How to Improve Your Speaking Voice
The science of vocal aesthetics, as well as tips, tricks, and exercises to make your voice a clear and compelling instrument.
An excerpt from a book I’m working on titled Psychology for World Domination, concerning the art of manipulating people by leveraging the quirks of perception, attention, memory, and decision-making common to all of us. Progress updates here.
What your voice reveals about you
On a day-to-day basis, we give our speaking voice little thought; we are purposeful with our words, but we are much less conscious of the quality of the voice which carries them. Yet our voice reveals a lot about us. We can easily infer a person’s emotional state and even personality just by hearing them speak. For example, it should come as no surprise that extraverts have, on average, louder speaking voices than introverts. Our voices also indicate a plethora of information about our physical appearance such as sex, age, and size.
There’s even evidence that certain vocal qualities are revealing of sexual orientation, though not to the untrained ear. You see, while people have notions of what a voice should sound like based on sexual orientation, categorisation tends to be rather inaccurate and heavily influenced by our expectations. Scientists, however, have found two cross-cultural acoustic qualities—greater variation in intonation and a less breathy voice—which reliably distinguish gay men from straight ones.
Typical and familiar voices are attractive
In psychology, there exists this concept of perceptual fluency. Across all domains, humans prefer stimuli that are easy to process, whether it’s a simple sentence in a printer manual or a face that doesn’t look like a Picasso painting come to life. Likewise, a typical voice requires less brain power to process due to its familiar features and is, therefore, more appealing. For instance, a sex-typical voice facilitates ease of categorisation and for this reason, is judged to be more attractive.
Another reason we are predisposed to favour familiar voices is that they fall under the umbrella of the mere exposure effect. We tend to judge a neutral stimulus favourably after repeated exposure to it (including someone who keeps turning up without drawing attention to themselves). Having proved itself benign each time that it has appeared, such a stimulus is subsequently thought of positively.
Typical voices are average voices, and in matters of aesthetics, ‘average’ is synonymous with attractive. As with physical appearance, voice is subject to the halo effect wherein beauty is confounded with goodness… and competence, kindness, and trustworthiness… and you get the picture. Average is attractive and attractive is virtuous.
Chimeric composite of multiple faces and synthetically merged voices—the more, the merrier—are both judged as much more attractive than any of their individual, constituent components. Speaking of faces, you might have a voice for radio if you don’t have a face for it. If you’re a woman, facial attractiveness will modulate how appealing people find your voice.
...which means sex-stereotypical voices are sexy
Men and women differ in terms of vocal tract length, giving men a deeper voice i.e. one with a lower fundamental frequency or pitch. Back cavity length—another sexually dimorphic characteristic—in men is also a good predictor of vocal attractiveness. (The thoracic cavity is a large hollow space in our bodies, in men, the volume of this space is greater than in women.)
Simply put, properties that play up sex-based physiological differences make a voice more attractive. The closer you are to the prototypical male or female voice (for both fundamental and formant frequencies), the more people will perceive your voice as being attractive. This is because it falls conveniently in line with their internal, mental representation. It should come as no surprise that what’s considered the prototypical female voice is rather an exaggerated feminine ideal and much farther from reality than the prototypical male voice. The ideal woman seems to be a mirage no unaugmented mortal can match.
In matters of vocal aesthetics, women face another setback. While high pitched female voices are judged as attractive (up to a certain point, not exceeding 280 Hz), they are also perceived as being less dominant. Masculine voices are viewed as more desirable for both men and women in leadership positions.
Vocal fashions
Like appearance, vocal aesthetics are subject to the whims and caprices of fashion. Historically, what has been considered an attractive voice has varied just as much, if not more so, than conventions surrounding physical appearance.
Consider this description from an article published in the 1930s which lists the undesirable qualities of a female voice thusly, ‘thinness, huskiness, breathiness, harshness, stridency’. There are a fair few modern-day actresses and singers with trademark husky voices which, on the contrary, seem to bolster their popularity. Interesting enough, breathiness (the amount of air leakage) is a male quality of voice but is perceived as appealing in women too. Perhaps a certain blonde bombshell who once crooned “Happy Birthday, Mr President” is to blame?
