Find and Power Your Authentic Voice – Lesson 3 – Pitch Exercise
Work that Pitch
Enjoy our Zokacast of this blog post here.
A sure way to keep your audience engaged is to expand your vocal range using a pitch exercise. Humming is a simple way to expand your vocal pitch range. This is especially critical if you communicate with a monotone. A dull monotonous voice is a sure way of neither reaching nor captivating an audience of one or one thousand. In my prior blog I pointed out that the human voice is capable of 36 pitches with each pitch being a consecutive black or white key on the piano. If you’re like most speakers you are probably lucky if you use three or four pitches — boring!
Humming is a great exercise for expanding your pitch range. There are several techniques for humming. Let’s focus on the simplest technique for this exercise. Open your mouth take a deep breath and slowly close your mouth but don’t let your teeth touch. Now make the humming sound. What some of you may ask is the humming sound? Think of a buzzing bee.
Start with a deep breath in. During the exhale while you are humming or buzzing like a bee go up and down a musical scale you’re comfortable with.
During this humming exercise hum and lift your head up. Hum to the head voice and then slowly drop your chin as you hum down to the chest voice. Reverse the direction and continue up and down until you need another breath. Practicing the humming exercise together with the vowel exercises in Lesson 2 will set you on the path to engaging your audiences when you speak.
Pitch Exercise
Here is a handy 2 minute audio humming tutorial.
PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE!
As a coach, trainer and consultant, Larry Blumsack partners with people and organizations on the move and those already there to accelerate their communication, presentation and speaking skills to be on par with their ambition. Through one-on-one coaching and group training Larry helps leaders and aspiring leaders elevate their presence and communication skills to influence more people, sell more products-services-ideas and inspire others more successfully than they ever imagined.
Larry is the bestselling author of Face-to-Face is The Ultimate Social Media and founder of Zoka Institute and Zoka Training®. Zoka Training® — Mind/Voice/Body/Mindfulness in sync — is the result of Larry’s 45 years as a coach, acting teacher, actor, voice-over artist, theater and TV director/producer, radio & TV commentator and show host, speaker, trainer, serial entrepreneur, and syndicated columnist. Larry was a founding member of the theater department at Northeastern University.
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