Joanne Lockwood: You. Hello,
Joanne Lockwood: everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood, and I am your host for the
Joanne Lockwood: Inclusion Bites Podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a
Joanne Lockwood: number of amazing people and simply had a conversation about the subject
Joanne Lockwood: of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better
Joanne Lockwood: place for everyone to thrive. Join me in the
Joanne Lockwood: future, then please do drop me a line.
Joanne Lockwood: Jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk
Joanne Lockwood: that's S double E Change Happen dot co
Joanne Lockwood: dot uk. You can catch up with all
Joanne Lockwood: the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual
Joanne Lockwood: places. So, plug in your headphones, grab a decaf
Joanne Lockwood: and let's get going. Today is
Joanne Lockwood: Episode 77 with the title
Joanne Lockwood: Breathe. I have the absolute honor and privilege
Joanne Lockwood: to welcome Jamie Reed. Jamie describes himself as a
Joanne Lockwood: vocal coach and vocal health expert.
Joanne Lockwood: When I asked Jamie to describe his superpower, he said that he
Joanne Lockwood: believes not only does everyone have a beautiful voice,
Joanne Lockwood: but most importantly, that it should be heard
Joanne Lockwood: fiercely and proudly. Hello,
Joanne Lockwood: Jamie. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Joanne. I'm really
Jamie Read: delighted to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Yes, we've talked about this
Joanne Lockwood: for so many months now and we finally got around to it. Excellent.
Joanne Lockwood: Jamie, why is breathing so
Joanne Lockwood: important? So,
Jamie Read: somebody much wiser than me once said, life
Jamie Read: is not measured in years, it's measured in breaths. And I think that's a
Jamie Read: really beautiful thing. Breathing is the fuel supply
Jamie Read: for the voice, it's the fuel supply for life. And
Jamie Read: we all share the same breath, we all share the same air and
Jamie Read: oxygen. So it's a very
Jamie Read: equal, very available thing
Jamie Read: that all of us have and all of us need and
Jamie Read: breath. As a vocal coach, so I began my career as an actor and as
Jamie Read: a performer and moved into coaching about 18 years ago. And breath
Jamie Read: is so fundamental to the way that we vocalize and how
Jamie Read: we produce our voice and how we express ourselves that
Jamie Read: it just felt so integral and so important.
Jamie Read: That's why the word was there in the text
Jamie Read: that I sent over. That's why it popped out so much, I think.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, it resonated straight with me because as a professional
Joanne Lockwood: speaker, and even before I was a professional speaker, when I was maybe a public
Joanne Lockwood: speaker or a corporate speaker in the corporate
Joanne Lockwood: world, I'd often find that I forget to
Joanne Lockwood: breathe. I'd end up, in this time, myself into or
Joanne Lockwood: painted myself to the corner where I had no breath left and
Joanne Lockwood: all my anxiety levels or my panic mechanism kicked in.
Joanne Lockwood: And often think that many people who have an
Joanne Lockwood: anxiety or a fear of public speaking worry
Joanne Lockwood: about losing their breath or not being able to get their words out.
Jamie Read: Yeah, it's such a primal thing, it's such an important thing and
Jamie Read: nobody really focuses on it day to day. We're getting
Jamie Read: much better in the world at large about being aware of the
Jamie Read: usefulness and the benefits of mindfulness and meditation and so on. But by
Jamie Read: and large, nobody's ever thought about
Jamie Read: breathing because we just do it luckily. I mean, we'd be in trouble if we
Jamie Read: didn't. But as you say, when you come under pressure,
Jamie Read: actually the breath, because it's part of the cardiovascular
Jamie Read: system, if the breathing speeds up or shallows, then the heart rate speeds up or
Jamie Read: shallows. And those things have an impact on how we feel. And how we
Jamie Read: feel has a huge impact on how we express ourselves and what we say
Jamie Read: and how we say it. And actually, I think
Jamie Read: that's the big thing for me as a vocal coach, because I work with
Jamie Read: genuinely anyone with a voice. So I've worked with everything from opera singers
Jamie Read: to rabbis, to people with vocal health difficulties,
Jamie Read: to business CEOs to actors. I mean, you name it.
Jamie Read: I do all kinds of different work with voices. And actually, how you feel
Jamie Read: about yourself affects the way that you breathe,
Jamie Read: affects the way that you speak, and therefore affects the way that you're perceived. And
Jamie Read: it's such an important interface for human beings. It's a very tribal
Jamie Read: behavior. Voice. We hear a voice and decide actually if this person
Jamie Read: belongs to our tribe or us to theirs, is this somebody I can
Jamie Read: connect with? It's where we get accents and dialects and you
Jamie Read: hear that kind of corporate boardroom thing where the voice goes down
Jamie Read: here somewhere, where everyone's kind of in that space. Or you hear the oh, it's
Jamie Read: a new baby. Oh, that's lovely. And that kind of space in there. And
Jamie Read: it's such an emotional response and such a primal
Jamie Read: response that if we can get control over it, we
Jamie Read: can really start to feel in in control of how
Jamie Read: we express ourselves and how we're perceived and how our emotions are expressed
Jamie Read: and perceived as well. That's so true. I'm thinking about that.
Joanne Lockwood: We can often our pitch of our voice can increase
Joanne Lockwood: as our anxiety or our panic, or when we're not
Joanne Lockwood: maybe emotionally in control of ourselves. And that can lead us
Joanne Lockwood: to sound less credible or less capable
Joanne Lockwood: because we associate deep, steady
Joanne Lockwood: resonance with authority. Yeah,
Jamie Read: which is a curious thing in and of itself. There was a piece of research
Jamie Read: last year that I was reading not that long ago that
Jamie Read: showed that a drop of only about 25 Hz, which is a very
Jamie Read: small drop in pitch in the voice amongst
Jamie Read: CEOs in the US. Is associated with
Jamie Read: an extra $187,000 of income for that person
Jamie Read: per year and something in the order of an increase of
Jamie Read: about $400,000 in the size of the business that they run.
Jamie Read: And that's just 25 Hz, which I found that really
Jamie Read: interesting. But also, I don't know, it's slightly jarred
Jamie Read: for me because a lot of what I people come in with the idea that
Jamie Read: there's a right or a wrong way to speak and that just isn't true. That's
Jamie Read: a hangover from the idea of RP received pronunciation when
Jamie Read: every on the BBC all spoke like this welcome to the BBC Light Service. And
Jamie Read: you didn't hear regional dialects, really, until
Jamie Read: your man from Big Brother in 1999, D 44 in the Big Brother house.
Jamie Read: And everyone kind of went, oh, wow, what's that? And actually, that
Jamie Read: sense of right and wrong is something that we really carry. Oh, in this
Jamie Read: space, I need to be this person. So I get so many
Jamie Read: women in business coming in to the studio to work with me or
Jamie Read: working online with me, saying, oh, I need a lower voice because I'm surrounded by
Jamie Read: men and I've got to be able to command authority. And
Jamie Read: although part of the work is in that area, the bigger part of the work
Jamie Read: with those clients is helping them to feel the authority and the
Jamie Read: authenticity in the voice that they already have and owning their
Jamie Read: presence. So that actually that audience learns to listen to whatever
Jamie Read: voice they're hearing, rather than just assuming that this lower pitch range
Jamie Read: is right in inverted commas in that environment. I get a bit of a beam
Jamie Read: up on it about it. Joanne. Yeah, I agree.
