I have a bad speaking voice—my sibilants (“S” sounds) come out mushy. If I record my speaking voice and play it back, even when I’m concentrating on enunciation, I sound… terrible. It’s a voice that sounds geeky at best, retarded at worst. A little too high-pitched and monotone, as well. People have been telling me they can’t understand what I’m saying all my life.
It’s quite likely that I’ll give many public presentations throughout my life, so being better at speaking might be worthwhile. I’ve lost my fear of public speaking (knowing the material well takes care of that) -- I’m just talking about the mechanics of speech. I want to be audible, comprehensible, and not sound like a moron.
I found that frequently recording my voice and playing it back immediately afterward helps immensely.
Up through the start of my junior year of highschool I did a very poor job with pronunciation in general and what I thought I sounded like, sounded nothing like what I did in fact sound like. I got a portable voice recorder midway through my junior year.
I like poetry, so a few times a week I would spend a while (maybe a half hour) in the evenings reading poetry into the recorder and playing it back a stanza at a time. If I didn’t like the way it sounded, I would repeat the stanza (or the particular line in that stanza that sounded wrong) until it started sounding right.
Within a few months I very much liked the way my voice sounded, and instead of having people telling me I talked funny, I occasionally had people complimenting my enunciation.
(As I side effect I also became able to read out loud which was something else I used to have a lot of trouble doing)
Just noticed this thread after someone linked to it. For the last year and a half, I’ve been writing and recording a 100-word story every week, in response to a prompt word, and sending it off to a web site that runs a weekly drabble challenge. I use a proper voice recorder for this (the Edirol R-09), and do as many takes as it takes to get the best possible result.
I don’t just record them once a week, with 80 stories in my head by now I often just recite them for practice when I’m alone. Less work than picking up a book to read aloud from. If you don’t write, memorising poetry would provide the same advantage.
I used to find that my voice was fine first thing in the morning, but tended to get very hoarse by mid-morning, but that has abated substantially. Maybe I just don’t talk enough otherwise to keep it exercised. I don’t actually do enough talking in everyday life that anyone has spontaneously commented, but I have had a few compliments in the comments at the web site.
On the other hand, some recording technologies make your voice sound higher and thinner than it really is. Voice answering machines are really bad about this. But for enunciation, rhythm, and that sort of thing, this should be very helpful.
Do you know of a modern recording technology that would make this kind of recording convenient? An iOS app would be best, I think; alternatively a computer software.
I can well imagine recording myself reading the poems with a cassette recorder, but not with any software that I know.
Maybe useful—Everyday Looper is an iOS app for recording short looping samples, up to four at a time. That is, you record a sound and it plays it from start to finish over and over in a loop, and you can record another sound up to the same length and play them next to each other, or adjust the volume on them individually.
It’s intended for musical use, but might do for what you ask. It is not free, so you might check it out on Youtube to see how it works and why it might be good for quick record-hear-compare feedback.
(iOS / iPhone does have a basic sound recorder in it, as you may know).
I think there may be some psychological element to finding one’s own recorded voice unpleasant. When I hear my own recorded voice played back at me, I find it incredibly unpleasant, but my acquaintances assure me that it doesn’t sound bad to them. Likewise, I’ve had people tell me that they can’t stand the sound of their own recorded voices, when they sound perfectly fine to me.
If your acquaintances agree that your speech could use work, I agree with the recommendation of speech therapy, but it’s possible that the problem is in your perception.
I dislike my own recorded voice as well. I’ve heard that because the sound of our own voices is partly transmitted to our ears via our heads, everyone’s voice sounds higher in a recording. The difference is probably enough to be unnerving and I think that’s what it is for me.
I used to be extremely self-conscious about my voice before I became a volunteer DJ at my local college radio station. After six years of listening to myself through headphones, I speak much more slowly and clearly, and people who don’t know about the DJing have told me that “I should be on the radio”.
But my ability to be understood by phone systems that depend on voice-recognition doesn’t seem to have improved at all. Any suggestions there?
