The Importance of Voice When Presenting Virtually (Part 4)
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In this post, we explore the importance of pitch, tone, and cadence as a speaker. As we have asserted in previous posts related to this topic thread (part one, part two, part three), we feel that the use of voice is one of the most important aspects of speaking—whether in person or online. Voice is the heart of great storytelling and great presentations. In this case, we are focusing on the intentional adjustments that you might choose to make to your voice, not commenting on aspects of a person’s “natural voice.”
Pitch – This refers to a speaker’s frequency of sound. A speaker’s intonation is a variation of pitch and can be experienced as high or low. Separate from the natural pitch of someone’s voice, a speaker with a pitch that is constantly too high can come across to listeners as having a lack of confidence or authority. However, the high pitch may also communicate excitement (surely, you know someone whose voice gets higher...or louder...if they get excited). The key is an intentional pitch variation to communicate sentiment. (1, 2) While it may not always be easy for every speaker to control the pitch of their voice, practicing within their natural pitch range can help them identify what works best. You do not want to overexaggerate by purposely raising your voice too high or lowering your voice; this will be evident (and sometimes off-putting) to an audience. Rather, try practicing with a variety of sentence types (imperative, declarative, exclamatory, or inquisitive). Does your voice go up at the end of a question (this is where “upspeak” is appropriate)? Is there more variation when you are exclaiming something with enthusiasm? How do you deliver an imperative command? Test all of these out to see how your voice sounds in different situations. Interestingly, one study found that “high speech rate and average pitch variation also resulted in higher ratings for male speakers.”(3) This is less a commentary on the results of this one study and more about highlighting the importance of intentionally combining multiple elements such as smiling and variation in pitch, volume, and pace to yield necessary results.
Tone – The speaker’s tone is used to express emotion or emphasize words or phrases. Tone can impact meaning or convey emotion. For example, “The speaker established a somber tone” would be delivered differently than “The speaker set an upbeat tone” (we encourage you to pause here and try reading those two sentences aloud to practice your own delivery!).Tone can be altered by modulating elements such as pitch, volume, pauses, and pace. It’s important to ensure that as the speaker, you establish an emotional tone that aligns with your purpose/objectives. If the objective is to motivate and inspire, the tone may include elements such as an increased speaking pace, increased volume, and vocal variety to engage listeners. A somber tone will have a decreased pace, increased use of pauses, lower pitch, and potentially, a lower volume.
Cadence/Rhythm – These terms refer to the flow of words when speaking. For some, the flow is smooth and rhythmic. For other speakers, the flow can be experienced by listeners as abrupt, jerky, or uneven—components of a concept called speech disfluency, which “generally contains long pauses, discourse markers, repeated words, phrases or sentences, and fillers or filled pauses like uh and um.” (4) Another way of thinking of speech disfluency is when you think of someone whose presentation and speaking style could be characterized as “choppy.” Speakers with abrupt pauses or phrasing can be distracting for listeners, which ultimately clouds their message.
Pitch, tone, and cadence are three important aspects of voice that will have a fundamental impact on your ability to deliver captivating presentations. The good news is this: You can practice each of these any time you talk with another person—a co-worker, a friend, a client, and so on! And while all of these strategies are relevant for presentations that take place in person and virtually, we especially encourage you to practice these elements a little more with online presentations. In the online medium, you are limited in the ways that you can present yourself; what we mean is that you do not have a full stage and audience space to use, so you cannot walk around and direct your eye contact in various places, or even turn your head or point somewhere that makes your audience’s eyes follow your hand. Online, one of the few presentation elements that you do have control over is how you use your voice (in addition to facial expressions, appropriate hand gestures, and the presentation platform itself)—that is why we wanted to devote some time specifically to your voice. As with our other topics, we will also encourage you to be cognizant of your pace and volume for the sake of your attendees; if you are speaking too quickly, someone whose device has poor connectivity may not hear everything you say (auto-generated captions may be available, but we do not have enough experience to comment on the reliability of captioning services at this time). If you speak too loudly or too soft (or are too close or are too far away from your microphone), you may lose some attendees as well (or you will have to interrupt your own presentation to adjust the sound if attendees submit comments that they cannot hear).
As we have shared before, devoting some time to practicing and listening to (yikes) your own voice before you present will help you “calibrate” the pitch, tone, and cadence that are right for you as you work toward achieving what you consider your “natural presentation voice.”
References
1. Rosenshine, B. (1970). Enthusiastic teaching: A research review. The School Review, 78(4), 499–514.
2. Hincks, R. (2004). Processing the prosody of oral presentations. In InSTIL/ICALL Symposium 2004.
3. Singhal, A., Ali, M. R., Baten, R. A., Kurumada, C., Marvin, E. W., & Hoque, M.E. (2018, May). Analyzing the impact of gender on the automation of feedback for public speaking. In 2018 13th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition (FG 2018), 607–613.
4. Das, S., Gandhi, N., Naik, T., & Shilkrot, R. (2019, May). Increase apparent public speaking fluency by speech augmentation. In ICASSP 2019-2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 6890–6894.
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