0205 – An Introduction to Pitch

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

English - July 23, 2021 23:01 - 3 minutes - 2.35 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
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Previous Episode: 0204 – Don’t Be Too Much

Next Episode: 0206 - So what is ‘pitch’?

0205 – An Introduction to Pitch

“Words mean more than what is set down on paper.

It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning”

Maya Angelou - Poet and civil rights activist

Definitions

I try to be very careful when using language around voice, because of how terms have been used over time and the effects that’s had on people’s perceptions of explanations.

Pitch, tone and intonation all refer to different aspects of our voice.

Pitch is the degree of highness or lowness with which one speaks. For example, some people naturally have a high-pitched voice. Emotional factors can also affect the pitch of someone's voice. For example, people may speak in a lower pitch when they are tired. Surprise may make them speak in a higher pitch than usual.

Tone usually refers to the emotion that is conveyed in the voice. Think about the expression "I didn't like his tone of voice" or to a teenager “Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice!”. Tone can show anger, impatience, etc.

Intonation is the weight or pitch one puts on an individual word. Cadence refers to the music of a language; that is how it rises and falls over a chunk of speech (sentence, phrase, group of sentences).

We’ll look at each of these in turn.

Pitch and tone come under the heading of ‘emotional prosody’ or ‘affective prosody’ which refers to the various non-verbal aspects of language that allow people to convey or understand emotion.

It includes someone’s tone of voice conveyed through changes in pitch, loudness, timbre, speed, and pauses.

These elements are particularly important in audio work where the listener cannot read facial clues to help determine an emotion.

Through these around-5-minute episodes, you can build your confidence and competence with advice on breathing and reading, inflection and projection, the roles played by better scripting and better sitting, mic techniques and voice care tips... with exercises and anecdotes from a career spent in TV and radio studios. If you're wondering about how to start a podcast, or have had one for a while - download every episode!

And as themes develop over the weeks (that is, they are not random topics day-by-day), this is a free, course to help you GET A BETTER BROADCAST, PODCAST AND VIDEO VOICE.

Look out for more details of the book during 2021.

Contacts: https://linktr.ee/Peter_Stewart

Peter has been around voice and audio all his working life and has trained hundreds of broadcasters in all styles of radio from pop music stations such as Capital FM and BBC Radio 1 to Heart FM, the classical music station BBC Radio 3 and regional BBC stations. He’s trained news presenters on regional TV, the BBC News Channel and on flagship programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama. Other trainees have been music presenters, breakfast show hosts, travel news presenters and voice-over artists.

He has written a number of books on audio and video presentation and production (“Essential Radio Journalism”, “JournoLists”, two editions of “Essential Radio Skills” and three editions of “Broadcast Journalism”) and has written on voice and presentation skills in the BBC’s in-house newspaper “Ariel”.

Peter has presented hundreds of radio shows (you may have heard him on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, Virgin Radio or Kiss, as well as BBC regional radio) with formats as diverse as music-presentation, interview shows, ‘special’ programmes for elections and budgets, live outside broadcasts and commentaries and even the occasional sports, gardening and dedication programmes. He has read several thousand news bulletins, and hosted nearly 2,000 podcast episodes, and is a vocal image consultant advising in all aspects of voice and speech training for presenters on radio and TV, podcasts and YouTube, voiceovers and videocalls.

The podcast title refers to those who may wish to change their speaking voice in some way. It is not a suggestion that anyone should, or be pressured into needing to. We love accents and dialects, and are well aware that how we speak changes over time. The key is: is your voice successfully communicating your message, so it is being understood (and potentially being acted upon) by your target audience?

This podcast is London-based and examples are spoken in the RP (Received Pronunciation) / standard-English / BBC English pronunciation, although invariably applicable to other languages, accents and dialects.

Music credits:

"Bleeping Demo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7012-bleeping-demo