What you’re asking may require practice, rather than just following a new set of guidelines. I have had some formal vocal training, so I can offer some activities that could help.
One important factor in public speaking is breath support. Practice breathing deeply and smoothly, with erect posture and tense abdominal muscles. (Doing this daily can be very refreshing, anyway.)
Practice speaking at various sound levels—softly and loudly—alone (or with a supportive friend) in a room with hard walls and/or floor, so you can hear yourself clearly. Tense the muscles of your throat and soft palate (the back of the roof of your mouth) in different ways to change your voice in ways that may feel and sound unnatural. This should help you gain a better sense of how to use your voice.
When you speak more loudly, does the pitch of your voice go up? Many people do this, because our ears are more sensitive to higher pitches. Try forcing more air through your words to gain volume instead of raising the pitch. In other words, use more air to say the same words by increasing the pressure of your abdominal muscles.
When we speak loudly, we can generally feel a vibration, if we pay attention. When you speak usually, you may find that the sensation is in your throat, or in the far back of your mouth. Force yourself to yawn, but then activate your voice during the yawn (i.e. vocalize the yawn), to place the sensation more in your sinuses and the front of your face (the front of the face is called the masque). This may take some practice, but the most pleasant sonority of most people’s voices is achieved by using the face as a resonator.
I hope one or more of those activities can help the sonority and pitch aspects of your voice become more like what you want. I haven’t heard your voice, so it may be that I’d think it doesn’t need any fixing :) My husband hates his voice, but I think it’s great!
I don’t think there’s any really quick way of dealing with this. I had about 4 years of speech therapy which helped a lot. Note that a speech therapist will generally have lots of things that are tailored to you in particular to help out. For example I have a list of words that I still have trouble with so I make sure to always be ready to use their synonyms when speaking. Unfortunately there really isn’t any simple solution to this.
If you don’t want to go to a speech therapist, a friend with some linguistics training or a voice (singing) teacher may be able to listen and tell you where to put your tongue, etc.
I, too, have a related problem. I have great difficulty controlling my volume. That is largely hereditary (or nurtured by my family environment), but the real problem is that I can’t hear when I’m too loud. There are certain triggers (being excited, interrupted, or in the presence of my mother) but they are not really triggers I can avoid, and I can’t see a way to fix it. The obvious solution is to have someone tell me when I’m too loud, but being interrupted for that purpose tends to make me involuntarily louder.
Similar: I would find it useful to learn to speak slowly. I have to repeat myself a lot. The trouble is that I lose track of what I’m saying if I try to speak at a normal pace—I cannot seem to focus on speaking slowly and think of things to say at the same time.
(Edited the last few paragraphs to be more useful.)
I actually teach this to college students, to some degree. This is in the context of moderately scripted competitive speech, though.
The first basic trick is to consciously try to speak at half-speed. Once you’ve done that, halve your speed again. This will at least be close to the right speed.
Another trick is to tell friends or family to rudely (or politely) interrupt you if you speak too fast. This technique can also be helpful for eliminating um, uh, like, y’know, and similar disfluencies. I will write “SLOW” on a piece of paper and hold it up while a student is speaking, for example.
I admit I am surprised that you find speaking slowly more difficult in terms of keeping track of what you are saying. In almost all cases I encounter, people actually speak much more coherently when they speak slower. Either use the extra time to think of what to say, or insert a few judicious pauses for the same effect.
I would say there is a non-negligible chance that your rapid speech comes off as very clear to you, but not to observers. I know that when I get really engaged in an idea, I will often talk rapid-fire in a way that I think makes perfect sense, only to be stopped or slowed down by those around me, whom I’ve lost completely. My thought process feels a little more muddled when I have to slow down and think about exactly what I’m saying, but this is not because my communication is worse; it’s because I actually have to run a mental check to make sure I have a cogent point, rather than simply having a cogent point internally and saying whatever happens to feel right. Rapid-fire speech may create an illusion of transparency, but I’m not familiar with it actually helping people speak better.