Of course, it could be that such actresses and songstresses are popular despite their rather stereotypical tendency toward vocal fry (a creak in the voice at its lowest, natural register)—the latest vocal fashion. Vocal fry was first observed among young, American women. At present, studies show extreme vocal fry is considered neither attractive nor is it associated with trustworthiness or competency.
Although low voices confer an impression of competency for both men and women, this does not seem to be the case with the crackling, “breaking up” quality of vocal fry. This is likely because vocal fry is a speech characteristic primarily associated with young women and as such is a socio-linguistic phenomenon suffering from sexist attitudes. (It’s also a bit irritating.)
And yet, the phenomenon of vocal fry seems to be spreading, crossing and borders and more importantly, across to the male sex. Perhaps this speaking style will become normalised over time, even to the point of being considered highly attractive. Or, as is equally likely, it will be replaced with some entirely new vocal fashion.
Practical exercises and tips to improve your voice
While writing this, I’ve come to realise that what’s considered an optimal voice varies greatly according to context. For example, men with a deep, masculine voice are perceived as good leaders, socially dominant, honest, trustworthy, and possessing physical prowess—all typically attractive qualities. However, women also rate men with such voices as more aggressive, likely to cheat and unlikely to invest in offspring. In that sense, hardly a prime choice of mate. The magical cut-off appears to be 96 Hertz—does that mean at 97 Hz a man could have the best of both worlds? The world is his (singing) oyster? (That’s a reference to 2017’s most viral video, internet historians.)
What I’m trying to say is—in your insatiable urge for world domination—don’t feel as though you ought to lower or raise the pitch of your voice to increase how attractive people find you. Likely you do that subconsciously anyway; both men and women modulate their pitch when in conversation with an attractive member of the opposite sex. (There’s no research on what same-sex attracted people do.)
Rather, you should focus on other important qualities of voice—do you want an attractive voice, or a compelling, effective one? The following exercises will give your voice resonance, expressiveness, brightness, and smoothness. (You may also like to check out the various resources on the Voice Foundation website.)
First, record your voice
Knowledge is power, France is Bacon. You can’t have self-improvement without self-awareness, therefore listening to a recording of your voice is beneficial. Not only will you be able to experience your own voice as others experience it, but you will be able to pick up on various issues that would otherwise go unnoticed. Outside the reverberations of your skull, your voice will have less resonance and a higher pitch—this is, unfortunately, what you sound like to others. Fortunately, we cringe by squinting our eyes rather than our ears, so this is no impediment to the exercise.
Nasal is good
I don’t mean that you should emulate Fran Drescher or Michelle Wolf (unless you’re looking for a career in comedy). However, giving your voice a little bit of a nasal positioning is beneficial. By humming a long series of mmm and nnn vocalisations through your nose you can train your voice to sit forward in a more ‘assertive’ position, giving you a clearer tone. To test whether you’ve achieved the correct positioning, pinch the bridge of your nose whilst humming—you should be able to feel the vibrations there.
Posture is king
What have I been telling you about that all-important and easily exploitable mind-body connection? Not only will good posture put you in a better frame of mind and ease any public speaking-related anxiety, but it will also make it easier to deliver your speech.
Make sure your back is straight and your shoulders are back, down, and relaxed. Your head should be retracted a little, rather than tilted downward or tipped back. A useful trick is to imagine a helium balloon attached to your head, pulling it upward.
Breath
Closely related to the problem of poor posture is the fact that people often breathe in the reverse of the optimal manner. When you inhale it should be an expansive, outward motion, it’s only on the exhale that you should be drawing in and tensing your core. Together with good posture, this will aid in projecting your voice.
