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