Of course, YMMV and I could be totally wrong. But from the couple dozen or so students I’ve worked with, I never remember hearing a complaint that it is harder to think cogently while speaking slowly, only that it is difficult to remember to speak slowly.
In almost all cases I encounter, people actually speak much more coherently when they speak slower. Either use the extra time to think of what to say,
I don’t have much practice with public speaking, and I’ve tried this. To speak slowly while you think about what you’re going to say next takes practice. When I try this, I’m likely to confuse my thoughts with my current speech.
or insert a few judicious pauses for the same effect.
And this is what I’ll actually do: pause a bit between sentences, so that the audience can think about what I just said, and I can think about what to say next. Much easier than trying to talk and think at the same time.
To speak slowly while you think about what you’re going to say next takes practice.
There’s your problem right there. Optimally, public speaking should require very little on-the-spot thinking with respect to word choice. Depending on exactly how important (and predictable) the subject matter is, you should have a relatively set vocabulary and set of concepts you wish to discuss. There’s being competent at public speaking, and there’s being good at public speaking; this comment is about how to do the latter.
Before I get started: one general useful piece of advice: if giving a speech, your first few sentences matter far more than everything else, because people will decide whether or not they want to listen to you and will frame their understanding based on it.
If you’re giving a speech, you should have a moderately detailed bullet-point outline of what you’re going to say, and you should have thought (or actually spoken) your way through it in advance. (Often many, many times)(In some cases, and for some people, it’s ideal to have a verbatim script. But such circumstances tend to be relatively rare.) When you are actually speaking, you shouldn’t need to think too hard about your exact word choices. For relatively high-stakes public speaking, I will have thought the issue over so many times it takes some effort to prevent myself from saying what I’ve been thinking of saying at a hundred miles an hour. In other words, if you’re doing serious public speaking, you should be clear enough on what you want to say in advance that you can afford to devote a significant amount of your mental effort to your tone, movement about the stage, and speed of speech. This is admittedly advanced-level, but it’s how one excels.
When answering questions (as opposed to controlling exactly what you say) it doesn’t change much. 90% of questions can be easily anticipated. The remainder, you pause a bit before answering (or, if appropriate, reframe (honestly) to make easier to answer, “If I understand your question, you’re asking _”).
If you’ll forgive a rudimentary sports metaphor: when you’re throwing a ball, all you want to have to think about is where you want it to end up and how fast you want it to get there. Knowing how to position your arm and move your wrist and rotate your shoulder should be second-nature. You get them in line by practicing them before game day. Similarly, quality public looks off-the-cuff and conversational, but reflects a great deal of preparation and mental weight-lifting that prepare the speaker to communicate effectively.
[I’d certainly be willing to expand this into a top-level post if anyone thinks such would be useful. Public speaking skills are surprisingly rare; I believe this is because they require practice and people identify as being bad at them and avoid said practice.]
A useful additional trick is to practice a few generic units of body language, such as walking thoughtfully across a stage or making eye contact with several audience members, until it looks and feels natural to do them. You can drop them into the stream when you need to give yourself a longer break, and they will usually “read” as part of your presentation.
Recording yourself can help with this too. I recorded myself rehearsing for my first ever presentation, and found that when it seemed to me that I was speaking so slowly that I was sarcastically calling the audience stupid, when played back I was speaking at the right pace.
The right pace for whom? I hate it when other people talk slowly, too. I don’t think I’d calibrate properly if I aimed at making myself sound slow enough to myself.
I think it pays to be able to adjust the speed to the situation / audience. In my toastmasters groups I actually overdid the slowing after becoming aware of my too high speed.
I can only speak slowly if I have notes to work from. In normal conversation, including work discussions among 2-10 participants, I tend to rush to get my thoughts out, and that makes it hard for people to follow.
I’ve found that having a whiteboard helps a lot (a notepad on which I can scribble less so, but still better than nothing). Having to slow down enough to write main points down or sketch out some things seems to make me more comprehensible without losing my train of thought.
How do you speak clearly?
