0251 - How To Sound Happy And Friendly… And Sad

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

English - September 07, 2021 23:01 - 4 minutes - 3.02 MB - ★★★★ - 4 ratings
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0251 - How To Sound Happy And Friendly… And Sad

When you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you. But what if they can't see you? What if they can just hear you?

Smile and raise your eyebrows.

That’s because smiling affects how we speak, to the point that listeners can identify the type of smile based on sound alone, according to a study by scientists at the University of Portsmouth.[1]

The research suggests smiling and other expressions pack a strong informational punch and may even impact us on a subliminal level. It's believed that some 50 different types of smiles exist, ranging from triumphant ones to those that convey bitterness.

The research lead author Amy Drahota said "When we listen to people speaking, we may be picking up on all sorts of cues, even unconsciously, which help us to interpret the speaker".

Researchers identified three different types of smiles when they asked contributors to read the same answer “I do in the summer” to different increasingly unusual questions:

The Duchenne smile - where the lips are drawn back, the cheeks are raised and you get little crows-feet wrinkles around the eyes.

The non-Duchenne smile – which is similar but less intense smile, without the crows-feet wrinkles around the eyes.

The suppressed smile – when a someone is trying not to smile while they’re speaking perhaps because they are trying to remain serious pulling their lips in or down as they speak.

No smile - where people just speaking normally.

The smiles were categorised, and were then played back to another group of people who were asked whether they thought the ‘answerer’ was smiling as they spoke, and most people were good at hearing the Duchenne smile.

“A voice contains a variety of acoustical characteristics” said Drahota. “It’s possible that we interpret these ‘flavours’ in someone’s voice almost without noticing.”

I know a voice talent who puts rubber ducks on top of their screen because it made them smile. Someone else puts a mirror in front of them, so they make sure they’re smiling as they’re reading.

And as for a sad tone, a voice-over colleague once told me that when her mother died – and she had some ‘sad reads’ to complete, so just went into the ‘grieving zone’ and thought of her mum to help her.

Of course that’s not necessarily something you can do, but you could watched a sad video on YouTube, to bring you to tears, or at least put you in that emotional mindset.

[1] Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18255131&t=1603124379938 ;

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080111224745.htm ; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2007.10.001

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