Joanne Lockwood: As you know, I'm a transgender woman. I transitioned about six
Joanne Lockwood: years ago. And at the time, I was in this big dilemma about my
Joanne Lockwood: voice because, as you said, it's a critical part of one of those primary
Joanne Lockwood: senses of how we categorize people and put them into a box
Joanne Lockwood: and assess their worth or my tribe or not my
Joanne Lockwood: tribe. And I wrestled
Joanne Lockwood: long and hard about my voice, whether I could be a professional speaker, but I
Joanne Lockwood: could be taken seriously. And I decided one day I was just going
Joanne Lockwood: to. It's my voice, it's my voice.
Joanne Lockwood: Why try and educate or train it or do it
Joanne Lockwood: differently? Because it's another cognitive load you have to deal
Joanne Lockwood: with. I appreciate after time, after you trained it,
Joanne Lockwood: maybe after months and months and months, it becomes more natural. But I just
Joanne Lockwood: decided hey. And I think the awesome thing you just said there
Joanne Lockwood: was about how that pitch gives a
Joanne Lockwood: certain level of authority as well. And for me, it's worked as a
Joanne Lockwood: bit of a shock and awe tactic. So I can stand on stage and just
Joanne Lockwood: hold the room before I speak. And then when I
Joanne Lockwood: speak, people kind of look at me and go, wow, where did that come from?
Joanne Lockwood: I play it to my advantage sometimes.
Jamie Read: Yeah, absolutely. And as I say, the authenticity thing is the big part of
Jamie Read: it. And actually, the fact that you had that thought and went, do I need
Jamie Read: to do something about this? Actually, no, I don't. This is my voice. It means
Jamie Read: something to me. That's the thought
Jamie Read: that is more important than any other in the vocal aspect,
Jamie Read: especially for trans and nonbinary clients that I work with, who may be
Jamie Read: beginning to question how the world might view them or if they're in
Jamie Read: the process of transitioning. Sometimes the voice can be a hindrance,
Jamie Read: and sometimes, as you say, it can be something where you go, actually, no, this
Jamie Read: is really authentically me. I already know this part of myself so
Jamie Read: well that I don't want to change it, but maybe I do want to optimize
Jamie Read: it, or maybe I want to be able to have a wider range of color
Jamie Read: in my voice, whatever the particular thing is. Nine out
Jamie Read: of ten times people come into the room with one idea of
Jamie Read: what they perceive the problem to be, and again, I use heavy inverted commas around
Jamie Read: the idea of the problem, and actually, they leave with a fresh understanding
Jamie Read: of going, oh, actually, no, I thought it was this. But now, having
Jamie Read: talked it through and understood a bit more about the process,
Jamie Read: it's often a really different picture that they leave with, which is a great part
Jamie Read: of the work. I love that. Yeah, don't be wrong. My
Joanne Lockwood: voice doesn't work for me all the time.
Joanne Lockwood: There are times, say, for example, I've been in
Joanne Lockwood: gendered spaces, so public toilets, toilets,
Joanne Lockwood: and my wife's been with me, and she starts having a conversation through the
Joanne Lockwood: toilet door, through the cubicle wall, and
Joanne Lockwood: I don't respond because my voice, without my
Joanne Lockwood: image, is
Joanne Lockwood: incongruent. And in that space, it could be perceived
Joanne Lockwood: as being confusing for people outside. I've actually had someone
Joanne Lockwood: shout out once, Is there a man in there? And I said, no,
Joanne Lockwood: it's just Joanne. Oh, sorry, Joanne. So I'm very conscious
Joanne Lockwood: again about how we print imprint people
Joanne Lockwood: based on voice and visuals. And so there are times when I
Joanne Lockwood: do I am very conscious about it in certain
Joanne Lockwood: spaces. Yeah,
Jamie Read: I can imagine that. I can appreciate what that would be
Jamie Read: like. And it is, I think, an experience.
Jamie Read: The particular experience that you describe, I think is really specific
Jamie Read: to the trans community. But also, I think there are lots of places
Jamie Read: where people feel that their voice doesn't represent who they are in
Jamie Read: some way. You often get the reverse thing where somebody's on the
Jamie Read: it's so common for people to be misgendered on the phone,
Jamie Read: regardless of whether they're trans or CIS or transitioning or nonbinary
Jamie Read: or whatever, actually, you get that sense of, oh,
Jamie Read: you didn't understand who I was, you don't know who I am. And there's a
Jamie Read: dissonance there that isn't necessarily comfortable.
Jamie Read: And also, I've been working with a couple of singers
Jamie Read: recently who are non binary
Jamie Read: singers, and it's been really interesting because there's a real conversation that's
Jamie Read: opened up there that if you wanted
Jamie Read: to sort of almost point to the science, if you like, and go, well, okay.
Jamie Read: A traditional CIS male voice would have these parameters. A
Jamie Read: traditional CIS female voice would have these parameters. Often, trans people
Jamie Read: are working towards those parameters in some way, or understanding which aspects
Jamie Read: of themselves are represented in one or the other. And for the first non
Jamie Read: binary singer that I worked with, who came in saying, not only actually
Jamie Read: do I want to change the keys of these songs and not be singing male
Jamie Read: or female rep, but actually singing from a mixture of them, I want to find
Jamie Read: my non binary singing voice. And I kind of went, wow, that's really cool. What
Jamie Read: does that sound like in your head? And they said, Actually, I don't know. I
Jamie Read: don't know what it sounds like. It doesn't sound like anything yet. Let's play together
Jamie Read: and explore. And it was so lovely to have that opportunity to figure
Jamie Read: out what we were reaching for. Was it pitch range? Was it
Jamie Read: Tombra? Was it repertoire? Was it a mixture of those things?
Jamie Read: There's a statistical difference between
Jamie Read: the pitch sorry, the pace and the inflection
Jamie Read: of the CIS female and CIS male voices. So was there something in that that
Jamie Read: we were working toward? And even the breath, which,
Jamie Read: again, speaks to the inclusion thing and the fact that there are things we don't
Jamie Read: even notice in inclusion that
Jamie Read: oftentimes if a person feels they have
Jamie Read: the right in a certain circumstance to speak to
Jamie Read: be heard, they will breathe more. They literally take up more
Jamie Read: air in the room because they will breathe more
Jamie Read: deeply. And that adds to a sense of presence and a sense of command.
Jamie Read: And we think, all right, I'm supposed to listen to this person. Often with
Jamie Read: public speakers, people have been trained to use their pauses exactly as you just
Jamie Read: said, actually, where you take that moment to let the room land
Jamie Read: and be in your presence before you start. And sometimes it works
Jamie Read: really well. And if people aren't employing it as successfully as they might, then
Jamie Read: there was a famous speech that I'm going to struggle to remember the beginning of
Jamie Read: now, but that Tony Blair gave, and Tony Blair was a big Pauser.
Jamie Read: And it was a power pause, because there was that sense that if you kind
Jamie Read: of stop speaking for a moment, people have to
Jamie Read: lean in and listen. It becomes really frustrating. You're just like, oh, my God,
Jamie Read: Tony, get on with it. When it works,
Jamie Read: it works well, and when it's overused, it becomes a problem.
Jamie Read: So that sense of power breathing, taking in the breath, holding the
Jamie Read: air, holding your presence in a space, and then
Jamie Read: vocalizing from that, you've automatically taken power and oxygen from
Jamie Read: other people in this space. So we kind of have to fight for that a
Jamie Read: little bit. I still
Joanne Lockwood: remember that type of, as you say, that extra pause. And
Joanne Lockwood: I think it's because it's an unnatural pause in a mid sentence. If
Joanne Lockwood: it's kind of at the end of a paragraph or
Joanne Lockwood: on a virtual page turn of a chapter, then you
Joanne Lockwood: can allow the audience to refresh in bed to soak it in. But
Joanne Lockwood: if you're trying to trick your audience into, as you say, leaning in and trying
Joanne Lockwood: to grab their attention, it can become a bit exhausting
Joanne Lockwood: for the audience, can't it? I think that's the trouble. It wears you out listening
Joanne Lockwood: to that. Yeah. You don't want your audience to be working.