I have a bad speaking voice—my sibilants (“S” sounds) come out mushy. If I record my speaking voice and play it back, even when I’m concentrating on enunciation, I sound… terrible. It’s a voice that sounds geeky at best, retarded at worst. A little too high-pitched and monotone, as well. People have been telling me they can’t understand what I’m saying all my life.
It’s quite likely that I’ll give many public presentations throughout my life, so being better at speaking might be worthwhile. I’ve lost my fear of public speaking (knowing the material well takes care of that) -- I’m just talking about the mechanics of speech. I want to be audible, comprehensible, and not sound like a moron.
I found that frequently recording my voice and playing it back immediately afterward helps immensely. Up through the start of my junior year of highschool I did a very poor job with pronunciation in general and what I thought I sounded like, sounded nothing like what I did in fact sound like. I got a portable voice recorder midway through my junior year. I like poetry, so a few times a week I would spend a while (maybe a half hour) in the evenings reading poetry into the recorder and playing it back a stanza at a time. If I didn’t like the way it sounded, I would repeat the stanza (or the particular line in that stanza that sounded wrong) until it started sounding right. Within a few months I very much liked the way my voice sounded, and instead of having people telling me I talked funny, I occasionally had people complimenting my enunciation. (As I side effect I also became able to read out loud which was something else I used to have a lot of trouble doing)
Sounds good. If anyone else reading this tries this, please report back on how well it works for you!
Just noticed this thread after someone linked to it. For the last year and a half, I’ve been writing and recording a 100-word story every week, in response to a prompt word, and sending it off to a web site that runs a weekly drabble challenge. I use a proper voice recorder for this (the Edirol R-09), and do as many takes as it takes to get the best possible result.
I don’t just record them once a week, with 80 stories in my head by now I often just recite them for practice when I’m alone. Less work than picking up a book to read aloud from. If you don’t write, memorising poetry would provide the same advantage.
I used to find that my voice was fine first thing in the morning, but tended to get very hoarse by mid-morning, but that has abated substantially. Maybe I just don’t talk enough otherwise to keep it exercised. I don’t actually do enough talking in everyday life that anyone has spontaneously commented, but I have had a few compliments in the comments at the web site.
On the other hand, some recording technologies make your voice sound higher and thinner than it really is. Voice answering machines are really bad about this. But for enunciation, rhythm, and that sort of thing, this should be very helpful.
Do you know of a modern recording technology that would make this kind of recording convenient? An iOS app would be best, I think; alternatively a computer software.
I can well imagine recording myself reading the poems with a cassette recorder, but not with any software that I know.
Maybe useful—Everyday Looper is an iOS app for recording short looping samples, up to four at a time. That is, you record a sound and it plays it from start to finish over and over in a loop, and you can record another sound up to the same length and play them next to each other, or adjust the volume on them individually.
It’s intended for musical use, but might do for what you ask. It is not free, so you might check it out on Youtube to see how it works and why it might be good for quick record-hear-compare feedback.
(iOS / iPhone does have a basic sound recorder in it, as you may know).
I think there may be some psychological element to finding one’s own recorded voice unpleasant. When I hear my own recorded voice played back at me, I find it incredibly unpleasant, but my acquaintances assure me that it doesn’t sound bad to them. Likewise, I’ve had people tell me that they can’t stand the sound of their own recorded voices, when they sound perfectly fine to me.
If your acquaintances agree that your speech could use work, I agree with the recommendation of speech therapy, but it’s possible that the problem is in your perception.
I dislike my own recorded voice as well. I’ve heard that because the sound of our own voices is partly transmitted to our ears via our heads, everyone’s voice sounds higher in a recording. The difference is probably enough to be unnerving and I think that’s what it is for me.
I used to be extremely self-conscious about my voice before I became a volunteer DJ at my local college radio station. After six years of listening to myself through headphones, I speak much more slowly and clearly, and people who don’t know about the DJing have told me that “I should be on the radio”.
But my ability to be understood by phone systems that depend on voice-recognition doesn’t seem to have improved at all. Any suggestions there?
