Learning to control your breathing is the first thing to work on. Make a conscious effort to avoid expanding the upper part of your chest when you inhale to speak or sing. Make your lower lungs expand. Pull in your abdomen to support the diaphragm. Then control the outflow of air by gradually letting your lungs breathe out with good diaphragmatic support maintained by abdominal muscles. At the same time try to keep your throat muscles relaxed. This can be practiced by counting as far as possible, without strain, on a single breath of air. Reading aloud is also good practice.
Resonance can be improved by getting the feel of it in your head. This can be done by exaggerating the vibrant tones and prolonging them. Humming and sounding the letters “m” and “n” will help to improve your resonance. Blend these letters with vowels in words such as men, mind, and, end, sun, and so forth. Hold the “n” and “m” sound twice as long as usual while practicing.
For the words you speak to come out full and distinct you need good articulation. This requires free movement of the lips, tongue and jaws, for they shape the sounds. If you have the habit of speaking through tight lips and jaws you need to practice exercises that will make them more flexible. By practice you can also improve articulation so your words come out distinctly. The sounds should not run together and become slurred. You may need to work at it patiently for many months. A good exercise is to read aloud. While doing so, pronounce each word correctly and make each sound carefully. But be careful not to overdo it and develop an affected manner of speaking.
Suppose you have the problem of habitually talking with your voice pitched too high. What can you do to overcome this? A high pitch is due to tenseness of the muscles controlling the vocal folds or cords. They tighten the folds and so raise the pitch of the voice. By relaxing the jaw and throat muscles and by using diaphragmatic breathing you can develop a more pleasing tone and bring the pitch of your voice down to a middle range, which is a more natural level and which sounds less strained. Then you will have a wider range for inflection.
A soft, mellow voice with clear tones is pleasing to hear, but the voice should not be too soft. When it is, people may have difficulty in hearing what you say. With proper breath control a person with a soft voice can control his volume, keeping it adequate in all kinds of situations.
On the other hand, some persons have voices that are always bombastic. Such voices are out of place in quiet surroundings and can be irritating to other persons. This is especially so when listening to such a person on a telephone. Sometimes it is necessary to hold the receiver several inches from one’s ear because the voice on the other end is inconsiderately loud. Learning to vary the volume of your voice to fit the circumstances is one of the factors that make for a good voice.
If a person with a perpetually loud voice will listen to himself on a tape recorder and hear how he sounds to others it will help him to see the need of lowering his volume. All that is necessary to improve such a voice, as far as volume is concerned, is a little conscious effort to speak more softly.
