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 lighten and brighten your voice:

• You may find that ‘exaggerating’ your intonation patterns is helpful.
• Practice increasing and changing the rise and fall in your voice in a way which will make your voice sound more animated. This will help your develop a sense of what feels authentic for you. Remember to highlight words in a way that makes sense i.e. fits with the meaning of what you are saying.
• 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.