Jamie Read: That's the last thing you need. You want them to be engaged, but not having
Jamie Read: to work, I should just say, by the way, I'm going to apologize to you
Jamie Read: and the listeners. I'm currently being buzzed by a helicopter over the top of the
Jamie Read: studio I'm speaking to you from, so if there's background rumbling, I
Jamie Read: apologize. There's something flying very low overhead.
Joanne Lockwood: We live not far from Goodwood Airport and we often get light aircraft
Joanne Lockwood: or helicopters flying over here as well. Yeah, we're
Jamie Read: on some training route for I think it's RAF
Jamie Read: Benson. So the helicopters were on a training route down here. They followed
Jamie Read: they Buzz the canal, which is about chinook in the house. Twin,
Joanne Lockwood: twin prop chinooks. They fly quite low, as I don't.
Jamie Read: Think you're talking of those making a guest
Jamie Read: appearance. You talk about nonbinary singers and the person springs to
Joanne Lockwood: my mind, me, is Sam Smith, and
Joanne Lockwood: I find Sam's delivery,
Joanne Lockwood: because they have such a huge vocal range, the
Joanne Lockwood: high notes, and they can also bring the depth and the real
Joanne Lockwood: resonance in there as well. I get drawn in to the
Joanne Lockwood: song, to the words, because I find they really speak to me.
Joanne Lockwood: And if I wasn't aware of Sam's
Joanne Lockwood: gender, I wouldn't even care, because the song
Joanne Lockwood: is the delivery is so powerful.
Jamie Read: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think Sam Smith is a great example
Jamie Read: that when you are not
Jamie Read: attached to what society tells you someone
Jamie Read: is supposed to sound like, when you can in some way unattach
Jamie Read: yourself from that, you open up a whole range of possibility in terms
Jamie Read: of both pitch range pardon the pun, but also in terms of the manner
Jamie Read: of delivery, the expectation of how heavy or light the sound
Jamie Read: is going to be. So there's a real
Jamie Read: opening up there because actually, so much of it is societal
Jamie Read: conditioning that when you look at Western
Jamie Read: CIS male voices as a statistical
Jamie Read: analysis, the sense of, oh, I must have a low
Jamie Read: voice is more or less society. Saying men are
Jamie Read: supposed to be, again, heavy, inverted, commas, big, loud, strong,
Jamie Read: all of these kind of adjectives that have tended to be used. And
Jamie Read: girls are supposed to be light, small, unthreatening,
Jamie Read: and it's such nonsense, but it tends to be what society
Jamie Read: has told us. So, for example, statistically, the CIS male voice, the
Jamie Read: pitch range that is
Jamie Read: acceptable to society in this country or in the west at
Jamie Read: large, is lower than it is, for
Jamie Read: example, in West Africa, where a high male voice is quite celebrated,
Jamie Read: especially in singing. But actually, there's no sense of, oh, you have
Jamie Read: to speak low. Using a much wider kind of pitch
Jamie Read: range is completely acceptable. And actually, by the same
Jamie Read: token, the traditional CIS female voice, the pitch range can be lower
Jamie Read: in south africa and in some of those areas than it is
Jamie Read: in Asia. So there's a lot of societal
Jamie Read: conditioning and fundamentally, we all have the same instrument. Some
Jamie Read: people are born with a Steinway and some people are born with a pub piano,
Jamie Read: but it's basically the same instrument and anyone can learn to operate the
Jamie Read: thing, whether you're singing or speaking. And so
Jamie Read: knowing that physiologically for the vast majority of people,
Jamie Read: there are very few differences between our voice and the
Jamie Read: next person that we're going to meet, maybe some structural and size things,
Jamie Read: but actually, basically, we've all got the same kit in there. It's
Jamie Read: society that tells us what we're supposed to sound like.
Jamie Read: And actually we can answer back by saying, well, no, I sound like this, and
Jamie Read: this is where my authenticity is, and this is my voice. And
Jamie Read: the voice is where we tell people we love them and where we tell people
Jamie Read: we hate them and where we scream and where we cry and where we laugh.
Jamie Read: And I only half joking quite often say to people that
Jamie Read: actually the larynx is such an emotional thing that on Valentine's Day I think we
Jamie Read: all ought to give each other cards with larynxes on because it's much more emotional
Jamie Read: than the heart is. That's so true.
Joanne Lockwood: Your voice can crack and
Joanne Lockwood: lose stability, if you like, under emotional stress.
Jamie Read: Yeah. And laughter is a vocal we call them vocal gestures
Jamie Read: in voice science. Laughter is a vocal gesture. Crying is
Jamie Read: a vocal gesture. And a lot of the time you get people
Jamie Read: what I spend most of my time doing is actually encouraging people to make sounds
Jamie Read: they can already make and then using them in a different context. So, for example,
Jamie Read: if people kind of think of that really moany teenager voice like, oh, mom, it's
Jamie Read: not fair, that kind of space in there. Actually, if you take that into a
Jamie Read: song voice, I don't know, if I just kind
Jamie Read: of sing a note and just go, Ah. And then if I kind of cry,
Jamie Read: I didn't go money teenager becomes more
Jamie Read: operatic in its tonality because there's something
Jamie Read: called thyroid tilt. There's a movement in the larynx that is produced when we make
Jamie Read: the vocal gesture of crying. Whereas on the other hand, if I cheer,
Jamie Read: which I'm going to back away from the microphone, because I don't want to explode
Jamie Read: people's AirPods, but if I kind of cheer in the opposite direction of the computer
Jamie Read: and just go, hey yay. If I do that
Jamie Read: and hold it, I'm basically belting a rock song going, Yay.
Jamie Read: It's cheering. It's a vocal gesture we can already do.
Jamie Read: So when you were talking about Sam Smith, they use such a wide
Jamie Read: range of vocal gestures that include the kind of the
Jamie Read: falsettoe, very light sound, the cry sound, the belt
Jamie Read: sound, and they're all things that actually each of
Jamie Read: us physically can already do, but mentally, do
Jamie Read: we have permission? Has society or have we ourselves, or have
Jamie Read: those around us, given us permission to make
Jamie Read: that sound and to own the noise that we make? And that's where the work
Jamie Read: is often needs to be done.
Joanne Lockwood: You said just now that we all have the same instrument. Some of
Joanne Lockwood: them are just a bit rougher at the edges, a bit larger, a bit smaller,
Joanne Lockwood: whatever it may be. Yeah.
Joanne Lockwood: So how much of our voice
Joanne Lockwood: and the way we sound is nurture rather than nature?
Jamie Read: I would say a large majority of it. So
Jamie Read: the only physiological difference is to do
Jamie Read: with the hormones that hit us at puberty
Jamie Read: or in some cases, in
Jamie Read: transition. But when the
Jamie Read: larynx gets a hit of testosterone at a male puberty, or
Jamie Read: for a trans man, if they go on to testosterone, the
Jamie Read: larynx grows at that point. And because the larynx
Jamie Read: is bigger, the vocal cords are longer and the instrument you're playing is
Jamie Read: bigger. And that's why it has a more bass Tombra to it. So if
Jamie Read: you think of someone playing a trombone and somebody playing a flute, they could play
Jamie Read: the same note as each other, but the Tombra would be noticeably different because
Jamie Read: of the size of the pipework of the instrument. So when the larynx gets
Jamie Read: a testosterone hit, it gets bigger and as you've already touched
Jamie Read: on, that can happen. So for trans men, when they're transitioning, if they go on
Jamie Read: to T, the larynx will grow and they go through a voice break
Jamie Read: process. For trans women, if they have been through a
Jamie Read: CIS male puberty, you can't ungrow a
Jamie Read: tree. So once the larynx has grown, it doesn't shrink back. So
Jamie Read: actually, for trans women, the
Jamie Read: coaching work is necessary if they want to change the way that
Jamie Read: they sound. And as you've already touched on, there's no need for
Jamie Read: that to happen. It's entirely kind of down to the authenticity of the person.
