Shaping your voice: Lighten brighten: intonation

The earlier activities within ’tuning in to your intonation’ gave you the opportunity to start playing around with your intonation patterns. Through these activities, you may have noticed that changing your intonation relies on you making minor adjustments to your volume, pitch, rate of speech and even your facial expressions.

Try these exercises again and record yourself (all smartphones have this capability).  Notice what you are changing to emphasise some words or to give an overall ‘feeling’. Consider how this sounds and whether you feel that altering your intonation would create a more authentic voice for you.

Activity:

To do this activity, come up with a list of short phrases you use frequently in real life (black coffee please, when do you want dinner, what are you up to today etc). Then try some of the following:

If you are looking to deepen and darken your voice:

•  You may find that ‘flattening’ your intonation patterns is helpful.
• Practice reducing the rise and fall in your voice in a way which will make it sound ‘flatter’. This might mean keeping it ‘flat’ as you come to the end of a sentence. Remember that some rise and fall is natural e.g. we all tend to go up at the end of a sentence when asking a question.
• Then try some longer phrases. Again, choose phrases you would actually use in real life. This will make it easier to start using intonation more in real situations as you progress.
• When you feel comfortable with this, work through the progression activities discussed in later pages to further develop your skills. Continue to record yourself and listen back to help you decide what feels authentic for you.