Owning Your Voice: Robert Barto and Raco Del Vera

As the title of the chapter, “Owning Your Voice,” I expected to be taught how to really take command of my voice.. and I was! ..Just in a little bit of a different way than expected. This chapter discussed how there are nine ingredients that go in your voice:

• Tempo - your voice in time - is your speech fast, slow medium or variable?
• Rhythm - your drum beats - How do you attack words and how do you stress them?
• Articulation - shaping sound - how precisely, carefully, and crisply you speak each sound in a word.
• Pronunciation - standards, regional, eccentric - there’ s an accepted way to saying anything in person; 
• Pitch - notes on your sheet music - pitch is determined by the size of the vocal folds.
• Volume - filling space 
• Quality- creating the sound core - the most important single ingredient
• Word choice - your own lingo - word choice can show a huge amount about the toilet paper.
• Vocal nonverbals - snap, crackle, and pop - Nonverbals are sounds that are not worms.

I liked learning about the different things that your voice goes into which was amazing! It’s interesting to think about whether you were the same before college compared! Looking back on videos of me singing as a child. It’s interesting to think about the many layers of our voice and how little we think about what goes into using it. After reading this excerpt, I’ll definitely think about what I’m doing while using my voice a little more. This way I’ll find myself engaged and aware of where my voice is going, why it’s going there and what it’s doing. I’m interested to see how adding this small change in my every day will affect my voice and how I use it. I’m hoping some kind of break through will occur and I’ll always be able to slip into second circle vocal energy at the drop of a hat.

Voice - Patsy Rodenburg

After reading about the voice in Patsy Rodenburg’s The Second Circle, I was able to make some observations and conclusions about what I read and how it pertains to what we’ve been doing in voice and speech class. I like that Rodenburg asks general questions about the voice and how it feels when we use it and how people react to it. This seems important to me because how can you know the effectiveness of your voice or how to manipulate it if you are not cognizant about its effects on you and the people around you. By being aware of your voices place in the world you can begin to realize how to use it in a second circle manor and have it live in second circle. I like that Rodenburg discusses the exercises to find second circle because it displays to the reader that even if you don’t use the exact same warm up to free the natural, second circle voice, precision is key. It shows that if you’re not specific when warming up the voice, how can you expect to be specific when using the voice? The section on intoning kind of made my heart smile because we do it so often in class and it’s incredibly affective. Rodenburg describes the effects of intoning at an increase of color and movement in the voice and I think that’s quite beautiful considering when I intone in class, I find myself becoming much more open and expressive and free. Intoning allows the voice to find a rounder tone that’s more welcoming to an audience and more interesting in general. Overall, I learned that if the voice lies in first or second circle it can be either indirect and confused or jarring and irritating, and neither are desirable options. The second circle voice is the most affective and the most complimentary to the individual. 

Point Park University's As You Like It: A Review

In November I had the pleasure of seeing As You Like it by William Shakespeare. I was a little skeptical at first because I'm not the biggest fan of his work.. not because I necessarily dislike it, it's just not my cup of tea. I find that he uses very roundabout dialogue that makes the plot more confusing to the audience and the work, overall, less enjoyable. With As You Like It I was very pleasantly surprised! It wasn't hard to follow and the language was constructed in a way that was very witty and appealing to the audience. The show is built on a basic love story plot but with a twist that includes many cooky characters and interesting turns along the way. 

On a voice and speech level I found a lot interesting things that the actors did that I never would have noticed before taking the class. The actor who played Adam obviously wasn’t an older gentleman but was able to change his voice in a way that was transformative to his character. He definitely used slack folds to make his voice come out a little more breathy, which added to the character greatly. He was one of the oldest characters in the show and it was very interesting to see how just a slight adjustment in placement and compression can change an actor’s presence entirely. Another character that used voice and speech techniques onstage was the actor who played Charles. His character was an upperclass wrestler and the actor used his voice to add to the way audience viewed Charles. He changed the placement of the tone by placing it in the soft palette and kind of forward. This change made him seem ultimately more well off and snobbish which helped his character a lot. This placement and the presence it created became even more apparent when he entered the stage as a different character, Corin, he didn’t even have a similar speech pattern. I was very impressed! 

The show as a whole was very enjoyable because the way the actors were directed to speak. Yes, they were performing Shakespeare, but the actors did not speak the text as though they were on BBC and over-pronunciate every single word. Instead they spoke as though they were in modern times and the language was very lax and common for the period. That was probably my favorite part of the show because I think Shakespeare previously bothered me because of the way people performed it. I agree that Shakespeare’s language and meter is an art form but if the words were being spoken in real life, even in that time period, they would not be overdone. As You Like It definitely changed my view on Shakespeare. If every Shakespearean play was performed like this production.. I could see myself liking… even LOVING Shakespeare.

Rehearsal Video: "The Highwayman" - Alfred Noyes

Rehearsal Video - "The Beekeeper's Daughter" - Sylvia Plath

Kristin Linklater - The Natural Voice

Freeing the Natural Voice - Kristin Linklater

While reading this excerpt I was very interested in the where the sounds actually comes from. It’s odd to think that there’s an entire process of neural transmission that happens before a breath is even taken. We don’t often think of breathing or the process to make it happen, we often just breath because it’s so natural to us at this point. The fact that the breath is so deliberate and it ultimately affects the sound that exits your mouth definitely makes me care and think about the kind of breath I’m taking before talking, singing, or yelling. While reading the section of the reading about “why the voice does not work,” I learned that habits and constrictors are the common causes of the voice not wanting to work. This is rather frightening because habits are so easily formed and so often hard to reverse. So this made me think about the habits I may have formed and the kinds of constriction it may have on my voice and my production of sound. While reading this article, I was reminded of the words of wisdom that my voice teacher back home used to tell me. She would never explain the entire anatomical process of the breath or sound, but she would say that it’s all about the primal sound. She would describe this as a baby wailing or crying or screaming. This impulse connects the body to the voice and ultimately connects the breath to the vocal folds. So reading the passage was very eye opening and full circle which definitely made me think about the flow of air and how I’m accessing air and catalyzing breath from the body. In my voice lesson last week I tried to use the thoughts if Linklater to embrace the tone coming from a more connected place and though I don’t think I mastered it, I think I’m well on my way to finding the action that allows me to connect my body and vocal folds in a cohesive and powerful manner.