Be the Sound You Wish to Hear

[Music]

how do you use your voice

to your advantage speaking

is the form we most commonly use to

communicate with one another

and the human voice is a simple machine

which can be broken down into four parts

the breath

the diaphragm which regulates how fast

the air comes through the vocal cords

which actually vibrate and

the resonating space in the mouth so how

can you use this machine to your

advantage

personally i’ve always been an auditory

creature when i was a kid i would

sing myself to sleep the vibrations of

my own tiny voice

lulling me into oblivion while the

demons of reality

nod at my ankles sound

as a physical and artistic concept has

been the purpose

of my life’s work professionally i’ve

been a lot of things

an opera singer a master speaker coach a

violinist

and even for a wonderful decade in there

a trapeze artist

that last one didn’t make a lot of noise

but i found ways

to make it noisy as a predominantly

classical musician i spent

a lot of my life singing other people’s

music making

other people’s art sound beautiful and

while i enjoyed that to a certain extent

something was always missing and then

march 2020 happened

and for the first time in a long time i

was able to slow down and just

be with the sounds inside of me

and i wrote a lot i wrote an entire

one-woman show called sympathetic

resonance which explores the concept of

sound

through poetry physics and opera

and it was in my research for that show

that i taught myself a bit about the

physics of sound and began to fully

understand

the power of the invisible waves that

control

so much of our lives throughout that

whole time that wonderful mahatma gandhi

quote

be the change you wish to see in the

world kept rattling around inside my

head and then one day it hit me like a

ton of bricks

i want to make the sound i wish to hear

in the world see we all have a

soundtrack that goes through

our lives no matter where we are whether

it’s

our sixth zoom call of the day or on the

phone with a friend or

singing in a choir after work our voice

creates that soundtrack

but we don’t get a fancy netflix budget

that

underscores everything and guides our

listeners emotional center to where we

want them to go

now all we get is this simple

four-part machine called the human voice

and our voice creates all this

sound and all this sound comes out

of you the actual physical wave of sound

sparks

in your throat when air passes through

and the vibration of your vocal cords

travels out of your body into the air

through the space

displacing the molecules around it even

through a microphone

and those sound waves then land in your

listeners

ear and their ear the cilia inside of

their ear

dance and move and raise to attention

like the hairs on your arm when a lover

kisses your neck and that specific

movement gets decoded in their brain

but what i’ve found over my years

working with clients

is that people have absolutely no

idea how their voices work or how to

harness the power of their voices to

make that sound

they wish to hear and create the

beautiful soundtracks of their lives

see we spend an enormous amount of time

in our lives focused on

what we’re going to say we even spend an

enormous amount of time focused on

why we say what we say but yet

we spend almost no time focused on how

we say what we say it makes sense when

you think about it

we all have a voice we all can speak but

if i tell my son

i’m not mad he doesn’t believe me

because my tone is betraying the hard

truth

underneath my words maybe i really am

just frustrated or annoyed

but he hears bad it stands to reason

then that

all professions who have to talk a lot

or be in front of a crowd or

communicate messages would get voice

training right surely

mba must programs must have whole

courses on how to use this simple

four-part machine to your advantage

think about professions that rely on

their voices lawyers

news anchors sales people trainers

in their formal education none of these

professions consistently receive

public speaking education as a matter of

necessity

many mba programs offer improv comedy

night or

after school comedy clubs to help their

students improve their oration skills

and yet

despite the history of elocution and

rhetoric training dating back to the

ancient

greeks these courses are not

consistently offered

programs focus on content can we fix the

strain in this curve engineers can we

sell this product marketers can we make

our clients more money financial

planners

learning subjects and gaining mastery in

them is crucially important

don’t get me wrong but what good does

having the cure for cancer do

if you don’t have the tools to

communicate it effectively

a few months ago i had the pleasure to

work with joanne a food scientist who

was working in a very

real way to eliminate world hunger

we were prepping him to present his

proposal for a multi-million dollar plan

that would eliminate world hunger

for the majority of the citizens in the

country in which he was working

while this incredible human being could

tell me the latest developments on food

science

in three different languages he

struggled to stand on stage

and introduce himself by name a product

of a system

where what and why are given all the

creed

what we sound like the how of what we

say has been relegated

to the talent bin people think oh well

she just has a naturally nice voice or

well he’s just good at speaking he has a

pretty instrument

objectively this is inaccurate

being a compelling communicator takes

time

energy and focus but more than that it

takes knowing that your

body is a simple machine an instrument

play it you would never expect a

professional athlete to go out on the

pitch with her shoes tied together and

yet how often do we see speakers

slouching

collapsing their lungs cutting off the

source of their own power

how many of us have ever been to a

conference where the speaker

mumbled and couldn’t understand their

words

yeah it’s therefore they don’t open

their mouth a guitar player

would never stuff socks inside the body

of the guitar before he goes on stage

and yet this is exactly what we do when

we allow the how

of how we say things to become anemic

an afterthought through the use of time

energy and focus joanne the food

scientist was able to learn

how to use his voice as an instrument

for change

and i’m happy to report that he got the

contract and work is underway

but if he hadn’t taken the time to focus

on his voice and how he

sounded hundreds of thousands of people

would still be going hungry

what we sound like is crucially

important i want to play a little game

with you to demonstrate this and i’m

going to sing a pattern

and i want you to finish it are you

ready one two three

four did you say five

i’m just alone in here most people say

five okay

now i’m gonna do another one you ready

one three five

seven

[Music]

