ABSTRACT
The one question I am asked as a voice coach more frequently than any other is ‘Can you do something about the pitch of my voice?’ It’s not only women who ask. Men too are often troubled that their voice doesn’t sound as deep and strong as they think it should. Broadcasters are particularly vulnerable in this area because there is a perceived wisdom that deeper voices carry more authority. Notice I say ‘perceived’. I think it’s a myth worth questioning. Most of the people who ask the question have perfectly normal voices, well within the usual range for their age and gender. But the Deep Voice has become one of those obsessions in broadcasting. Just as we’d all like longer legs or bigger chests, we’d all like to have a deeper voice. Perhaps one of the reasons this becomes an obsession is that almost everyone is horrified by the sound of their own voice when they first hear it recorded and played back to them. Normally, we only ever hear our own voices as we are speaking, and because our ears are set against the head we hear a disproportionate amount of the skull’s resonance. We get used to the sound of the voice that
way and it’s a shock to hear it the way everyone else hears you speaking, at a distance. The contrast makes us think we have a higher voice than we had imagined, and so we may get caught in the loop of believing we need to do something about the pitch of our voice. It is rather like the person who only ever looks at themselves in their favourite mirror. Seeing themselves on video (‘Gosh, who’s the fat bird?’) is a startling revelation. It may reveal genuine flaws they could change; but it may also spark a neurotic obsession with some facet of their appearance that everyone else accepts as perfectly normal. If you work in broadcasting, you have to get used to the sound of your own voice as it really is. You can’t avoid hearing recordings of it played back to you, and though painful at first, it is one of the best ways of learning how you can improve your voice. Whatever you might think the pitch is often not the first thing that needs attention. But there are times when you do need to consider the pitch – and ask yourself whether there is something you are doing when you broadcast that is forcing the pitch of your voice up above what would be your normal speaking range.