Breathing shallowly, as is common in high-stress situations such as presenting to a large group, results in the disruption of the smoothness of speech. Instead, breath slowly and deeply, from your diaphragm. My singing teacher often told me to breathe from ‘the pelvic floor’, although I gather that was more of a metaphor as I don’t think there’s any breathing apparatus down there.
Poise
Apart from affecting breathing, stress also causes a breakdown of coordination within the larynx (‘disorganised laryngeal muscle activity), and between the ‘breathing apparatus and the muscles involved in phonation’, resulting in breathiness, a break in rhythm and cluttered articulation according to Training the Speaking Voice (1977). Stress will also cause tensing of the resonator muscles giving your voice a strained quality.
Relaxation is vital to good speech, so why not try meditation to get over your stage fright? Having a realistic appraisal of your likely performance, rather than catastrophising will also serve to reduce your stage fright from overwhelmed to pumped. Adopting the ‘Superman stance’ as a confident posture will help calm you, as cognition is embodied, the posture of your body affects your mental processes.
Box breathing, a technique employed by Navy SEALs, is another great technique to reduce anxiety. Breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, then repeat. (If all else fails, there’s the old standby of picturing everyone in the audience naked. Heck, do it even if you’re not nervous.)
Pitch
Make sure the pitch of your speaking voice stays in a fairly minimum range, with just enough variance to keep things interesting. A monotonous drone is far from what we’re after—a good speaking voice is necessarily an emotive and expressive one, as long as it doesn’t warble too much, of course.
Speed
The CEO of an organisation I once worked at was able to hold the floor long enough at after-work drinks to tell us the entire plot of Shantaram (now a 43-hour audiobook), whereas I’m often not sure if I’ll be allowed to get the end of my coffee order without interruption. Hence, I talk fast.
Although you might be able to remind yourself to slow down some of the time, attempting to remain conscious of your speaking speed at all times is failure-bound. Instead, cultivate a habit of deliberately inserting pauses after each phrase to act as speed bumps in your speech. This way you’ll be replacing an old habit, and habits are easier to replace than they are to extinguish according to The Power of Habit by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Charles Duhigg.
Replacing fillers such as “um” and “ah” in your speech will also lend clarity and an aura of confidence to your speech. In their place, a pregnant pause will not only make you appear thoughtful and measured in your response, but it also adds the spice of suspense as the audience hangs on to your every word.
Losing your marbles
If you can enunciate through a mouthful of marbles, pennies, or walnuts, you’re doing something right. Though anyone catching you in the act will likely think you suffer from pica (a craving to eat substances other than normal food), or that you’re storing nuts for the winter. (Don’t worry, your sultry and/or sonorous voice will be enough to sweet-talk your way out of any aspersions cast on your character.)
Tongue twisters
My singing teacher used to have me warm up with, ‘She sells seashells by the seashore but the seashells she sells aren’t seashells I’m sure’. I taught her a much better tongue twister about the fig plucker and his helpful son. I’d read it in a book on ventriloquism during some career-related soul searching. Alas, it’s not fit for your tender ears. So here are a couple of safe-for-work tongue twisters to train your voice to be nimble, each focusing on a different group of sounds:
My mum makes me mash my mini-M&M's on a Monday morning
Round the rugged rocks, the ragged rascals ran
Thistle sticks, sixty-six thousand and six thistle sticks
Barren Beacon Beckons Bacon Baron
Further reading on vocal aesthetics
What your voice reveals to others
Lass, N. J., Hughes, K. R., Bowyer, M. D., Waters, L. T., & Bourne, V. T. (1976). Speaker sex identification from voiced, whispered, and filtered isolated vowels. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 59(3), 675–678. doi: 10.1121/1.1914231
Ptacek, P. H., & Sander, E. K. (1966). Age recognition from voice. Journal of speech and hearing Research, 9(2), 273–277. doi: 10.1044/jshr.0902.273
Scherer, K. R. (1978). Personality inference from voice quality: The loud voice of extroversion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 8(4), 467–487. doi: 10.1002/ejsp.2420080405
Suire, A., Tognetti, A., Durand, V., Raymond, M., & Barkat-Defradas, M. (2020). Speech acoustic features: A comparison of gay men, heterosexual men, and heterosexual women. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 49(7), 2575-2583.
