape the power of your breath as it passes over them.

What is responsible for vocal power is not how hard your cords are working, but how much air is passing over them.

The Wrong Way
When you hear people screaming or shouting, and they go hoarse, it’s because they are using their vocal cords incorrectly; they are trying to use them to generate power.

What happens when people do this? Well, in their mind, they conceptually think that a strong voice comes from the throat, and so they screech or scream from that location. What this does, physically, is simply bang the vocal cords together, like cymbals.

Now while this gives them some volume and sound in the short term, the vocal cords were never designed to be banged together, and so eventually they get aggravated, swell up, and shut down — and the person goes hoarse.

The Right Way to Build Vocal Strength
Given the anatomy and how the vocal cords function, vocal strength is more a function of your ability to provide a good supply of air to your vocal cords, than a function of how well you can slap your vocal cords together.

When you speak, the power of your voice should not be coming from your vocal cords (throat). It should actually be coming from your diaphragm — but nobody knows where the diaphragm is, so I tell people to envision that it comes from the very, very bottom of their belly, about two inches below and behind their belly button. Yeah, we’re talking about practically sitting in your bowels.

Do this exercise. Put a hand on your belly, and your other hand on the back of your spine, right above your tail bone. In other words, put one hand in front of the other, with your lower torso in between, like you were about to take a bow.

Now, take a deep breath — but instead of trying to fill up your chest cavity by puffing up your chest and shoulders, try to push your hand (the one on your belly) as far away from your spine as possible.

This causes you to suck air deep, deep down into your lungs past your diaphragm, so you have a good supply with which to start speaking (or shouting).

This is called belly-breathing. Do it for 5-10 breaths, until you can clearly identify where the air needs to go to expand your stomach and push your hand away.

Now, hold your other hand (the one that was on your back) out at arm’s length from your face, and hold one finger up (like you were telling someone “wait just a minute”). Pretend that this finger is candle, and you’re going to blow on it, not hard enough to extinguish it, but just enough to make it flicker.

Do it with a real candle if you feel brave, but watch out for dripping wax.

Take a deep belly-breath, and then blow out directly towards your finger. Try to regulate the air flow so that you can blow on the “candle” for 10 seconds. Gauge how hard you are blowing and how fast you are going through your air reserve by how much breeze you can feel on your finger.

Repeat this exercise frequently. This will help you build lung and air capacity, and also teach you to moderate the rate at which you release air.

The second level of this exercise is more fun, and a LOT more challenging.

Take a small square of paper (maybe 2″ x 2″ or 4″ x 4″). A sticky note or 3×5″ index card would work as well, but if you use a sticky note turn the sticky side towards you.

Go to the nearest wall, and put this piece of paper up against it. Stand maybe six inches to a foot away from the wall. While holding the paper in place, start blowing on it — and then let go, and try to pin the paper to the wall using your breath alone.

This is like the push-ups of vocal exercises — it builds lung capacity and strength, helps you focus your air flow, you can extend it for as you like. Try using bigger sheets of paper for more challenge, or standing farther away. Keep in mind that the greater your lung capacity, the more air you have to work with (working out heavily also builds lung capacity quickly).

So, with those two exercises, we’re going to assume you now have awesome lung capacity, and also have mastered the concept of gradually releasing your air supply. Now we move on to Projection.

Vocal Projection
Projection is really all about “throwing” your voice. Once you have the basic concepts of belly-breathing and proper use of your vocal cords in place, it’s actually quite easy.

Start by imagining that all the breath you have in your belly is a big ball of energy (it is). Then, start blowing it out just like in the candle and paper exercises, above, only this time add some tone to it — a wordless sound, or better yet, shape a particular word around the breath you are expelling. Practice doing this until you have a good idea of how many words you can get out on a breath, and practice going up and down the scale (from high to low and back again) without pausing between tones. Even just adding the vowels (”A-E-I-O-U”) to your breath is a good start.

Once you’ve done that, and gotten used to forming words out of the air you are expelling, keep all those concepts in mind and start speaking in a booming, stentorian voice — as though you were talking to an entire concert hall.

It helps to be standing up, with good posture, chest out and shoulders back (not hunched). Look across the room from you and choose a target — a TV, couch, flower pot, whatever — and project your voice as though your words were missiles that were going to strike that object and knock it over.

Think of it like this. The air you inhale is a big formless ball of energy in your gut. When you start releasing it, you make it a stream of energy — a very thin, focused and powerful stream that resonates over your vocal cords.

Once this stream gets into your mouth, it gets further carved up by your tongue, palate, teeth and lips — you want the stream of energy to come angling up from the back of your throat, hit the roof of your mouth (palate) and get chopped up and shaped into words by your tongue (especially the tip of your tongue) and blast out past your teeth, getting a goodbye kiss from your lips.