Jamie Read: But apart from that one difference of testosterone
Jamie Read: causing the larynx to grow, essentially, the physiology is the same
Jamie Read: across everybody. We all have the same capability.
Jamie Read: I was having the conversation for 15 years. I ran a drama school and
Jamie Read: was working with actors in training on a full time basis.
Jamie Read: And one of my colleagues there is
Jamie Read: a woman with a very low bass resonance voice. She's got a really
Jamie Read: lovely, rich, kind of beautiful, butterscotch
Jamie Read: kind of voice. And actually, my spoken voice is quite high and my singing voice
Jamie Read: is quite high. And we were talking to the students about
Jamie Read: voice and gender and characterization. And when you're working,
Jamie Read: in fact, as we are, when it's just a voice that people are hearing,
Jamie Read: how we're perceiving that sound, and how, as an actor, you can engage that
Jamie Read: audience. And somebody said, oh, yes, but women have higher voices than men.
Jamie Read: And I said, well, no, it's not that you can have a more bass
Jamie Read: Tombra to it, but actually, if I stand next to Claire, who is my colleague
Jamie Read: and we both say the alphabet to you. I have a little gadget I use
Jamie Read: on my computer that shows you the pitch that the speaker is using and lo
Jamie Read: and behold, Claire was a good few hertz below me in our natural
Jamie Read: speaking ranges. But it's the Tombra
Jamie Read: that can change. We can work with the Tombra and move it up and down.
Jamie Read: So a lot of what we perceive as vocal differences are in fact vocal
Jamie Read: similarities. Just with a few little nips and tucks around the
Jamie Read: edge. Could you just explain to me what Tombra
Joanne Lockwood: is? Not sure. Yeah,
Jamie Read: for sure. So for example,
Jamie Read: this is going to sound very odd for your listeners now. So stand by everybody.
Jamie Read: Do not adjust your sets. I'm actually making these noises
Jamie Read: so I'm going to hold one note so that I'm not changing the
Jamie Read: pitch. So the actual pitch, if I were to make a pitch change I'd be
Jamie Read: going and you'd hear a
Jamie Read: change of note. Yeah, exactly. Kind of moving up and down.
Jamie Read: What I'm going to do is hold one note. So if you imagine in your
Jamie Read: head a graph, the graph is flatlining, there's no undulation
Jamie Read: in it. E. And
Jamie Read: then what I'm going to do is change the treble and bass in
Jamie Read: that sound. So you'll hear a bass frequency and a treble
Jamie Read: frequency and I'll move between so
Jamie Read: e.
Jamie Read: So that's the same note throughout. So therefore, if I speak to you from
Jamie Read: this position here with my larynx really low, I sound a little bit like EOR
Jamie Read: actually from Winnie the Pooh. But if I kind of speak with my larynx quite
Jamie Read: low down here, it's got a bass Tombra but I can speak quite high in
Jamie Read: my pitch range and still keep that kind of bass voice in there. Whereas on
Jamie Read: the other hand, like I said, do not adjust your
Jamie Read: sets. This is actually happening. On the other hand, I can talk
Jamie Read: in a lower pitch range but if I raise my larynx up and make the
Jamie Read: sound smaller, I've got more treble frequency in there and I kind of turn into
Jamie Read: as mayor of the munchkin city in the county of the land of ours. So
Jamie Read: pitch and Tombra, that Tombra is to do with the texture of how much
Jamie Read: bass and treble is in the sound and often they're attached.
Jamie Read: So often we'll think of kind of the low voice with the bass Tombra and
Jamie Read: the high voice with a small Tombra, but they don't have to be, you can
Jamie Read: move between them. Wow.
Joanne Lockwood: I'm sort of fascinated. Fascinated. This is
Joanne Lockwood: a real educational slot for me today. So I'm loving this. This is a
Joanne Lockwood: yeah. And you're amazing use of your voice there. Yeah,
Jamie Read: it's kind of the day job really.
Joanne Lockwood: I can imagine being one of your students or clients
Joanne Lockwood: and you've got some amazing ways of
Joanne Lockwood: giving an example of what you're trying to explain
Joanne Lockwood: because I didn't have this idea of tombry in my head, but now I understand
Joanne Lockwood: it's around the base, the treble, the richness and
Joanne Lockwood: all those things. It's not just around, as you say, the pitch or the note.
Joanne Lockwood: It's about everything else, isn't it? But I guess the
Joanne Lockwood: other side of testosterone is lung capacity. So presumably a lot of
Joanne Lockwood: resonance comes from the chest, doesn't it?
Jamie Read: Well, now, actually, that's something of a myth. So we
Jamie Read: talk about chest resonance and head resonance, and they're useful
Jamie Read: bits of terminology as imagery, but they're not actually
Jamie Read: physiologically true. So the voice is fairly linear.
Jamie Read: The air comes up from the lungs, through the chest and up to the throat,
Jamie Read: and at the level of the larynx is where it meets your vocal
Jamie Read: cords, and that's where the vibration happens. And the sound then travels up and out
Jamie Read: through the mouth and all the resonance happens beyond
Jamie Read: that point. So if you were resonating in the chest, you'd be inhaling
Jamie Read: and speaking out at the wrong end, because you would have to have
Jamie Read: air flowing into the chest in order for resonance to be down there.
Jamie Read: Also, the chest, although it feels empty because of the thoracic
Jamie Read: cavity, needs capacity for the lungs. Actually, it's a sealed unit and you
Jamie Read: can't resonate anything in there because you can't get any sound into the empty
Jamie Read: spaces. However, and the same with the head. One assumes that the head is also
Jamie Read: quite full, one hopes, and you can't resonate the sound outside
Jamie Read: of the oral cavity. You can't get it outside of the mouth or the nose.
Jamie Read: You can't resonate in the forehead or in the mask or these are all images
Jamie Read: that we've used in voice training to help people understand
Jamie Read: the sense of the thing. Because actually what it feels like is just as
Jamie Read: important as what it actually is. So you can try as
Jamie Read: the experiment and listeners can do the same thing. If you put your hand on
Jamie Read: the top of your chest and make the lowest kind of
Jamie Read: rumbliest sound that you can, wherever
Jamie Read: that pitch range is, you'll feel vibration there, but
Jamie Read: you're not actually resonating the sound there, you're feeling sympathetic
Jamie Read: vibration. The bits of your body that are at the same
Jamie Read: frequency as that sound vibrate in sympathy
Jamie Read: with them. So head and chest are useful
Jamie Read: ways of describing a set of vocal behaviors, but actually,
Jamie Read: all of the resonance is done in the throat, nose and mouth
Jamie Read: in quite a small space, so it's a linear system. So
Jamie Read: lung capacity has an effect on the voice in terms of how long we can
Jamie Read: phrase for how long we can keep going and how long we can keep speaking.
Jamie Read: But it doesn't affect the volume or the resonance
Jamie Read: of the voice, because the other myth, that's one that
Jamie Read: most people carry, again, mostly because society tells us this
Jamie Read: actually, is that more breath does not equal more voice
Jamie Read: in the same way that more petrol doesn't equal going faster. You just overflow
Jamie Read: the. Petrol tank and you can feel it really
Jamie Read: easily. So again, another experiment we can all do over the magic of the
Jamie Read: airwaves is that if you put your hand in front of your
Jamie Read: mouth and just make a really quiet breathy sound
Jamie Read: or any comfortable pitch, doesn't matter where the pitch is,
Jamie Read: you can feel the air there. And now if you put your hand in the
Jamie Read: same place and yell at it yay.
