Why is it important for the speaker to focus on vocal variety during an online presentation?

Our brains are hardwired to pick up on a change in our environment and ignore anything repetitive or predictable. So, imagine how difficult it would be for an audience to listen to someone who speaks in monotone for any length of time. That steady tone becomes white noise, and the audience will tune out. That’s why vocal variety is critical.

Índice Show

Vocal toolbox elements
How to warm up your voice
Exercise - Vocal drills

How do you inject vocal variety into your delivery?

We create vocal variety naturally when we focus more on what we’re saying and less on how we’re saying it.

When we’re in casual conversation that’s not being recorded, we all vary our speech based upon what we’re conveying. Our delivery might become faster if we’re excited, or we might slow down if we want to put extra emphasis on something.

The problem is, when we’re reading a script, we tend to lose that natural variation in cadence because we are overly focused on pronouncing each word perfectly.

By keeping yourself connected to what you are saying, you are much more likely to have that natural variation in your inflection.

When we are speaking on camera, we can often appear less animated than we are in person, but it also can suck all of the energy out of our delivery. Karin Reed explains the importance of vocal variety when communicating via video.

Learn More: On-Camera Coach

If you found this information valuable, check out my book, On-Camera Coach: Tools and Techniques for Business Professionals in a Video-Driven World, now available from Wiley Publishing. On-Camera Coach aims to take the mystery out of communicating through the camera and provides specific tips and techniques that can make your message sing—and you, the messenger, feel confident in a job well done.

How you speak and sound makes a dramatic impact on your speech. It’s not all about the content of what you say, your presentation slides, or your appearance - how you use your voice is equally important.

For many people, if they focus on a few elements of the vocal toolbox, they can dramatically enhance their presentation and make it more engaging for the audience.

The vocal toolbox is a concept made popular by Julian Treasure in his TED talk – ‘How to speak so that people want to listen’, now watched by millions of people. He asks the audience - ‘Have you ever felt like you’re talking, but nobody is listening?’ and then goes on to explain how people can engage better with others by using the 5 elements of the vocal toolbox.

These techniques can be used in all types of speeches, from conference presentations to team meetings to best man speeches. Let’s review the different elements of the vocal toolbox.

The 5 elements of the vocal toolbox.

Vocal toolbox elements

1. Register

A person with a lower register who speaks from their chest is seen as more authoritative than someone who speaks from their nose. Politicians with deeper voices are more likely to get elected than politicians with higher voices – they command more respect. When practicing for your next speech, focus on lowering your register slightly and record your voice to analyse how it sounds.

2. Timbre

Timbre determines how warm, smooth and rich your voice sounds. A voice with good timbre is thought to be more attractive and produce better listeners. Focus on speaking slowly, with regular pauses and deep breaths to achieve this.

3. Prosody

This is the rhythm and sound variation which makes up the notes we speak. This is particularly noticeable with people who speak in a monotone manner, where the variation in sound changes very little. This can make it difficult to listen to and focus on for long periods of time. On the opposite end of the spectrum, when we talk to babies or even pets, we exhibit huge variations in sound and rhythm.

4. Pace

An authoritative speaker usually has a slow, deliberate method of delivery. They believe what they say is important and so don’t feel rushed by the audience. They use tactical pauses to emphasise important points (without using filler words such as ‘umm’ and ‘ah’), and speed up certain sentences to create excitement.

When we’re nervous, we tend to speed up what we say and take short, shallow breaths, which impact the other vocal toolbox elements. However, in everyday conversation, a faster pace is acceptable and often encouraged in a workplace setting where time in meetings is limited.

5. Volume

Talking too loudly, particularly in small group settings, can be annoying, rude and come across as trying to control the conversation. There are many CEO’s, directors and other leaders who surprisingly, speak very quietly – it’s the content of what they say and the use of the other vocal toolbox techniques that ensure people listen to what they are saying.

Making important parts of your presentation or key messages louder than the rest of your presentation can add real impact. Try and mix louder parts with quieter sections for maximum impact.

