0215 – Lowering Your Pitch

Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

0215 – Lowering Your Pitch

Lowering your pitch

Your register is not only dictated by the speed your vocal folds vibrate, but also how taught they are. So, it stands to reason that to lower it, your folds need to be less-taught. They cannot be relaxed by themselves, but only with the rest of the body. So, less stress, better posture and breathing, will all contribute to a more relaxed state overall … and so slightly lower the pitch of your voice.

Refer back to the 1-10 range mentioned before. Some people seat their pitch in the lower half of that range – they may naturally be a 5, but force themselves to start at a 4 or 3. They do this in the belief that it makes them sound more masculine, authoritative or believable.

But as we saw before, if you start too low for an ‘ordinary’ story and then you need to inject a bit of gravitas for a more serious one, what do you do? You’re already at the limit. If you start to low… you’ve got nowhere to go!

As we saw earlier when we looked at resonance, the sound of your voice is partly determined by the structure within which it moves. The sound of a tuba is different from that of a piccolo. And a lot of your body is a resonator for your voice. I’ve seen it described like this: the head is like a smaller speaker for higher frequencies, and your chest is a subwoofer for the mids and lows.

A slightly deeper voice can be obtained (should you want one) by having more of a ‘chest sound’ and that’s done by lowering the position of your larynx, done with the same movement as happens when you yawn.

Famously former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher lowered her voice while in office, to give herself more gravitas[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28_0gXLKLbk and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRQwLrpX61M

Audio recording script and show notes (c) 2021 Peter Stewart

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)

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

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"Beauty Flow" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5025-beauty-flow

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"Envision" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4706-envision

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"Limit 70" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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"Rising Tide" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5027-rising-tide

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"Wholesome" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

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