Read The Art of Voice Acting: the art and business of performing for voice over Online
Authors: James Alburger
Your voice is a wind instrument. To do any voiceover work that reveals subtlety and nuance through a performance, it is essential that you know how to play your instrument properly. In other words, you need to know how to breathe. Proper breathing provides support for your voice and allows for emotional expression. It allows you to speak softly or with power, and to switch between the two styles instantly. Proper breathing is what makes possible the subtleties of communicating a broad range of information and emotion through the spoken word.
Breathing comes naturally, and it is something you should not be thinking about while performing. From the moment we are born, we are breathing. However, during our formative years, many of us were either taught to breathe incorrectly, or experienced something in our environment that left us with an improper breathing pattern. It may be that we learned to breathe from our chest, using only our lungs. Or perhaps, we adapted to our insecurities and created a mental block that inhibits our ability to breathe properly.
Arthur Joseph, a voice specialist and creator of Vocal Awareness, describes vocal presentation as the way in which others hear and respond to you. The way you are perceived by others is directly related to your perception of yourself. If you perceive yourself to be outgoing, strong, forceful, and intelligent, your voice reflects these attitudes and perceptions with a certain loudness and assertiveness. By the same token, if you perceive yourself to be weak, helpless, and always making mistakes, your voice reflects your internal beliefs with qualities of softness and insecurity. How you breathe is an important factor in your individual vocal presentation because breath control is directly related to the loudness, tonality, and power behind your voice.
Your perception is your reality. So, if you want to change how you are perceived by others, you must first change how you perceive yourself—and that requires awareness. In most cases, a problem with vocal presentation is a habit directly related to a lack of vocal awareness—and habits can be changed. Changing a habit requires an extreme technique, discipline, conscious diligence, and constant awareness. A number of vocal presentation problems, and exercises for correcting them, are discussed later in this chapter.
Many of the exercises in this book will help you discover things about yourself and your voice, of which you might not have been aware. They will also help you improve or change your breathing technique and vocal presentation, and maintain the new qualities you acquire. The lessons you learn about your voice from this and other books will help give you awareness of your voice and will be of tremendous value as you proceed on your voice-acting journey. From this new awareness, you will be able to adapt and modify your vocal presentation to create believable, compelling characters.
Joni Wilson has written an excellent series of books for improving and maintaining the sound of your voice. The first book of the series,
The 3-Dimensional Voice
is the much-needed owner’s manual for the human voice and introduces her ideas and techniques. You can learn more about Joni and her books by visiting her web site at
www.joniwilsonvoice.com
. On Track 2 of the CD, Joni describes 20 facts you should know about your voice (CD/2).
The first lesson you must learn before you can begin mastering the skills of voice acting is how to breathe properly. Take a moment to observe yourself breathing. Is your breathing rapid and shallow? Or do you inhale with long, slow, deep breaths? Observe how you breathe when you are under stress or in a hurry, and listen to your voice under these conditions. Does the pitch of your voice rise? When you are comfortable and relaxed, is the pitch of your voice lower and softer? Feel what your body is doing as you breathe. Do your shoulders rise when you take a deep breath? Does your chest expand? Do you feel tension in your shoulders, body, or face? Your observations will give you an idea of how you handle the physical process of breathing that we all take for granted.
Of course, the lungs are the organ we use for breathing, but in and of themselves, they cannot provide adequate support for the column of air that passes across your vocal cords. Your lungs are really nothing more than a container for air. It is the diaphragm, a muscle situated below the rib cage and lungs, that is the real source of support for proper breathing.
Allowing your diaphragm to expand when inhaling allows your lungs to expand more completely and fill with a larger quantity of air than if a breath is taken by simply expanding your chest. When you relax your mind and body, and allow a slow, deep, cleansing breath, your diaphragm expands automatically. Contracting your diaphragm, by pulling your lower abdominal muscles up and through your voice as you speak, gives a constant means of support for a column of air across your vocal cords. For a performer, correct breathing is from the diaphragm, not from the chest.
Good breath control begins with a relaxed body. Tense muscles in the neck, tongue, jaw and throat, usually caused by stress, constrict your vocal cords and cause the pitch of your voice to rise. Tension in other parts of your body also has an effect on the quality of your voice and your ability to perform. Relaxation exercises reduce tension throughout your body and have the additional benefit of improving your mental focus and acuity by providing increased oxygen to your brain. Later in this chapter, you’ll find several exercises for relaxing your body and improving your breathing.
Good breath control and support can make the difference between a voice actor successfully transcending an especially unruly piece of copy or ending up exhausted on the studio floor. A voice actor must be able to deal with complex copy and sentences that seem to never end, and to make it all sound natural and comfortable. The only way to do it is with good breath control and support.