Watch examples of different vocal range, pace and volume:

Vocal range is important for capturing and keeping the attention of the audience. This video highlights the difference between two speakers with contrasting vocal ranges.

The first speaker, Ray Mabus, presents in a very narrow range and it is difficult to pay attention for long periods of time. The second speaker, Bernie Sanders, is much more dynamic and uses a wide vocal range when speaking.

How to warm up your voice

Here are 3 simple warm up exercises to do before a speech or presentation. These were taken from a wider range of vocal exercises found at Vocal Warmup: Put Your Best Voice Forward.

Warm Up #1 - Lips

This exercise releases lip tension and connects your breathing with your vocal range. Place your lips loosely together and breathe out air in a steady stream to create a trill or raspberry sound. Try to hit an “h” sound, followed by a “b” sound.

Hold the sound for a few seconds by continually blowing out air through your lips. Repeat this exercise and try to glide up and down a musical scale with the sound from your lips.

Warm Up #2 - Tongue

This exercise relaxes your tongue while engaging your breathing and voice. Place your tongue behind your upper teeth. Exhale and trill your tongue with an “r” sound. Hold this sound steady in between deep breaths. Now try to vary the pitch up and down while trilling.

Warm Up #3 - Pitch

This exercise stretches your vocal folds. Start in a low pitch and gently glide up the scale on a “me” sound. Don’t push the top or bottom of your range but do try to increase the range gently each time you do the scales. Now reverse and glide down the scale from the top to the bottom on an “e” sound. You can try this on the “oo” sound also.

A 5-minute strength training workout for your voice to get your ready for a presentation, singing, or any type of performance.

Learn More

Exercise - Vocal drills

These vocal drills will warm up your vocal cords, great to do 5-10 minutes before a presentation. Exercise taken from the RADA Effective Communication guidebook.

Ptkt – ktpt – repeat ten times
Tdr – rdt – repeat
Th-s-sh-sh-s-th (‘th’ as in ‘thin’)
Th-z-j – j-z-th (‘th’ as in ‘this’) (‘j’ as in ‘measure’)
t-tt-ttt – repeat six times
d-dd-ddd – repeat six times
Tdt – tdt – repeat six times
Dtd – dtd – repeat six times
Rittity – tittity – repeat four times
Thittity – tittity
Rittity – thittity – tittity
Jittity – thittity – rittity – tittity
Tippity – toppity – repeat four times
Dippity – doppity – repeat four times
Wippity – woppity – repeat four times
Kippity – koppity – repeat four times
Tippity-toppity-dippity-doppity-wippity-woppity kip pity- koppity – repeat ten times

Using these vocal toolbox techniques will help the audience listen to and understand your message. You’ll be perceived as authoritative and knowledgeable, giving people a reason to listen to you.

Use a voice recorder or even virtual reality to practice and critique your use of these vocal techniques. After doing this over a few weeks, you’ll notice a much improved vocal toolbox.

Identify elements of vocal delivery that make a speech more engaging.
Identify elements of vocal delivery that make a speech clearer.
Discuss the relationship between vocal delivery and speaker credibility.

Vocal delivery includes components of speech delivery that relate to your voice. These include rate, volume, pitch, articulation, pronunciation, and fluency. Our voice is important to consider when delivering our speech for two main reasons. First, vocal delivery can help us engage and interest the audience. Second, vocal delivery helps ensure that our ideas are communicated clearly.

We have all had the displeasure of listening to an unengaging speaker. Even though the person may care about his or her topic, an unengaging delivery that doesn’t communicate enthusiasm will translate into a lack of interest for most audience members. Although a speaker can be visually engaging by incorporating movement and gestures, which we will discuss more later, a flat or monotone vocal delivery can be sedating or even annoying. Incorporating vocal variety in terms of rate, volume, and pitch is key to being a successful speaker.