Jamie Read: If you yell at it there's no air or there's less air. So the louder
Jamie Read: we are, the less air actually comes out of your mouth. The quieter we
Jamie Read: are, the more air comes out. It's a real anomaly of how we
Jamie Read: perceive things. But
Jamie Read: all of that said, I draw a little bit on NLP, on
Jamie Read: Neuro Linguistic Programming and a lot of mirroring work with my clients.
Jamie Read: So when somebody comes into the studio they might say to
Jamie Read: me, I have real problem resonating my voice in my
Jamie Read: chest because it all seems to be stuck in my head and I need to
Jamie Read: resonate in my chest more. And if I say to them, oh well actually that's
Jamie Read: not what you're doing, and unpick it all, I'm probably just going to bamboozle them.
Jamie Read: So in my head I'm going okay cool. What we're actually working on is thick
Jamie Read: vocal folds and a low larynx and what have you. But then I'll give them
Jamie Read: what they asked for and say yeah, can you feel that? There. Now is that
Jamie Read: satisfactory for you? Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to feel. That feels
Jamie Read: good. And then some clients will come in and want
Jamie Read: to get into the nitty gritty and understand it and some clients just want a
Jamie Read: quick fix and other clients think they have one idea and we need to meet
Jamie Read: in the middle. And so it's a really
Jamie Read: flexible thing actually of meeting the clients where they are.
Joanne Lockwood: So what's going on in my head and my body then? Because I'm
Joanne Lockwood: so if I'm at a function and someone says
Joanne Lockwood: to me joe, can you get everyone's attention? We need to get everyone back in
Joanne Lockwood: the room. And first thing I do is I take a massive breath,
Joanne Lockwood: I expand my body and my chest and
Joanne Lockwood: I roar with the deepest voice I have and I feel that whole
Joanne Lockwood: exercise is digging into me and throwing it out. But what
Joanne Lockwood: you're saying is psychological, not reality, is it?
Jamie Read: It's a little of each, but mostly on the psychological side because
Jamie Read: like I was saying earlier on, actually, when you take in a big breath, you
Jamie Read: increase your presence, you grow physically, you increase your presence in the
Jamie Read: room and you tell your body that everything is fine.
Jamie Read: Because when we feel short of breath we're normally in panic and we don't like
Jamie Read: being in that state. When we feel we can take a big breath in,
Jamie Read: we feel in command and in control. So actually we're
Jamie Read: releasing chemicals from the brain that are helping us to feel
Jamie Read: in control and in command that will help us to vocalize
Jamie Read: in that manner. But when you're making that roaring
Jamie Read: sound, if you put your hand in front of your mouth, you'll find not much
Jamie Read: of that air is actually coming out. So for the vast majority
Jamie Read: of people, they lose air by being
Jamie Read: quiet. So actually, if we think of that kind of whispery sound
Jamie Read: leaning in on the mic a little bit and kind of doing the sort of
Jamie Read: Mariella Frostropapodo co UK kind of a thing in there,
Jamie Read: that kind of breathy sound is very inefficient because the fuel of the
Jamie Read: voice is breath. And so if there's breath leaking through to make it
Jamie Read: breathy, then actually we've got a fuel leak. Whereas actually, if you're kind
Jamie Read: of in your Brian Blessed voice in here, you're in a much bigger, more
Jamie Read: robust vocalization, which means that although there might be lots
Jamie Read: of air in your body, it's not going anywhere very quickly. You can keep doing
Jamie Read: that for much longer. So
Jamie Read: it's about the psychological cue of feeling like you own the
Jamie Read: space and you have the right to take in
Jamie Read: that amount of air and produce that amount of sound.
Jamie Read: And also, when we gather the body in that manner, we encourage
Jamie Read: muscular work in the back, in the lap muscles, and also in the lower
Jamie Read: abdominal muscles in the pelvic floor that help to
Jamie Read: stabilize the larynx and the breath mechanism to make the
Jamie Read: voices optimal call that process anchoring. So there is an amount of
Jamie Read: that going on as well. So taking
Joanne Lockwood: from that, I should be able to create the same impact and presence
Joanne Lockwood: with just a relaxed posture
Joanne Lockwood: and believing that just by making my voice
Joanne Lockwood: loud without puffing myself up, it should have the same effect.
Jamie Read: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you think about the times in
Jamie Read: nature, because that's what it always comes back to, is actually, what were we designed
Jamie Read: to do with the vocal gestures? So if you think of
Jamie Read: somebody walking along the high street, they've got their earphones in, they're
Jamie Read: on Snapchat and they're about to walk in front of the number 17 bus, you
Jamie Read: don't have time to stand there, take a big deep inhale, present your body and
Jamie Read: go, Stop. Because that sucker's smoosh, they're gone, they're out of there. Right,
Jamie Read: in that moment, you've got to take a short, sharp breath. Stop. Look
Jamie Read: out. Sorry, I'm deafening. You have to do a bit of mixing
Jamie Read: on this one, but you take a short, sharp
Jamie Read: gasp to power the voice into that energetic
Jamie Read: vocalization. Whereas actually, when you're going to cry when something's really
Jamie Read: sad, we take that really low, slow kind
Jamie Read: of breath and that's a slower, lower place,
Jamie Read: because it's going to use more air to do it, so it's always coming
Jamie Read: back to naturally. What does the body do in similar circumstances? If I
Jamie Read: were wandering about in a swamp, wearing a skin and carrying a club
Jamie Read: what would my voice do in this set of circumstances? And
Jamie Read: that normally tells us what to do. I think that's a sort of blueprint for
Jamie Read: life, actually, quite often is. What does our instinct
Jamie Read: tell us to do in this moment? So the whole
Joanne Lockwood: posturing, the puffing up, the presence is
Joanne Lockwood: around making ourselves, as you say, drawing
Joanne Lockwood: breath in. And when we take breath in, we create
Joanne Lockwood: a kind of a presence around us that people then see that
Joanne Lockwood: authority, if you like, from that presence. So that's what we're really doing is
Joanne Lockwood: creating that listen to me, everybody stance.
Jamie Read: Yeah, exactly. And allowing ourselves to feel that to be in our
Jamie Read: presence and go, I'm feeling strong, I deserve
Jamie Read: to make this sound. And the physical strength and the breath often go together,
Jamie Read: but they don't have to. If you think of a
Jamie Read: great political speaker or a rock and roll singer, somebody who uses their voice
Jamie Read: quite loudly and confidently, they're usually really physical with
Jamie Read: what they're doing. They gesture the sound. And actually, even me saying those
Jamie Read: words there for your listeners because obviously we can see each other on the link
Jamie Read: that we're on. But for the listeners, if I punch the air as
Jamie Read: I speak, you hear that energy in the sound. So
Jamie Read: we use our physicality to engage
Jamie Read: the muscles that support the voice. But I can kind of create the same
Jamie Read: effect without doing it. It's just less you feel
Jamie Read: more riled up about it. You see the rock singer thrashing into the guitar or
Jamie Read: hanging onto the mic. That's that anchoring idea of the body feeling
Jamie Read: physically strong and giving us permission to hit these
Jamie Read: sounds. Whereas when we're feeling not in our
Jamie Read: power, not in our presence, when we're feeling under threat,
Jamie Read: we get physically smaller and the breath becomes weaker and shallower
Jamie Read: and the voice will therefore follow suit. Now, I
Jamie Read: can kind of hold a posture like a kind of strong man. I can still
Jamie Read: speak in a really kind of quiet voice, but it feels
Jamie Read: odd to do. It looks probably quite odd as well.