The following piece of copy must be read in a single breath in order to come in at :10, or “on-time.” Even though the words will go by quickly, it should not sound rushed. It should sound effortless and comfortable, not strained or forced. It should be delivered in a conversational manner, as though you are speaking to a good friend. Allow a good supporting breath and read the following copy out loud (CD/3).
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How did you do? If you made it all the way through without running out of air, congratulations! If you had to take a breath, or ran out of air near the end, you need to increase your lung capacity and breath support. Long lists and wordy copy are commonplace and performing them requires a relaxed body, focus, concentration, and breath support. You need to start with a good breath that fills the lungs with fresh air.
Check your breathing technique by standing in front of a mirror. Place your fingers just below your rib cage, with thumbs toward the back and watch as you take a slow, deep breath. You should see and feel your stomach expand and your shoulders should not move. If your hands don’t move and your shoulders rise, you are breathing from your chest.
As the diaphragm expands, it opens the body cavity, allowing the rib cage to open and the lungs to expand downward as they fill with air. If you breathe with your chest, you will only partially fill your lungs. It is not necessary for the shoulders to rise in order to obtain a good breath. In fact, rising shoulders is a sign of shallow breathing, indicating that the breath is getting caught in the chest or throat. Tension, fear, stress, and anxiety can all result in shallow breathing, causing the voice to appear weak and shaky and words to sound unnatural.
Breathing from your diaphragm gives you greater power behind your voice and can allow you to read longer before taking another breath. This is important when you have to read a lot of copy in a short period of time, or when the copy is written in long, complicated sentences.
Do the following exercise and then go back and read the copy again. You should find it easier to get through the entire piece in one breath.
A slow, deep, cleansing breath is a terrific way to relax and prepare for a voice-acting performance (see Exercise 1 on page 46). It will help center you and give you focus and balance. However, working from a script requires a somewhat different sort of breathing. You will need to find places in the copy where you can take a breath. For some scripts you may need to take a silent catch breath. At other times you might choose to vocalize a breath for dramatic impact, or take a completely silent breath so as not to not create an audible distraction.
If you breathe primarily from your chest, you will find that breathing from your diaphragm makes a difference in the sound of your voice. Your diaphragm is a muscle and, just as you tone other muscles in your body, you may need to tone your diaphragm.
Here’s a quick exercise from Joni Wilson that will help you develop strong diaphragmatic breathing. You’ll find other exercises in her book
The 3-Dimensional Voice
1
:
One of the secrets for proper breathing with a voiceover performance is to only take in enough air for what you need to say. We do this instinctively in normal conversation. If you only need to say a few words, there’s no point in taking a deep breath. Inhaling too much air may result in a sudden and unnatural exhale at the end of your line.
Listen to how you and others speak in conversation. You’ll notice that no one takes a deep breath before they speak. You’ll also notice that no one waits until someone else finishes talking before they take a breath. In conversation, we breath in a natural and comfortable manner—even when others are speaking. When we speak, we only take in enough air for the words we say, and we breathe at natural breaks in our delivery without thinking about what we are doing. When you understand how to properly use your diaphragm to provide breath support you will eliminate the need for frequent deep breaths and rapid catch breaths.
You need to breathe, and you will sometimes be working a script with extremely long, complicated sentences. Breath points in most copy usually
occur after a portion of a thought has been stated. Listings provide natural break points between each item. You probably won’t want to breathe between each item, but there is usually an opportunity if you need it. To make lists more effective, try to make each item in a list unique by slightly altering your delivery or inflection.
Of course, when we are performing from a script, the words aren’t ours, but as voice actors we must make the words sound conversational and believable as if they are ours. A common problem for many people just starting in voiceover is that they become too focused on the words or feel like they may not be able to “get through” the script, especially if the sentences are long. The result is that they tend to take a deep breath and read as much as they can until they begin to run out of air, somehow thinking that by reading the copy without breathing will help. Although some may be able to deliver the words with a reasonable interpretation for short bursts, most will sound rushed and detached from the meaning of the words. In this case, there is no acting or performance taking place and no connection with the intended audience. The voice talent is merely being themselves while struggling through a highly stressful situation.
The remedy for this common ailment is to realize that the words are just words on a piece of paper, and that our job is to simply speak those words in an appropriate manner. The stress of the moment is completely self-imposed and need not exist. Nowhere is it written that a voice actor must read, or “get through,” a script without breathing. The truth is that breathing is an essential part of communicating the meaning of those words.
The challenge is in learning how to breath naturally while reading from a script, allowing the breath to happen at appropriate places, and truly telling the story. In order to find the natural breath points in a script, you need to understand the story, your character, and the myriad other details in the script. When you play the role of a character you create, the stress of working with a script can be completely eliminated because the character already knows how—and where—to breathe.