Rate of speaking refers to how fast or slow you speak. If you speak too fast, your audience will not be able to absorb the information you present. If you speak too slowly, the audience may lose interest. The key is to vary your rate of speaking in a middle range, staying away from either extreme, in order to keep your audience engaged. In general, a higher rate of speaking signals that a speaker is enthusiastic about his or her topic. Speaking slowly may lead the audience to infer that the speaker is uninterested, uninformed, or unprepared to present his or her own topic. These negative assumptions, whether they are true or not, are likely to hurt the credibility of the speaker. Having evaluated thousands of speeches, I can say that, in terms of rate, the issue speakers face is speaking too fast. The goal is to speak at a rate that will interest the audience and will effectively convey your information. Speaking at a slow rate throughout a speech would likely bore an audience, but that is not a common occurrence.

Some people naturally speak faster than others, which is fine, but we can all alter our rate of speaking with practice. If you find that you are a naturally fast speaker, make sure that you do not “speed talk” through your speech when practicing it. Even if you try to hold back when actually delivering your speech, you may fall back into your practice routine and speak too fast. You can also include reminders to “slow down” on your speaking outline.

Volume refers to how loud or soft your voice is. As with speaking rate, you want to avoid the extremes of being too loud or too soft, but still vary your volume within an acceptable middle range. When speaking in a typically sized classroom or office setting that seats about twenty-five people, using a volume a few steps above a typical conversational volume is usually sufficient. When speaking in larger rooms, you will need to project your voice. You may want to look for nonverbal cues from people in the back rows or corners, like leaning forward or straining to hear, to see if you need to adjust your volume more. Obviously, in some settings, a microphone will be necessary to be heard by the entire audience. Like rate, audiences use volume to make a variety of judgments about a speaker. Softer speakers are sometimes judged as meek, which may lead to lowered expectations for the speech or less perceived credibility. Loud speakers may be seen as overbearing or annoying, which can lead audience members to disengage from the speaker and message. Be aware of the volume of your voice and, when in doubt, increase your volume a notch, since beginning speakers are more likely to have an issue of speaking too softly rather than too loudly.

Pitch refers to how high or low a speaker’s voice is. As with other vocal qualities, there are natural variations among people’s vocal pitch. Unlike rate and volume, there are more physiological limitations on the control we have over pitch. For example, males generally have lower pitched voices than females. Despite these limitations, each person still has the capability to intentionally change their pitch across a range large enough to engage an audience. Changing pitch is a good way to communicate enthusiasm and indicate emphasis or closure. In general, our pitch goes up when we are discussing something exciting. Our pitch goes down slightly when we emphasize a serious or important point. Lowering pitch is also an effective way to signal transitions between sections of your speech or the end of your speech, which cues your audience to applaud and avoids an awkward ending.

Of the vocal components of delivery discussed so far, pitch seems to give beginning speakers the most difficulty. There is a stark difference between the way I hear students speak before and after class and the way they speak when they get in front of the class. It’s like giving a speech temporarily numbs their ability to vary their pitch. Record yourself practicing your speech to help determine if the amount of pitch variety and enthusiasm you think you convey while speaking actually comes through. Speakers often assume that their pitch is more varied and their delivery more enthusiastic than the audience actually perceives it to be. Many of my students note this on the self-evaluations they write after viewing their recorded speech.

Overall, the lesson to take away from this section on vocal delivery is that variety is key. Vocal variety includes changes in your rate, volume, and pitch that can make you look more prepared, seem more credible, and be able to engage your audience better. Employing vocal variety is not something that takes natural ability or advanced skills training. It is something that beginning speakers can start working on immediately and everyone can accomplish. The key is to become aware of how you use your voice when you speak, and the best way to do this is to record yourself. We all use vocal variety naturally without thinking about it during our regular conversations, and many of us think that this tendency will translate over to our speaking voices. This is definitely not the case for most beginning speakers. Unlike in your regular conversations, it will take some awareness and practice to use vocal variety in speeches. I encourage students to make this a delivery priority early on. Since it’s something anyone can do, improving in this area will add to your speaking confidence, which usually translates into better speeches and better grades further on.