Jamie Read: But if I kind of shrink my posture and allow myself to kind of come
Jamie Read: into a smaller space it feeds the
Jamie Read: psychology of what the voice is doing. Yeah,
Joanne Lockwood: I really get this feel for it. It's not just your voice, it's your
Joanne Lockwood: entire psyche and body and posture and how
Joanne Lockwood: you're perceived. It's a real package, isn't it? And your voice is just one
Joanne Lockwood: component of this presence. Yeah,
Jamie Read: absolutely. And in that kind of chicken and egg
Jamie Read: scenario of the package, actually, for some people, if they don't feel
Jamie Read: physically confident in a particular space, their
Jamie Read: voice won't demonstrate
Jamie Read: confidence. And by the same token, the other side of the same coin is if
Jamie Read: the voice isn't confident, they won't feel confident in that space.
Jamie Read: So there's a whole kind of chicken and egg thing there with
Jamie Read: speakers. And that's not just professional speakers and singers, which
Jamie Read: I've referenced a lot in this kind of conversation, but actually for
Jamie Read: people just at work who use the phone a lot or on zoom a lot,
Jamie Read: and they're using their voice professionally without realizing it because no one's saying, oh, you're
Jamie Read: a professional speaker. But actually they're a call center worker managing
Jamie Read: 6 hours of telephone calls on a shift. They're a professional voice
Jamie Read: user. And if they are not feeling confident about what their voice is
Jamie Read: going to do, they won't feel confident in the space that they're in,
Jamie Read: whether that's the work environment or their physical body.
Joanne Lockwood: Okay, I've got a bit of confusion now. So why do
Joanne Lockwood: we tend to see large size opera singers? We have this
Joanne Lockwood: belief that all of this deep power of an opera singer comes
Joanne Lockwood: from this big chest cavity that they can dive into. What you're saying
Joanne Lockwood: here is a lot of this power doesn't come from the residents because you say
Joanne Lockwood: the air is traveling in the wrong direction at that point.
Jamie Read: Yeah, exactly. And some of that is just about the kind of image that we
Jamie Read: hold of the sort of Wagnerian soprano with the horns, with that we
Jamie Read: hat on, that we kind of hold that image as going, oh yeah,
Jamie Read: that's what an opera singer looks like. But actually, very often when
Jamie Read: you look at great opera singer, there are, of course, you think
Jamie Read: immediately of Pavarotti and Brin Turfil, for example, who are
Jamie Read: quite physically large guys. But equally, if you think of Jose Carreras,
Jamie Read: who was one of the three tenors as well and was a contemporary of Pavarotti,
Jamie Read: he was a tiny little guy. If you think of
Jamie Read: some of the contemporary opera singers now, Elizabeth Llewell and Pamela
Jamie Read: Hay, they're small built, slight
Jamie Read: people because the power of the voice is not in the
Jamie Read: size of the instrument, it's in the resonance. And
Jamie Read: the reason why opera singers trained for so many years is because actually
Jamie Read: they're going into it's like hearing in three dimensions. They're going into
Jamie Read: incredible detail about the resonance of the voice. That,
Jamie Read: for example, we talked about that sympathetic resonance before, the fact that
Jamie Read: one part of the body vibrates in sympathy with another. The most audible
Jamie Read: frequency for human ears is, give or take
Jamie Read: 2800 Hz, somewhere between 2000
Jamie Read: 803,000. That's the frequency of baby cry,
Jamie Read: which is an evolutionary advantage because it sits at a point that it's audible
Jamie Read: above anything else. But actually, if we emulate that sound as an adult,
Jamie Read: we finish up with a voice that's like this, which is really annoying. And the
Jamie Read: reason the voice is so annoying when you hear that person on a bus and
Jamie Read: you're like, I need to find where that person is and stop them.
Jamie Read: The reason we have that sensation is because it sits at the
Jamie Read: frequency that blocks out every other thought we're trying to have because from an
Jamie Read: evolutionary basis, it allows us to hear this
Jamie Read: baby cry. So opera singers and
Jamie Read: performers in general have often learned to
Jamie Read: use this resonant frequency at 2800 Hz,
Jamie Read: because at that frequency, the space above the
Jamie Read: larynx that you're resonating in is about 1 CM wide by 3 CM
Jamie Read: long, which is roughly the same size as your ear canal. So
Jamie Read: you're getting sympathetic resonance in the ear canal of the audience. So they're
Jamie Read: not louder than the orchestra. They're singing over with no microphone. They're more
Jamie Read: hearable. They're putting on a vocal high vis jacket and sitting at a frequency
Jamie Read: that's just a bit jazzier for our ears. So
Jamie Read: when we talk about projecting the voice, that's what we're doing. We're
Jamie Read: actually again, it's the perception versus actually what we're
Jamie Read: doing. We think if I kind of go into quite a big into
Jamie Read: my sort of interfa voice down here somewhere, that kind of resonance
Jamie Read: in there. The
Jamie Read: resonance comes from a narrowing and creating a really
Jamie Read: small space in the throat. But we think of it as being a really big
Jamie Read: space because it's a louder sound.
Jamie Read: But the loudest thing that we know
Jamie Read: in day to day life usually is baby cry. And babies are tiny. They don't
Jamie Read: need a big chest cavity. They can hit
Jamie Read: 2800, get straight across
Jamie Read: the frequency, straight into our ears. This is
Joanne Lockwood: absolutely fascinating. So there's a few well known comedians
Joanne Lockwood: that have an annoying baby type voice, isn't there?
Joanne Lockwood: Do you think that's natural? Do you think it's just that they work on that?
Jamie Read: I think they're probably milking it. I think they're probably working on it because
Jamie Read: it gets a laugh. It sort of refers
Jamie Read: back to what you were saying about when you begin speaking somewhere that actually, if
Jamie Read: there's a dissonance between the person that we see and the voice
Jamie Read: that they come out with, it gives that shock and awe tactic. And if it's
Jamie Read: a big, powerful voice, we're like, all right, okay. Whereas actually, if we expect it
Jamie Read: to be a big, powerful voice and it kind of comes out in here somewhere,
Jamie Read: it's kind of funny because we tend to avoid that sound.
Jamie Read: People don't necessarily want to go around talking like that. We
Jamie Read: know immediately that's a sort of punch and duty stock character.
Jamie Read: It's a stock comedy character in the same manner as the big opera
Jamie Read: singer with the horns on the head. It's
Jamie Read: the comedia Del arte version of that character. It's
Jamie Read: heightened. And we know what to expect from that.
Jamie Read: Yeah. And that just led me on to another thought, Joanne, which is this
Jamie Read: that quite often there's an emotional response to a voice that we're not aware
Jamie Read: of, where when we hear that
Jamie Read: voice, we instinctively know that it's funny. Because actually, when we laugh, the larynx
Jamie Read: often rises up there in that kind of so if
Jamie Read: I kind of speak in this place, we want to join in with what we're
Jamie Read: hearing, and it makes us laugh when we do it. So there's such
Jamie Read: a thing as vocal body language that actually we
Jamie Read: adopt the physical postures in the body and the breath of the
Jamie Read: voices that we're hearing in order to understand how they feel.
Jamie Read: So if someone rings up and goes, hey, Joanne, how are you?
Jamie Read: You're right, chances are you'll go, yeah, I'm fine. Yeah.
