Voice Quality

What is voice quality?

It involves sounds, stresses, intonation, pitch, thought groups, and so on. We are not talking about your voice quality as a singer’s!

You need to know different aspects of voice quality to make your spoken word clear, powerful and effective.

Proper pronunciation includes learning the sounds, stresses, and intonation. For instance, while ‘thanks’ is a very positive word, different intonations can give it vastly different meanings. And then the body language also complicates matters!

English has 26 letters in its alphabet but 44 sounds! This contradiction itself makes pronouncing that language rather tricky. Because there are no fixed rules that apply, and they keep changing over time and geographical locations.

There are 5 acknowledged ‘native speaking countries’ in the world – UK USA, Canada, Australia, and South Africa. And, it is expected that the others follow one of these 5 countries while they speak.

However, happily, while interacting with the natives of these lands, I have never felt any such compulsion on their part. So, just chill! They are just like us. If they understand you they are fine. They don’t bother with “rolling r’s”!

But the point to note is each of these 44 sounds use a specific set of out mouth. And while learning how to utter the sounds correctly, we should know which sound uses which parts of the mouth. In other words, we should know how to enunciate the sounds.

Then there are several other areas we should be aware of:

STRESS

In English, generally only one syllable on a word is stressed.

So, we say:

GOOD-ness – stress on the firstr syllable

But we say GOOD-WILL – stress on both syllables.

Others examples could be:

- - - Academy – a-CA-demy — stress on th 2^nd syllable
    - But Academic – a-ca-DEM-ic —stress on the 3^rd syllable

- - - Photograph – PHO-to-graph — stress on 1^st syllable
    - Photography – pho-TO-graphy — stress on 2^nd syllable
    - Photographic – pho-to-GRA-phic — stress on 3^rd syllable

Note the change in the stressed syllable with the change in the form of the word. There are rules governing them. But be careful, they cover only around 90% of the cases. You will get the rest as you progress.

Then only selected words of a sentence are stressed. This makes English a stress-timed language. As against this, all of the Indian languages are syllable-timed. This is also what makes us fail to understand the native speakers of English. We have been trained to hear all the syllables stressed while speaking.

Look at this example:

He’ll buy the bag.

He is going to have bought the bag.

Both these sentences are spoken in the same length of time in spite of the difference in the number of words.

INTONATION

This is the music, the melody of the language. English stress and rhythm are also involved in this melody. Those learning Shakespeare will tell you that English goes dee-dum dee-dum, dee-dum, where dee is unstressed syllable, while dum is the stressed bit. Shakespeare’s plays follow the Iambic Pentameter – dee-dum dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum dee-dum.

English is naturally spoken iambically – I think following Shakespeare – correct me if I am wrong here! That is, stressed and unstressed syllables are paired as we speak.

For instance,

The work’s getting a tad boring goes like this

The work is get-ting a tad bor-ing.

o O o O o o O O o

Note that between tad and boring there doesn’t seem to be any syllable to de-stress. So there’s a space. That accounts for a de-stressed syllable. We’ll look at this is detail in another article.

Now, look at this:

- - My name’s Manu ends with a falling pitch. It is a statement.
  - What’s your name? ends with a falling pitch, because it is a WH- question.
  - Is your name Manu? ends with a rising pitch on the last syllable ‘u’. It is a Yes/No question.
  - Your name’s Manu! with a rising pitch, however, expressed surprise or amazement. It’s like saying, “Wow! I didn’t know that!”

You use intonation to show emotions like anger, surprise, hesitation, confusion, sarcasm, interest

It makes your spoken word more dynamic and more interesting.

See, you can be: curious, surprised, disappointed, angry, disbelief, in agreement

Intonation helps you reflect your mood correctly. It is the rise and fall in pitch while you speak – the music of any language.

“Really” – in different ways

So, you need to know where to raise the pitch, where to drop it, &c

LINKINGS

Another area we often forget is the fluency. Fluency in induced by stress, pitch, and intonation. Apart from this there is also, what I call the sound-based fluency. You link sounds to form a steady flow – without bumps. We use links like C-C, C-V, V-V links…

For instance, “hired a builder” can be uttered as 3 different words or in a single smooth flow as Hire da builder

What we did was to LINK the consonant sound /d/ at the end of hired and the immediately succeeding vowel sound /a/. What happens is, HIRED A then sounds like HIRE-DA. This is a C-V link.

Similarly we have other links as well.

These are some of the methods to improve your fluency, and therefore your confidence.