I’m pretty sure I’ve never used a phone system that depends on voice recognition, and I’m afraid I have no idea what the relevant issues are, sorry.
I think the job title of someone who helps with that kind of problem is “speech therapist”.
And, for what it’s worth, I kind of like your voice...
What you’re asking may require practice, rather than just following a new set of guidelines. I have had some formal vocal training, so I can offer some activities that could help.
One important factor in public speaking is breath support. Practice breathing deeply and smoothly, with erect posture and tense abdominal muscles. (Doing this daily can be very refreshing, anyway.)
Practice speaking at various sound levels—softly and loudly—alone (or with a supportive friend) in a room with hard walls and/or floor, so you can hear yourself clearly. Tense the muscles of your throat and soft palate (the back of the roof of your mouth) in different ways to change your voice in ways that may feel and sound unnatural. This should help you gain a better sense of how to use your voice.
When you speak more loudly, does the pitch of your voice go up? Many people do this, because our ears are more sensitive to higher pitches. Try forcing more air through your words to gain volume instead of raising the pitch. In other words, use more air to say the same words by increasing the pressure of your abdominal muscles.
When we speak loudly, we can generally feel a vibration, if we pay attention. When you speak usually, you may find that the sensation is in your throat, or in the far back of your mouth. Force yourself to yawn, but then activate your voice during the yawn (i.e. vocalize the yawn), to place the sensation more in your sinuses and the front of your face (the front of the face is called the masque). This may take some practice, but the most pleasant sonority of most people’s voices is achieved by using the face as a resonator.
I hope one or more of those activities can help the sonority and pitch aspects of your voice become more like what you want. I haven’t heard your voice, so it may be that I’d think it doesn’t need any fixing :) My husband hates his voice, but I think it’s great!
I don’t think there’s any really quick way of dealing with this. I had about 4 years of speech therapy which helped a lot. Note that a speech therapist will generally have lots of things that are tailored to you in particular to help out. For example I have a list of words that I still have trouble with so I make sure to always be ready to use their synonyms when speaking. Unfortunately there really isn’t any simple solution to this.
If you don’t want to go to a speech therapist, a friend with some linguistics training or a voice (singing) teacher may be able to listen and tell you where to put your tongue, etc.
I, too, have a related problem. I have great difficulty controlling my volume. That is largely hereditary (or nurtured by my family environment), but the real problem is that I can’t hear when I’m too loud. There are certain triggers (being excited, interrupted, or in the presence of my mother) but they are not really triggers I can avoid, and I can’t see a way to fix it. The obvious solution is to have someone tell me when I’m too loud, but being interrupted for that purpose tends to make me involuntarily louder.
Similar: I would find it useful to learn to speak slowly. I have to repeat myself a lot. The trouble is that I lose track of what I’m saying if I try to speak at a normal pace—I cannot seem to focus on speaking slowly and think of things to say at the same time.
(Edited the last few paragraphs to be more useful.)
I actually teach this to college students, to some degree. This is in the context of moderately scripted competitive speech, though.
The first basic trick is to consciously try to speak at half-speed. Once you’ve done that, halve your speed again. This will at least be close to the right speed.
Another trick is to tell friends or family to rudely (or politely) interrupt you if you speak too fast. This technique can also be helpful for eliminating um, uh, like, y’know, and similar disfluencies. I will write “SLOW” on a piece of paper and hold it up while a student is speaking, for example.
I admit I am surprised that you find speaking slowly more difficult in terms of keeping track of what you are saying. In almost all cases I encounter, people actually speak much more coherently when they speak slower. Either use the extra time to think of what to say, or insert a few judicious pauses for the same effect.
I would say there is a non-negligible chance that your rapid speech comes off as very clear to you, but not to observers. I know that when I get really engaged in an idea, I will often talk rapid-fire in a way that I think makes perfect sense, only to be stopped or slowed down by those around me, whom I’ve lost completely. My thought process feels a little more muddled when I have to slow down and think about exactly what I’m saying, but this is not because my communication is worse; it’s because I actually have to run a mental check to make sure I have a cogent point, rather than simply having a cogent point internally and saying whatever happens to feel right. Rapid-fire speech may create an illusion of transparency, but I’m not familiar with it actually helping people speak better.
