0237 – Tonal Changes From Heavy to Light

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

English - August 24, 2021 23:01 - 5 minutes - 3.56 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
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Previous Episode: 0236 – Rehearse Your Tone With These Real Scripts

Next Episode: 0238 -The Tonal Construct for a Presenter

0237 – Tonal changes from heavy to light

Serious/sad – another sad story from the ‘universal emotions’ file. A serious tone, perhaps tinged with a hint of resignation as if to say “everyone had not dare fear the worse but…”. If you were reading this on a station closer to this event, and perhaps had this story as a lead in the bulletin, the tone may become slightly more serious as friends and relatives of the family concerned may be hearing the news for the first time.

A body has been found by emergency services searching for a girl who'd fallen into the water near Loch Lomond in West Dunbartonshire. The alarm was raised in Balloch yesterday evening. In Norfolk, a woman in her thirties has died after getting into difficulties in the sea at the village of Waxham.

Lighter – a lighter story to end the bulletin. It’s not ‘fun’ and certainly not ‘funny’ but conjures up pictures in one’s mind of metal detectorists, raises questions of “what if I’d found them…”

A hoard of Bronze Age artefacts has been discovered in the Scottish Borders. The find is considered to be of national significance. It includes a complete horse harness -- preserved by the soil -- and a sword, which have been dated as being from 1000 to 900 BC.

So, when you look at a script you have to have to work out the appropriate tone in which to read it, and you do that by finding the emotion or feeling that is trying to be evoked by the content and context.

It is vital to get the tone of your news presentation just right. You need to sound authoritative yet natural and informal. And as we will see later, you need to have the speed of your reading just right and inject the correct amount of ‘light’ and ‘shade’ of intonation in your voice. Talking fast and loud does not mean you sound more urgent or dramatic; often it is quite the reverse. As in many things, the key is in finding the correct balance.

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