But always remember: the power of our words isn’t created by your mouth; it’s created by your belly and air capacity. Don’t think of launching missiles from your teeth, think of using your cords, tongue, teeth and lips to controlling a fire hose that is spraying up from your belly.

I know it sounds crazy, but that’s how it works.

So let’s get back to projecting. We’re standing with good posture, and our voice is reaching out to smash the flower pot. Now, you may be pretty pleased with yourself so far, and you should be — but there’s more your voice can do.

Being mindful of your air supply and keeping all the previous concepts in mind, take another breath, but this time choose another target for your projection — a target MUCH farther away. When I first learned this I choose the garbage can across the street, visible through the room’s picture window.

Try it, it works. Pick a target 25-50 feet away and “project” as though your voice was pitched for that object alone. You will be surprised at how much voice you have and how far it actually carries.

When I first did this I was literally speaking with enough power that the garbage can across the street could hear me (if it had ears), and it was making the room ring.

Bringing It All Together — Vocal Strength and Project in Action
So how does all this look? Well, roughly like this:

It’s a typical Friday night. I’m going to go out, but as part of my routine of getting ready, I do some vocal exercises, humming and singing to myself while I shower and dress.

On my way out the door, I make some phone calls, focusing on projecting my voice through the phone receiver as a way to warm-up my voice and get my vocal cords limber, and get in the “projection” mindset.

As I meet my boys at the first neighborhood bar, I make sure to greet them from far away, throwing my voice so they can easily hear me. I’m pleased by how clear and resonant my voice sounds, even in the relative quiet of the neighborhood street. My upper chest and throat feels warm, flushed with rich nourishing blood.

By the time we’ve had a few drinks and moved further downtown to a large club, I’ve worked out in my full range for the night, from the low murmurs of intimate conversation to the higher-pitched cutting tones of laughter.

We get into a dark nightclub. As usual, the bass is thumping, heavy and oppressive, and as we shoulder our way to the bar, I see guys all around me leaning in to girls, shouting in their ears, and the uncomprehending looks on the girls faces’ as they try to figure out what the hell was just said. I smile insouciantly at their amateurism.

There’s a cute girl two people down that I notice as I wait for my drink. “Hey!” I shout without thinking, throwing my voice at her like a physical thing while also pitching it in a high octave, to cut across the deep bass in the club. It works; she swivels her head to look at me. “You! C’mere!” I shout again, in the same pitch. My higher voice turns a few other heads around the bar, and makes the bartenders swivel in confusion, because higher pitches always carry and cut over the deep bass in clubs — but I’m indifferent to that social pressure of having people stare at me.

Me? she mouths soundlessly, not trusting her own voice to reach me, while pointing to herself.

Yes, you I mouth back, pointing a finger at her and then flipping it back towards myself in the “come-hither” motion, sparing everyone from hearing my big scary voice again.

She dutifully trudges over until she’s close enough for me to speak at a more normal, but still elevated, tone: “Hey, what’s up?”

“Nothin’,” she replies. “Why am I here?”

Before I can reply, a big, 6′2″ muscular guy walks up from her left. “Hey, buddy,” he pushes out, obviously trying to claim this girl as his own. I ignore him.

“Are you a horse person?” I engage the girl, holding her gaze with my eyes and speaking steadily and in a very flowing tone, leaning back, no extra effort needed to make myself heard.

“What?” The girl is reeled in, not sure she’s understood me, and trying to make herself heard.

“Hey, buddy–” the big guy again, moving closer because it’s hard for him to be heard otherwise.

“You remind me of a girl I knew in grade school, who thought she was a horse! It was so cute! She jumped around like a My Little Pony all the time….” I’m reeling out a random story in a clear, clarion voice. The girl is clearly intrigued.

The big guy comes up and starts trying to whisper in her ear, but I am nonreactive to him and keep talking to her, engaging her with steady eye contact and my steady, clear voice. His value plummets in her eyes as he tries desperately to make himself heard and draw her off — instead, she continues to focus on me, captivated by my clear voice, and drawn in closer since she can’t match it.

Of course, with enough time he would probably physically drag her away, so my wingman swoops in and engages him, also with a better voice. The guy is blocked out and the girl is all mine.

I chat with her for a bit more, hold her hand for a minute, and then smile as I send her back to her friends, promising to catch up later in the night. Any anxiety I felt has fled, I have made a new friend, and most importantly, the power of my voice has not let me down. I am warmed up and primed to have other good interactions. And the night is young.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also want to check out Parts I and Part II of the series Art of Conversation, on Opening and Vibing, respectively.

Related Articles:

• Why You Should 'Sarge'
• Art of Conversation: Part III, Managing Threads
• Art of Conversation - Part II, Vibing
• Art of Conversation - Part I, Opening