The Importance of Voice When Presenting Virtually (Part 1)
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“I don’t want to be boring. But that’s not always easy.”
—John Malkovich, actor
A theme we consistently heard from the executives we interviewed was the importance of a speaker’s voice. A speaker’s voice is their primary tool for engaging the audience. Karen Gilliam, Agency Chief Learning Officer & OD Capability Lead at NASA, reminded us of this reality when she suggested, “If you’ve got someone speaking in a monotone voice, it’s just lulling you to sleep.” Yes, it is—and one of our many purposes for writing our book and including the content on this blog is to help you avoid being that someone!
For an interesting take on this topic, take a look at Julian Treasure’s TED Talk, How to Speak So That People Want to Listen. In fact, some research has found that a lively voice (i.e., vocal variety) is correlated with enthusiasm. (1) Other scholars have found that “varied delivery improves listener comprehension.” (2) Prosody is a set of speaking attributes that may include a speaker’s pitch, loudness, pauses, intonation, and rhythm. These elements all contribute to the unique speaking style of each individual.
For instance, the sentence “The ring was hers” is fairly benign from a semantic point of view. However, the phrase can take on a different meaning if it’s spoken in certain ways. Variations in volume, pitch, speed, or emphasis of keywords may change the meaning. (3) The topic of voice can be further subdivided into a number of categories that warrant discussion. The keys to each of these topics are awareness and intentionality. As you read our next few posts on this topic, keep in mind the following piece of advice from Jennifer Cowles, Leader of Leadership and Executive Programs at KeyBank. She told us that “voice modulation is incredibly powerful in letting people know what you’re passionate about, building on a particular point, or sharing why something is important.”
The question to ask yourself is, “Am I aware of my default habits, and am I intentional when using, or not using, each?”
Our next few posts will explore different aspects of voice that will help you connect with your audience in person and online. Check back in the coming weeks as we continue this series; our posts will explore the rate of speech/pace, pauses/silence, pitch, tone, and cadence/rhythm. We encourage you to select at least one element per week to examine with your own speaking voice, and experiment with in order to improve!
References
(1) Haider, F., Cerrato, L., Campbell, N., & Luz, S. (2016, March). Presentation quality assessment using acoustic information and hand movements in 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2812–2816
(2) Beebe, S. A., & Biggers, T. (1988, June). Emotion-eliciting qualities of speech delivery and their effect on credibility and comprehension. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans, LA.
(3) Dupuis, K., & Pichora-Fuller, M. K. (2010). Use of affective prosody by young and older adults. Psychology and Aging, 25(1), 16.
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