Get A Better Broadcast, Podcast and Voice-Over Voice

2023.03.19 – 0808 – The Causes of Vocal Tension What Causes Tension Nerves. Overwhelm. Anxiety. Excitement. The unknown. Panic. Being underprepared. Being worried about how you sound. Concerns about your message and the audience’s reception to it.Any physical niggle can affect your voice. That’s anything from a paper cut to menstrual cramps, discomfort anywhere will cause ‘compensatory muscular tension’ and so mental distraction. Even if just a small part of your brain is dealing with the pain, possibly even if you are trying to block it out, it will affect your voice performance. The solution is obvious: deal with the source of the pain. Physical tension can be a direct cause of you sounding different: text neck, baby carrying, shopping, pushing and driving can all cause muscular strains or stasis that will affect your breath – the very foundation of how you sound. Tension pain may be treated with medication, which itself can cause a change in your voice: overly relaxing you, causing drowsiness or a lack of mucus. And a lack of mucus in your throat and mouth can lead to hoarseness and possible polypsTension can cause tiredness, both fatigue in your vocal instrumentation, but also in the rest of your ‘self’. Tiredness will affect your voicePain can cause you to be irritable or depressed, itself leading to stress and the possible use of medication… and so the spiral continues.

2023.03.18 – 0807 – Tension and Relaxation We looked at releasing tension in the mouth, jaw, tongue and lips in the previous chapter, but as the Voice Box above shows, physical tension that can affect your voice can be in many other places. “Tension murders vibration (and) vibrations thrive in relaxation”Kristin Linklater, “Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Language” And it’s important to remember that physical tension can come from mental tension: nerves or excitement about a presentation can manifest themselves in your muscles and so affect your performance. You see how everything is interconnected? (We look at mental stress and ‘mic fright’ in the next chapter.)  Muscles in a state of undue tension can make your voice sound a little thin, strained, irritated or bored and put it up an octave. Your reading can also speed up and your mouth can dry up leading to articulation problems.  Releasing tension opens the diaphragm, which gives deeper breathing which in turn helps the voice sound more open and confident. And in a ‘self-fulfilling spiral’, when you know you sound good, you relax, you slow down, your heart rate decreases and the natural fluids returns to your mouth. And during times of dramatic or significant news, it is important for radio and TV presenters to manage their personal tension. Feeling anxious, angry, sad or depressed can make it difficult to sound comforting or calm. But that is exactly what radio presenters need to sound if they are to communicate their message effectively.

2023.03.17 – 0806 – Stretching and Strengthening Your Laryngeal Muscle There are around 27 muscles in and around the larynx, 15 of these are outside the larynx and hold it in position in the neck, 12 are essential, with a direct action on the vocal folds in their lengthening and shortening, tension and relaxation, thinning and thickening.  These laryngeal muscles are intimately connected to the muscles of the neck, shoulders and upper chest and back. The tension of all these muscles is influenced by how we are feeling both physically and emotionally and they affect the function and sometimes the structure of the vocal folds.  We need enough tension for a strong healthy voice, but not so much that the voice becomes strained and constricted. [1]So, the muscles around the larynx are intricate and need delicate movement to work, and you need to avoid the other muscles around it, like in the neck (and they’re huge – if you’ve ever been in a car accident and had whiplash, you’ll know how debilitating that is) getting tense.And that’s why exercises are so important in getting a better voice: moving and stretching to both relax and strengthen muscles. [1] https://www.wsh.nhs.uk/CMS-Documents/Patient-leaflets/SpeechandLanguageTherapyServices/6534-1-Practical-voice-care.pdf