Jamie Read: We vocally mirror them because
Jamie Read: partly that's making them feel comfortable, but more importantly, it's allowing
Jamie Read: us to register the emotion that they are feeling by
Jamie Read: physically experiencing what that emotion feels like. By the same token,
Jamie Read: hey, oh, my God, guess what? I don't know what happened. We join
Jamie Read: in with that energy to the point where it's so
Jamie Read: embedded in us that one of the primary ways we
Jamie Read: understand how other people feel is not just
Jamie Read: by listening to them, but also by mirroring, muscularly, what that person is
Jamie Read: doing to try on their voice. So if you
Jamie Read: hear someone pretend to cry, you understand
Jamie Read: intellectually that it's sad, but you don't feel sad if you hear someone
Jamie Read: actually cry. Your voice joins in with those gestures and you feel
Jamie Read: sad. The same with laughter, the same with cheering,
Jamie Read: whatever the vocal gesture is.
Jamie Read: There's the famous bit in the musical Le miserab
Jamie Read: where the main character, Jean Valjean, sings a song called The Prayer,
Jamie Read: people generally know as Bring Him Home. And
Jamie Read: it's high, it's in this sort of light, falsetto place,
Jamie Read: which you can do just in a pure falsetto. So if I just I'm
Jamie Read: going to sing a couple of bars only and just go, God
Jamie Read: my prayer. So it's light and falsettoe,
Jamie Read: but actually it's really sad and he's pleading. So if I take that
Jamie Read: sound and if I take a moment to set up the sensation of
Jamie Read: crying in my breath and my voice, and then I sing, it
Jamie Read: good.
Jamie Read: We have a slightly different emotional
Jamie Read: response as an audience because we sense
Jamie Read: that this person is sad even through the
Jamie Read: music, and so we make that emotional connection through
Jamie Read: the voice as well.
Joanne Lockwood: I'm sat here in awe. This is an absolutely incredible
Joanne Lockwood: conversation. Another thing that's going through my head right now
Joanne Lockwood: is you talked about we mirror and you talk about
Joanne Lockwood: someone comes in bouncy and happy. We tend to mirror that bouncy. So is that
Joanne Lockwood: what's happening when we hear maybe a strong regional accent or something? Because
Joanne Lockwood: I've got a friend who comes from Tobadon in Yorkshire
Joanne Lockwood: and he always comes in and says
Joanne Lockwood: everybody who greets him will always say, Hi, how you
Joanne Lockwood: doing? It's like, Why doesn't he mirror us? But
Joanne Lockwood: we always end up mirroring him. Yeah, it
Jamie Read: is. Dialects are a really interesting one,
Jamie Read: and accents, just the whole field of that is something that really
Jamie Read: fascinates me, because all of us are aware that we have slightly different
Jamie Read: voices for different scenarios, usually. So we have our kind of I'm speaking to the
Jamie Read: mum on the phone voice, which might be different than I'm out with the girls
Jamie Read: for a night voice. We have these slightly different vocal
Jamie Read: behaviors and dialect. When you've got a strong regional
Jamie Read: dialect, you've either got a person who's got a strong
Jamie Read: identity that comes with that or someone who has
Jamie Read: got the flip side of it and has got outsider impostor syndrome in the
Jamie Read: environment they're in. So it depends on how that person is psychologically
Jamie Read: feeling in that moment, can I come into this space and proper own it and
Jamie Read: be myself and everyone will join in and that'll be great? Or actually, am
Jamie Read: I arriving here and everybody talks like this and it's all in
Jamie Read: islington you need to fill the face with that as well. Sorry,
Jamie Read: islington people. So if you're kind of in that place, then suddenly you find
Jamie Read: that the accent slightly starts to die away, and you just get occasional
Jamie Read: moments of it because we're trying to figure out
Jamie Read: whose tribe is dominant. And that's to do with the psychology of actually in
Jamie Read: that moment, who's the person in the room who's presenting the
Jamie Read: most confidence? And I'm absolutely
Jamie Read: terrible for just taking on the accents of
Jamie Read: the people around me because I'm so used to doing it. Firstly, as an
Jamie Read: actor, years ago, it was something that I found that I was quite good at.
Jamie Read: And actually, I'm bilingual, I speak German as well as English, and I
Jamie Read: think growing up with two languages meant that my ear is quite attuned
Jamie Read: to what we call prosody, which is the musicality of speech.
Jamie Read: So each of us is musical. I'm
Jamie Read: going to just say one sentence on this because I go off on a tangent
Jamie Read: otherwise, but there's no such thing as people who can't sing, there's just people who
Jamie Read: haven't sung yet. That's a whole other conversation. But we're all
Jamie Read: musical because we learn as babies that
Jamie Read: is an angry musicality and is a happy
Jamie Read: musicality, and so we learn these shapes and
Jamie Read: accents have that prosody to them. So
Jamie Read: if you think of like a kind of scouse sort of Liverpoolian accent, there's that
Jamie Read: kind of slight sort of sing song to it when you speak that, you can
Jamie Read: go up. But if I take that into my own voice and try and speak
Jamie Read: to you like that, it sounds absolutely ridiculous because the musicality is wrong. And
Jamie Read: equally, if I take the prosody of my Southern English Berkshire
Jamie Read: accent and take that into actually, it's really hard to take that
Jamie Read: into a scouse. If I try and take that kind of monotonous prosody into a
Jamie Read: scouse, I just sound really bored all the time. So you've
Jamie Read: got to find where the dominance
Jamie Read: is in the room and what musicality you're matching with the other people
Jamie Read: around you. And I do it so instinctively. I walk into spaces and start
Jamie Read: talking to someone and I accidentally finish up doing an impersonation of them
Jamie Read: just because it's become so much a part of what I
Jamie Read: do. But we can use that in an inclusion sense if we're
Jamie Read: aware of that sense of prosody, that musicality
Jamie Read: that if somebody enters a space and everyone is saying to them, sorry, what? Pardon?
Jamie Read: A excuse me, sorry. Because they have a regional
Jamie Read: dialect or an international dialect, they're speaking English as a second language, or because
Jamie Read: the voice doesn't seem to match the person that you see standing in front of
Jamie Read: you, or because they don't feel in their power. So they're kind of devoicing here.
Jamie Read: Those are things that, from an inclusion point of view, are really important, actually,
Jamie Read: to allow people not only to understand what they can
Jamie Read: do with their voice, but also communication is two way. There's
Jamie Read: no point learning how to make sound if you don't learn how to listen to
Jamie Read: it as well. So what is happening in the acoustic landscape
Jamie Read: of the workspace that you are in, or the family life that you're in, or
Jamie Read: the friendship group that you're in that is being inclusive
Jamie Read: or exclusive of certain people? And vocal exclusion
Jamie Read: is a really genuine thing that people
Jamie Read: experience. Yeah, I was going to ask you this. So
Joanne Lockwood: there are many studies that show regional accents can introduce holiday
Joanne Lockwood: bias based on candidate suitability, intelligence,
Joanne Lockwood: capability, all these things. So is it a
Joanne Lockwood: learned thing? So the Scouse accent, because we
Joanne Lockwood: associate people from Liverpool or that area as being
Joanne Lockwood: stereotypically. I don't want to get into the stereotypes
Joanne Lockwood: we can have from Scouse people, but do we associate the stereotypes? We have the
Joanne Lockwood: scouts with the accent, or does the accent
Joanne Lockwood: create a distrust in us? Which is it chicken and egg
Joanne Lockwood: there? In my
Jamie Read: opinion, in terms of the research that is out there,
Jamie Read: it's very much a deeply ingrained societal bias
Jamie Read: against the accents. And it really comes from
Jamie Read: the time of the beginning of recorded media. So as soon as we
Jamie Read: start getting the radio, and the radio is being broadcast
Jamie Read: from London and we have RP receive pronunciation. So as I said before,
Jamie Read: you kind of get this terrible BBC voice with everyone wearing their tuxedos on a
Jamie Read: Friday night. That's what we start to hear.
Jamie Read: And we get the idea of the Queen's English. The King's English? There's a
Jamie Read: correct way of speaking. And actually these things are not true.