could go anywhere could go to six kakoda

one so you see it’s the space between

the first

and the second that gives us pause that

makes our brains

search for an answer a predictable

harbor in which to anchor

but predictable is boring

it doesn’t give us pause or make us

yearn learning

how to use our voices isn’t just about

projecting the voice and standing up

straight or

even learning how to breathe it’s about

creating

an interesting auditory landscape for

our listeners so how do we do that

i turn to physics to find answers for

myself

in physics there’s this concept called

sympathetic resonance and it’s

a concept where it’s a harmonic

phenomenon where a formerly passive

string or vibratory body responds to

external vibrations to which

it has harmonic likeness that’s a

complicated way of saying that when one

thing vibrates

another thing vibrates along with it

you’ve seen examples of this in your

life the windows

rattling in the car when the subwoofer

is turned up or the water rippling in

the wine glass when you run your finger

around the edge

over and over history reminds us

of the power of sound to make change

perhaps one of the most dramatic

instances of this is the now

infamous demise of the tacoma nero’s

bridge or as she was lovingly nicknamed

galloping gertie a suspension bridge

about an hour north of seattle built

similarly to the george washington

bridge in new york or the golden gate in

san francisco

on july 1 1940 it opened to traffic but

on november 7th

a mere four months later the bridge

collapsed into the water below

a necklace breaking beads of bolts and

steel

into the river but what’s interesting

about this story

is that the winds which blew the bridge

down were actually not blowing that fast

engineers were baffled what happened

well one of the bridges cables had

slipped causing the bridge which

had a tendency to bounce up and down

anyway to begin to twist

and because of this twisting the

resonant tide of air

blowing across it made the bridge then

begin to spiral

twist and flutter and it was that

flutter

which then became a self-induced

harmonic vibration

pattern which grew and grew and grew

until the bridge’s deck could no longer

take the strain

and it crumbled into the water below

resonance is a powerful tool

which we must begin to use it’s a

powerful tool which we can all learn to

master

by harnessing the resonant tide of our

own

voices our bodies resonate

whenever we hear anything because our

ears are highly sensitive vibratory

receptors

sound travels through water five times

faster than through air and we

are made up of 60 water so who are you

not to become the sound you wish to hear

in the world

nature shows us over and over again that

sound is power

the lion’s roar the crash of a waterfall

but

in your everyday life why should you

care when you ask your partner to pass

the potatoes

they pass the potatoes so why try and

increase your vocal power

two reasons the first reason is for you

over and over again we see examples of

vocal mastery giving people the edge to

be successful from

opera singers to rap stars auctioneers

to ceos the best performers are

also the easiest to understand and they

emit power

most of my clients are people who are

looking to level up

in their industry and they seek vocal

training specifically

because they know it’s the edge they

need

one of my favorite examples of this is a

story from my own life

a few years ago i was working at a

school putting on an opera

on the playground there and we were all

working outside

when all of a sudden we heard gunshots

terrifying traumatic

but within 45 seconds the students were

safely inside the building because i

used the power of my voice and my phone

was in my hand calling 9-1-1

having that capacity to command a

situation and a space

even a particularly high stakes one like

this

gave me power and we found out later

that it was just old fireworks that went

off in a building across the street

thank goodness sound is

power the second reason you should care

about your vocal power

is for everybody else sound

connects us in a unique way and the

physics of sound back this up

sympathetic resonance is not just about

one object vibrating

and another vibrating along with it in

our lives

sympathetic resonance is about creating

a resonant vibratory field with our

voices that acts as an invisible

but very real connector between us one

we can feel

on a deep level but one that’s not near

romantic fodder for selling coffee table

books

this is physics we use our voices in our

day-to-day now maybe more than ever

endless zoom calls voice memos back and

forth

constantly trying to convey our messages

and it creates cacophony

we must become vocal scientists

so i ask of you this can you use your

voice

to your advantage can you use your voice

to try and make a difference in the

world

of course you can don’t be

a malpractitioner of sound be the

instrument you were meant to be no

be the instrument you already are the

full

instrument the body the breath the

bellows the resonance because if we are

all in resonance we create a more

harmonious

society i want to leave you

with the final poem from my show

sympathetic resonance

sound is defined as a mechanical

disturbance traveling through

an elastic medium a material that tends

to return to its original condition

after being deformed we all

return to ourselves

and we humans elastic mediums made up

of elastic mediums will find lives and

loves and homes and perhaps the

oscillations of our hearts

beating in our chests will drum out a

pattern

we cannot turn away from so

be the sound you wish to hear

in the world thank you