Of course, YMMV and I could be totally wrong. But from the couple dozen or so students I’ve worked with, I never remember hearing a complaint that it is harder to think cogently while speaking slowly, only that it is difficult to remember to speak slowly.
I don’t have much practice with public speaking, and I’ve tried this. To speak slowly while you think about what you’re going to say next takes practice. When I try this, I’m likely to confuse my thoughts with my current speech.
And this is what I’ll actually do: pause a bit between sentences, so that the audience can think about what I just said, and I can think about what to say next. Much easier than trying to talk and think at the same time.
There’s your problem right there. Optimally, public speaking should require very little on-the-spot thinking with respect to word choice. Depending on exactly how important (and predictable) the subject matter is, you should have a relatively set vocabulary and set of concepts you wish to discuss. There’s being competent at public speaking, and there’s being good at public speaking; this comment is about how to do the latter.
Before I get started: one general useful piece of advice: if giving a speech, your first few sentences matter far more than everything else, because people will decide whether or not they want to listen to you and will frame their understanding based on it.
If you’re giving a speech, you should have a moderately detailed bullet-point outline of what you’re going to say, and you should have thought (or actually spoken) your way through it in advance. (Often many, many times)(In some cases, and for some people, it’s ideal to have a verbatim script. But such circumstances tend to be relatively rare.) When you are actually speaking, you shouldn’t need to think too hard about your exact word choices. For relatively high-stakes public speaking, I will have thought the issue over so many times it takes some effort to prevent myself from saying what I’ve been thinking of saying at a hundred miles an hour. In other words, if you’re doing serious public speaking, you should be clear enough on what you want to say in advance that you can afford to devote a significant amount of your mental effort to your tone, movement about the stage, and speed of speech. This is admittedly advanced-level, but it’s how one excels.
When answering questions (as opposed to controlling exactly what you say) it doesn’t change much. 90% of questions can be easily anticipated. The remainder, you pause a bit before answering (or, if appropriate, reframe (honestly) to make easier to answer, “If I understand your question, you’re asking _”).
If you’ll forgive a rudimentary sports metaphor: when you’re throwing a ball, all you want to have to think about is where you want it to end up and how fast you want it to get there. Knowing how to position your arm and move your wrist and rotate your shoulder should be second-nature. You get them in line by practicing them before game day. Similarly, quality public looks off-the-cuff and conversational, but reflects a great deal of preparation and mental weight-lifting that prepare the speaker to communicate effectively.
[I’d certainly be willing to expand this into a top-level post if anyone thinks such would be useful. Public speaking skills are surprisingly rare; I believe this is because they require practice and people identify as being bad at them and avoid said practice.]
A useful additional trick is to practice a few generic units of body language, such as walking thoughtfully across a stage or making eye contact with several audience members, until it looks and feels natural to do them. You can drop them into the stream when you need to give yourself a longer break, and they will usually “read” as part of your presentation.
Recording yourself can help with this too. I recorded myself rehearsing for my first ever presentation, and found that when it seemed to me that I was speaking so slowly that I was sarcastically calling the audience stupid, when played back I was speaking at the right pace.
The right pace for whom? I hate it when other people talk slowly, too. I don’t think I’d calibrate properly if I aimed at making myself sound slow enough to myself.
I think it pays to be able to adjust the speed to the situation / audience. In my toastmasters groups I actually overdid the slowing after becoming aware of my too high speed.
I can only speak slowly if I have notes to work from. In normal conversation, including work discussions among 2-10 participants, I tend to rush to get my thoughts out, and that makes it hard for people to follow.
I’ve found that having a whiteboard helps a lot (a notepad on which I can scribble less so, but still better than nothing). Having to slow down enough to write main points down or sketch out some things seems to make me more comprehensible without losing my train of thought.