When Your Voice Sounds Flat: Five Ways to Practice Vocal Expression

Like most of my posts, this one was also inspired by a recent interaction. If you feel that your speech is too fast or too slow, or that your pitch is too high or too low (sorry, I got carried away… 🙊), and you emphasize every word like it’ll save humanity from extinction, or you sound like a flatlined life support machine, this post may be for you.

Let’s explore some fun and playful exercises we use in PREXcoaching® that can help you nail your vocal delivery.

Clearly, the aim of these exercises is not to turn you into a drama queen of expression, but to help you stretch, recognize and acknowledge your vocal capabilities and find your unique, authentic voice. Literally and figuratively.

Useful terms

And now for my favorite part – the nerdy bits! If you’re not a geeky geek like me, feel free to skip ahead. 😉

If you’re still here…

A useful term to know is – prosody. Simply put, prosody is the rhythm and musicality of speech.

In this post, we will focus only on basic elements and their practical influence on speech, i.e., how they help us follow and focus on what’s important. If you’re interested in learning more, check out what Britannica has to say on the matter.

And now the elements:

Pitch is how your voice sounds: high or low. It is used to create contrast, and quite often, we use lower pitch for serious matters, and higher when we are happy or excited.

Pace is the speed at which we speak. Among other things, we use it to add energy, draw attention, or build suspense.

Volume is how loud or soft you sound. We tend to speak more softly to create intimacy or more loudly to emphasize. However, louder does not always equate to more important. For instance, whispering can, among other things, create intimacy or emphasis.

Pauses allow us to process, chunk ideas, or anticipate what’s next. Hence the term “dramatic pause.”

Emphasis helps us highlight certain words or expressions, and we can achieve it in various ways, such as through stress, length, or pitch. THIS is important!

And finally, intonation is how your pitch fluctuates in a phrase or a sentence. For example, did you know that some questions have a rising intonation? Then again, most statements fall.

So, if you’re about to make an important point, you might want to slow down, pause, and emphasize the key word(s), maybe even lower your pitch.

Useful exercises

And now from theory to practice: here are five useful exercises and a little hardcore bonus for the brave ones. 😉

#1: Stress It!

This is one of the simplest exercises ever, and it’s used in many different areas, from teaching languages to public speaking.

First, we need a sentence, and then, we need to stress each part of it individually.

I usually like to use relevant examples, such as I stole all the presents! for Christmas, but let’s use the sentence Jesse Schell used in his book, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. (Okay, this is just one of those moments where I not-so-subtly hint that you should read the book if you’re interested in creating interactive, playful, and engaging learning experiences. Yes, I know the book is more referenced in the context of video games, but trust me on this one!)

Here’s the famous sentence:

I am a game designer.

Let’s read it five times and stress each part:

I am a game designer.
I am a game designer.
I am a game designer.
I am a game designer.
I am a game designer.

Please be mindful of articles, especially if you’re not a native speaker.

As you can notice, the emphasis shifts the focus or suggests a different implication, which shapes the way a message comes across.

After we’ve stressed each part separately, we are going to read the sentence again, this time five times in a row, while keeping a different stress pattern each time. We’re going to read all five versions in one go, as if they were a short piece of text, and as fast as we can.

And after that, especially if you have a partner, the partner can shout out different numbers (in this case from one to five, each matching the stress pattern), and you can say the corresponding sentence version aloud.

This way, not only do you practice accentuating different parts of a sentence, but you also practice making quick shifts between them while keeping track of which word to emphasize.

#2: Emotional Roller Coaster

Here’s another simple game. We still need a simple sentence, though this time, the focus is on expressing our voice by saying the same sentence with different emotions.

We usually go for ten different emotions, and a more advanced variant includes adding things such as quirks or idiosyncrasies.

For example, we can use a sentence such as:

My cat has died.

and say it in a confused, cheerful, or flirty way.

Bonus modes include similar emotions and/or quirks such as happy, excited, thrilled, ecstatic; sad, disappointed, dejected, devastated; or perhaps even flirty, sexy, erotic, and horny.

Here we learn how to use prosodic elements in relation to emotive expressions.

#3: Vocal Mode On

This is my favorite activity. It’s simple, straightforward, and there are gazillions of variations in how to do it.

First, we need a short paragraph. This can be part of a poem, a bigger tongue twister, a text packed with words that are difficult or tricky to pronounce, alliterative passages, or even tautograms. (FYI: a tautogram is a piece of writing where every word starts with the same letter.)

Today, we will be using the following famous tongue twister, mainly because it’s my favorite, and I like to complicate things.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked;
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

We are going to read it by changing one feature at a time, such as as high as possible, as low as possible, as fast as possible, as slow as possible, as loud as possible, as quiet as possible – but not whispering as whispering is a category of its own, etc.

In the next step, we are going to introduce playful modes such as singing, rapping, whispering, yodeling, etc.