In order to be an effective speaker, your audience should be able to understand your message and digest the information you present. Audience members will make assumptions about our competence and credibility based on how we speak. As with other aspects of speech delivery, many people are not aware that they have habits of speech that interfere with their message clarity. Since most of our conversations are informal and take place with people we know, many people don’t make a concerted effort to articulate every word clearly and pronounce every word correctly, and most of the people we talk to either don’t notice our errors or don’t correct us if they do notice. Since public speaking is generally more formal than our conversations, we should be more concerned with the clarity of our speech.

Articulation refers to the clarity of sounds and words we produce. If someone is articulate, they speak words clearly, and speakers should strive to speak clearly. Poor articulation results when speakers do not speak clearly. For example, a person may say dinnt instead of didn’t, gonna instead of going to, wanna instead of want to, or hunnerd instead of hundred. Unawareness and laziness are two common challenges to articulation. As with other aspects of our voice, many people are unaware that they regularly have errors in articulation. Recording yourself speak and then becoming a higher self-monitor are effective ways to improve your articulation. Laziness, on the other hand, requires a little more motivation to address. Some people just get in the habit of not articulating their words well. I’m sure we all know someone who mumbles when they speak or slurs their words together. From my experience, this is a problem that I’ve noticed more among men than women. Both mumbling and slurring are examples of poor articulation. In more informal settings, this type of speaking may be acceptable, but in formal settings, it will be negatively evaluated, which will hurt a speaker’s credibility. Perhaps the promise of being judged more favorably, which may help a person become more successful, is enough to motivate a mumbler to speak more clearly.

When combined with a low volume, poor articulation becomes an even greater problem. Doing vocal warm-ups like the ones listed in Section 10.1 “Managing Public Speaking Anxiety” or tongue twisters can help prime your mouth, lips, and tongue to articulate words more clearly. When you notice that you have trouble articulating a particular word, you can either choose a different word to include in your speech or you can repeat it a few times in a row in the days leading up to your speech to get used to saying it.

Unlike articulation, which focuses on the clarity of words, pronunciation refers to speaking words correctly, including the proper sounds of the letters and the proper emphasis. Mispronouncing words can damage a speaker’s credibility, especially when the correct pronunciation of a word is commonly known. I have actually heard someone, presenting on the topic of pronunciation, mispronounce the word pronunciation, saying “pro-NOUN-ciation” instead of “pro-NUN-ciation.” In such a case, it would not be unwarranted for the audience to question the speaker’s expertise on the subject.

We all commonly run into words that we are unfamiliar with and therefore may not know how to pronounce. I offer my students three suggestions when faced with this problem. The first is to look the word up in an online dictionary. Many dictionaries have a speaker icon with their definitions, and when you click on it, you can hear the correct pronunciation of a word. Some words have more than one pronunciation—for example, Caribbean—so choosing either of the accepted pronunciations is fine. Just remember to consistently use that pronunciation to avoid confusing your audience. If a word doesn’t include an audio pronunciation, you can usually find the phonetic spelling of a word, which is the word spelled out the way it sounds. There will occasionally be words that you can’t locate in a dictionary. These are typically proper nouns or foreign words. In this case, I suggest the “phone-a-friend” strategy. Call up the people you know who have large vocabularies or are generally smart when it comes to words, and ask them if they know how to pronounce it. If they do, and you find them credible, you’re probably safe to take their suggestion. The third option is to “fake it ‘til you make it” and should only be used as a last resort. If you can’t find the word in a dictionary and your smart friends don’t know how to pronounce it, it’s likely that your audience will also be unfamiliar with the word. In that case, using your knowledge of how things are typically pronounced, decide on a pronunciation that makes sense and confidently use it during your speech. Most people will not question it. In the event that someone does correct you on your pronunciation, thank him or her for correcting you and adjust your pronunciation.