Sulpizio, S., Fasoli, F., Maass, A., Paladino, M. P., Vespignani, F., Eyssel, F., & Bentler, D. (2015). The sound of voice: Voice-based categorization of speakers’ sexual orientation within and across languages. PloS One, 10(7). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0128882
Wang, Y., & Kosinski, M. (2018). Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(2), 246–257. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000098
Van Dommelen, W. A., & Moxness, B. H. (1995). Acoustic parameters in speaker height and weight identification: sex-specific behaviour. Language and Speech, 38(3), 267–287. doi: 10.1177/002383099503800304
Attractive or dominant vocal qualities
Babel, M., McGuire, G., & King, J. (2014). Towards a more nuanced view of vocal attractiveness. PloS one, 9(2). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0088616
Babel, M., & McGuire, G. (2015). Perceptual fluency and judgments of vocal aesthetics and stereotypicality. Cognitive Science, 39(4), 766–787. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12179
Borkowska, B., & Pawlowski, B. (2011). Female voice frequency in the context of dominance and attractiveness perception. Animal Behaviour, 82(1), 55–59. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2011.03.024
Bruckert, L., Bestelmeyer, P., Latinus, M., Rouger, J., Charest, I., Rousselet, G. A., … & Belin, P. (2010). Vocal attractiveness increases by averaging. Current Biology, 20(2), 116–120. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.034
Cellerino, A. (2003). Psychobiology of facial attractiveness. Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, 26(3 Suppl), 45–48.
Klofstad, C. A. (2016). Candidate voice pitch influences election outcomes. Political Psychology, 37(5), 725–738. doi: 10.1111/pops.12280
Pisanski, K., & Feinberg, D. R. (2017). Vocal attractiveness. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Perception. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198743187.013.27
Valentova, J. V., Varella, M. A. C., Havlíček, J., & Kleisner, K. (2017). Positive association between vocal and facial attractiveness in women but not in men: a cross-cultural study. Behavioural Processes, 135, 95–100. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2016.12.005
Van Borsel, J., Janssens, J., & De Bodt, M. (2009). Breathiness as a feminine voice characteristic: A perceptual approach. Journal of Voice, 23(3), 291-294. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvoice.2007.08.002
Zajonc, R. B. (2001). Mere exposure: A gateway to the subliminal. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10(6), 224–228. doi: 10.1111/1467-8721.00154
Techniques to improve voice and confidence
Anderson, V. A. (1977). Training the speaking voice. Oxford University Press.
McDowell, E. D. (1936). Acquiring Good Speech Habits in Early Childhood. Childhood Education, 12(4), 168–172. doi: 10.1080/00094056.1936.10724016
Steptoe, A., & Fidler, H. (1987). Stage fright in orchestral musicians: A study of cognitive and behavioural strategies in performance anxiety. British Journal of Psychology, 78(2), 241–249. doi: 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1987.tb02243.x
Vocal fashions
Anderson, R. C., Klofstad, C. A., Mayew, W. J., & Venkatachalam, M. (2014). Vocal fry may undermine the success of young women in the labor market. PloS one, 9(5). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0097506
Chao, M., & Bursten, J. (2016). Heard but Misunderstood: Understanding Negative Reactions to Female Vocal Fry.
Churcher, M. (2007). Essay What is a Sexy Voice?. Voice and Speech Review, 5(1), 260–262. doi: 10.1080/23268263.2007.10769768
Hornibrook, J., Ormond, T., & Maclagan, M. (2018). Creaky voice or extreme vocal fry in young women. The New Zealand Medical Journal, 131(1486), 36–40. doi: 10.1121/1.2027432
Yuasa, I. P. (2010). Creaky voice: A new feminine voice quality for young urban‐oriented upwardly mobile American women? American Speech, 85(3), 315–337. doi:10.1215/00031283-2010-018