0224 – Tone And Emotion

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English - August 11, 2021 23:01 - 5 minutes - 3.32 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
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0224 – Tone And Emotion

“We often refuse to accept an idea

merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.”

Friedrich Nietzsche - German philosopher

The right words alone won’t necessarily persuade. The tone of your voice matters too if your listeners are to believe what it is you are telling them.

Some people use the term ‘tone’ when they mean ‘pitch’. Again, this can be confusing, as the English phrase ‘tone of voice’ means something quite different, and usually it is derogative.[1]

However a ‘tone’ can actually be a useful way to talk about an vocal ‘attitude’ in a presentation, perhaps an ‘authoritative tone’ or one that is ‘snarky’, ‘business-like’ or even ‘girl-next-door’. Most people can pretend to have a certain tone when needed – when sending the children to bed for instance!

It may also refer to an age: ‘an older tone’, ‘the tone of a schoolboy’.

So you can see why it is important to distinguish between ‘tone’ and ‘pitch’ as two different vocal describers?[2]

Listeners may pick up a tone in your voice that you don’t mean to be there: almost imperceptible changes will be made to your sound if you have an underlying emotion, perhaps something going on in your personal life. After all, how often have you perhaps spoken to a friend on the phone and after a few moments said “Are you OK? You sound a bit different…”

“How are you?” – the tone of this simple question can be altered to mean several things: a bright greeting for which no response is anticipated, a genuine health enquiry of someone’s maybe after a bereavement, a reciprocal personal request as part of a conversation.[3]

So, if ‘pitch’ is the register of the voice, high and low, then ‘tone’ has more to do with the emotion of the voice – whatever the pitch is.

So you could in-tone a serious emotion in reporting on a disaster or concern for a missing child, happiness when reporting a pleasant weather forecast, elation when reading a commercial about a great sale, and humour when telling of some harmless mistake or incident.

Tone can have a huge impact on how your listeners feel about you, and what they think of what you’re telling them. If there is a disconnect between the words and the tone – for example if you say “I’m really passionate about this…” but in a disinterested voice – it could be the difference between someone thinking “Wow, they’re trustworthy!” to “Wow! What a tosser”.

[1] “Don’t take that tone with me…” or “I don’t like your tone of voice…” is sometimes said to a person who is talking in a disrespectful or condescending way, when the listener believes they should be spoken to more respectfully.

[2] A ‘tone’ in musicality may mean something a bit different, referring more to the bass or treble of a sound.

[3] Adapted from “Making Radio” Steve Ahern and Georgia Brown, Allen and Unwin, 2006

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