Fluency refers to the flow of your speaking. To speak with fluency means that your speech flows well and that there are not many interruptions to that flow. There are two main disfluencies, or problems that affect the flow of a speech. Fluency hiccups are unintended pauses in a speech that usually result from forgetting what you were saying, being distracted, or losing your place in your speaking notes. Fluency hiccups are not the same as intended pauses, which are useful for adding emphasis or transitioning between parts of a speech. While speakers should try to minimize fluency hiccups, even experienced speakers need to take an unintended pause sometimes to get their bearings or to recover from an unexpected distraction. Fluency hiccups become a problem when they happen regularly enough to detract from the speaker’s message.

Verbal fillers are words that speakers use to fill in a gap between what they were saying and what they’re saying next. Common verbal fillers include um, uh, ah, er, you know, and like. The best way to minimize verbal fillers is to become a higher self-monitor and realize that you use them. Many students are surprised when they watch the video of their first speech and realize they said “um” thirty times in three minutes. Gaining that awareness is the first step in eliminating verbal fillers, and students make noticeable progress with this between their first and second speeches. If you do lose your train of thought, having a brief fluency hiccup is better than injecting a verbal filler, because the audience may not even notice the pause or may think it was intentional.

Common Causes of Fluency Hiccups

Lack of preparation. Effective practice sessions are the best way to prevent fluency hiccups.
Not writing for speaking. If you write your speech the way you’ve been taught to write papers, you will have fluency hiccups. You must translate the written words into something easier for you to present orally. To do this, read your speech aloud and edit as you write to make sure your speech is easy for you to speak.
A poorly prepared speaking outline. Whether it is on paper or note cards, sloppy writing, unorganized bullet points, or incomplete/insufficient information on a speaking outline leads to fluency hiccups.
Distractions. Audience members and the external environment are unpredictable. Hopefully audience members will be polite and will silence their phones, avoid talking while the speaker is presenting, and avoid moving excessively. There could also be external noise that comes through a door or window. A speaker can also be distracted by internal noise such as thinking about other things.

Delivering Presentations Online

As many people and organizations are trying to do more with smaller budgets, and new software becomes available, online presentations are becoming more common. Whether using a Webinar format, a WebEx, Skype, FaceTime, Elluminate Live, or some other program, the live, face-to-face audience is now mediated through a computer screen. Despite this change in format, many of the same basic principles of public speaking apply when speaking to people virtually. Yet many business professionals seem to forget the best practices of public speaking when presenting online or don’t get that they apply in both settings. The website TheVirtualPresenter.com offers many tips for presenting online that we’ve covered in this book, including be audience focused, have engaging delivery, and use visual aids effectively (Courville, 2012). Yet speakers need to think about some of these things differently when presenting online. We have natural ways to engage an audience when presenting face-to-face, but since many online presentations are only one-way in terms of video, speakers have to rely on technology like audience polls, live chat, or options for audience members to virtually raise their hand when they have a question to get feedback while speaking. Also, in some formats, the audience can only see the presenter’s computer desktop or slide show, which pulls attention away from physical delivery and makes vocal delivery and visual aids more important. Extemporaneous delivery and vocal variety are still key when presenting online. Reading from your slides or having a monotone voice will likely not make a favorable impression on your audience. The lesson to take away is that presenting online requires the same skills as presenting in person, so don’t let the change in format lead you to make mistakes that will make you a less effective speaker.

Have you ever presented online or been an audience member for an online presentation? If so, describe your experience and compare it to face-to-face speaking.
What are some of the key differences between presenting online and presenting in person that a speaker should consider?
How might online presentations play into your future career goals? What types of presentations do you think you would give? What could you do to ensure the presentations are effective?

Speakers should use vocal variety, which is changes in rate, volume, and pitch, to make a speech more engaging.
Speakers should use proper articulation and pronunciation to make their message clear.
Interruptions to the fluency of a speech, including fluency hiccups and verbal fillers, detract from the speaker’s message and can lessen a speaker’s credibility.