An advanced version is to use a combination of two different variations, such as speaking slowly with a high pitch, whispering really fast, or even alternating the extremes within the same category, for example, by using high and low pitch.

The point of this exercise is to explore our vocal flexibility and see what our voice is capable of doing, and not to find that one “perfect” way to read the paragraph.

#4: Chunk It!

Here is another exercise that includes a paragraph. This can be a random passage of text, but it can also be any of the variants from the previous activity. (Well, go on, check it – I’m not going to repeat myself!)

Let’s take this tautogram here:

Before breakfast, brave bakers bring blueberry biscuits beside brown bread, buttery brioche, bright berry buns. Busy bees buzz beside baked buns; bright-eyed babies, bashful boys, both behold bakers bustling between bubbling kettles, baking trays. Behind Bea’s broad bench, Bea balances bowls, brushes crumbs, bakes buns, brews breakfast beverages, banters brightly beside bashful buyers. By brunch, bakery business booms: buyers browse, bargain, buy; baskets bulge, bakery bells beep, beaming bakers beam. Before bed, bone-tired bakers box biscuits, brush benches, balance books, briefly brag, bow, begin brainstorming bigger batches.

What we need to do here is to divide the tautogram into chunks of various lengths. We can do this randomly, or in a certain pattern. For example, every five words, or every 2-7-2-7 words, etc. If we have a partner, we can kindly ask them to divide the text randomly for us, because kindness is free, so let’s pass it on, as the saying goes. (Don’t judge me, I’m corny like that.)

Once we have chunked the text, we need to read the chunks out loud in one breath. Having done that, we repeat the process for as long as we want, with the same variant if we aren’t satisfied with our performance, or with a new variant each time.

This way, we practice breathing while reading long and short stretches of text. We are also practicing pacing and pausing. Again, the point of the exercise is not to read the text “properly” but to learn how much air we need for different stretches.

#5: Make It Make Sense!

Clearly, one of my favorite activities is conveying meaning through voice, not words.

For this exercise, we need one of the lorem-ipsum generator types. My favorite ones are Cupcake Ipsum or Doggo Ipsum. If you don’t have your own, you can start exploring the ultimate list of lorem ipsum generators here.

Since I’m PMS-ing, let’s use this one from Cupcake Ipsum:

Candy sweet donut I love oat cake marshmallow. Tiramisu wafer cake marshmallow topping. I love shortbread cookie wafer chupa chups jelly beans.

Dessert topping I love chocolate bar marzipan jelly-o. Caramels powder icing I love jelly beans dragée cookie pastry powder. Carrot cake chocolate bar sweet candy canes jelly-o. Donut I love danish marzipan muffin.

Pudding candy canes sweet roll icing halvah lemon drops lollipop I love danish. Jelly brownie candy canes I love sugar plum pudding pastry. Oat cake I love pastry cake cupcake croissant.

As you can see, the wording doesn’t make much sense, though it resembles a perfectly normal English text. This is not important as our primary goal is tonal delivery, not conveying the literal meaning of the words.

This is why we are going to assign or choose a certain role or topic and then present the text as if it makes perfect sense. For example, a CEO presenting annual results, an activist advocating to save the whales, or a team lead relaying the current project status.

Since we can’t rely on the words to carry a clear message, we have to use prosodic elements such as emphasis, pace, pauses, and/or pitch and employ our confidence to make a convincing delivery. The key focus here is on communicating intention.

BONUS: Restrain Yourself!

I have to admit; this is my favorite exercise, my Roman Empire. It’s a hardcore challenge I only give to the bravest ones.

Everyone is assigned a certain role and a situation, but – alas! – we only have one specific category of words we can use.

For example, this may be a presidential candidate giving a speech using fruit names, a priest delivering a sermon using household appliances, or a Miss Universe winner giving an acceptance speech using only footballers’ names.

So even though the role and situation are familiar, the twist is to work within the vocabulary restriction through voice and body language (if/where applicable) to deliver the assigned speech or presentation and make it convincing.

Now, if you think that sounds difficult or too harsh, I would just like to remind you that sometimes my participants are kind enough to let me be part of these activities, and on one such occasion, they tasked me with being a p*rn star promoting her latest movie using only the names of gym equipment.

What can I say? Oh, balls!

Bear in Mind

All of these exercises are practice tools. They are not rules about how everyone should speak. Their purpose is to help you find your own unique and authentic voice, something that is true to you and that expresses how you feel and/or who you are.

Experimenting with emphasis, rhythm, breath and expression in general helps you get acquainted with your own voice’s capabilities and potential limitations, which subsequently results in making more deliberate choices to sound persuasive and convincing when the right moment comes.

These are basic exercises, and though you may not learn “how to speak perfectly”, you will get practical tools that will help you discover “how to sound like you.”

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more challenges in this area, why not try Twisted Teleprompter, a playful speaking activity that gives you unexpected prompts, from simple to quite complicated ones, to work with as you read? 😁