Jamie Read: But as soon as you get mass media, we can start to put out the
Jamie Read: message that this is what people are supposed to sound like.
Jamie Read: So RP as a dialect receive pronunciation,
Jamie Read: is a non geographic dialect. People use RP all over the country. It doesn't
Jamie Read: belong to a region. It belongs to a
Jamie Read: sense of a bygone era where class was a thing that you
Jamie Read: could refer to and would have a certain vocal
Jamie Read: sound. So the idea of the upper classes in those heavy
Jamie Read: inverted commas, again, of having this particular way of speaking that was better than everybody
Jamie Read: else, which of course it isn't, but that didn't belong to a
Jamie Read: geography. So you then immediately in whatever place you're
Jamie Read: in, if you're in I don't know, Devon. I was talking to somebody from Devon
Jamie Read: on a call this morning that actually you've got somebody there who's the lord of
Jamie Read: the manor who speaks in this way, and somebody else there who's got a kind
Jamie Read: of more relaxed Devonshire accent. There's a them and us.
Jamie Read: There's the lord of the manor and the serfs kind of thing
Jamie Read: that is just so
Jamie Read: wrong, but so ingrained in us, that even if you say
Jamie Read: to people who would consider themselves not biased
Jamie Read: in any way, that would consider themselves working class, that would
Jamie Read: consider themselves open to all sorts of different things. If you said to
Jamie Read: them, can you imagine a time where the Prime
Jamie Read: Minister would have a Brummy accent? Most of them would
Jamie Read: instinctively chuckle at that and go, well, no, you couldn't do that. Why not? Why
Jamie Read: couldn't you? But we have this ingrained bias that the comedy
Jamie Read: characters are the regional dialect and the serious people
Jamie Read: are not. And that's a real
Jamie Read: issue, actually. It's a real problem. And it's something that,
Jamie Read: since mass media at the beginning of the 2000s has become
Jamie Read: much more inclusive of regional dialect and different voices in general.
Jamie Read: There is now a sense that maybe we'll eventually
Jamie Read: start to push back on this, but it includes things like speech impediment,
Jamie Read: like learning disability and physical disability that have an
Jamie Read: impairment on the voice and of course, gender as well.
Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, again, another reason I
Joanne Lockwood: opted not to do anything about my voice, because I have a kind of a
Joanne Lockwood: Hampshire Home Counties type voice. People
Joanne Lockwood: say I have like a radio, nighttime radio voice. If I'm easy to
Joanne Lockwood: listen to, I thought, well, if I mess with it, I might mess with something
Joanne Lockwood: that is important, that people resonate with. And I'm also aware that
Joanne Lockwood: people have told me my voice is very distinctive and they can pick my
Joanne Lockwood: voice out as a unique person more
Joanne Lockwood: than maybe I could about other people. Because I was speaking to someone, though, they
Joanne Lockwood: phoned me up and said, I've just seen you on television, and they live in
Joanne Lockwood: Sweden. And I took part in a TV documentary some years ago, and
Joanne Lockwood: they were broadcasting that TV documentary in English in
Joanne Lockwood: Sweden, and they were in the kitchen. They went, Hang on a minute, that's my
Joanne Lockwood: friend Joanne. And they ran into the lounge and there I was on telly.
Joanne Lockwood: So I'm also aware that we have this voice print of people, don't we? So
Joanne Lockwood: we do. As well as the visual cues or the other cues, the
Joanne Lockwood: subtle stuff that voice print is also very strong.
Jamie Read: Yeah, it is. And that's a really nice way of putting it, actually, through the
Jamie Read: idea of a voice print, that we
Jamie Read: have that sense of who we are so embedded in the way
Jamie Read: that the voice works that, as you say, people can pick us out of a
Jamie Read: crowd often. People can pick out
Jamie Read: an impostor, if you like, with a particular regional dialect. I know I'm doing sort
Jamie Read: of various cod dialects during the course of the interview. But people can pick out
Jamie Read: the impostor and sometimes the
Jamie Read: otherness can be beneficial. So I spent ten months living in
Jamie Read: the US when I was working out there on a show,
Jamie Read: and we were in a very curious place called
Jamie Read: Branson, Missouri. I don't know if anyone's ever been, but Branson, when I was there
Jamie Read: 20 odd years ago, had 47 theaters and the Kmart, and that was it. And
Jamie Read: it was in the middle of nowhere and Dolly Parton was there and the Osmonds
Jamie Read: were there, and Andy Williams Godreston was there. And they all had these theaters that
Jamie Read: they did their shows and they bust the tourists in and you all watched seven
Jamie Read: shows in a day and all got bust home again. So at nighttime, you just
Jamie Read: had actors and tumbleweed, really. And I remember going down
Jamie Read: to the supermarket and every week I went down there,
Jamie Read: I'd meet someone at the checkout that'd be so thank you
Jamie Read: very much. I'd just have a conversation with them, oh, my God, are you from
Jamie Read: England? Where are you from? And it would become a conversation and it was really
Jamie Read: lovely and it was very warm. But then after a while, I was like, I
Jamie Read: just want my shopping. So when I was in the supermarket,
Jamie Read: I'd work in a North American dialect that wasn't specific to the area that they
Jamie Read: were in, so I couldn't be caught out on the little specifics of it. So
Jamie Read: I was working in a slightly different dialect, but it just meant I could get
Jamie Read: through the supermarket quicker. So it kind of
Jamie Read: became I was avoiding my voice print in order to get through
Jamie Read: the supermarket quicker. But by the same token, it was used years ago when I
Jamie Read: was a child. I was at a state school as a kid and I
Jamie Read: filmed a commercial in the States back in the 80s
Jamie Read: for biscuits out there, or cookies called Fruit
Jamie Read: Newtons. And they specifically wanted a British kid on the
Jamie Read: advert because this was in the days before streaming and what have you. And
Jamie Read: when the commercial breaks came on, people got up to make a cup of coffee
Jamie Read: and they knew if they heard a British accent, people would come back in to
Jamie Read: see what was on the TV. Because the Americans generally love the British accent. And
Jamie Read: so they hired a British kid to do the commercial and they made
Jamie Read: it as cod British as possible. I was lying in a bed wearing silk pajamas
Jamie Read: with a suit of armor on either side, but
Jamie Read: it meant that people listened and heard and came back into the
Jamie Read: room and the advert ran for years. Actually, it was quite funny. Once I was
Jamie Read: older, I was like, oh, cracky, here we go again. So you can use it
Jamie Read: for or against. I worked for
Joanne Lockwood: bank. It was Coots Koots and Co, the bank of the Royal
Joanne Lockwood: family. And. The Upper Royal Bankers. Yeah, and I was
Joanne Lockwood: in Beverly Hills, in Rodeo Drive, and they had a
Joanne Lockwood: small, little office there. Not really a bank
Joanne Lockwood: encounter, but just where their clients could come in and meet
Joanne Lockwood: their relationship manager. And when I was there doing some It work,
Joanne Lockwood: they sort said, would you mind recording our answer phone message for us? I
Joanne Lockwood: was like, they wanted a posh Bush's
Joanne Lockwood: accent for their Bodes message.
Joanne Lockwood: I'm guessing they've erased it by now, but, yeah, must have run for
Joanne Lockwood: years. That's brilliant. Yeah.
Jamie Read: So that the idea of voice print, that idea of who am I? What's my
Jamie Read: vocal identity? That's what kind of ties it all together, really, and
Jamie Read: who do we want to present ourselves as out to the rest of the world?
Joanne Lockwood: And on that note, Jamie, I'd love to dive into singing. I'd love to be
Joanne Lockwood: able to sing. I'm one of these I know I can sing, but I just
Joanne Lockwood: haven't found the right note yet.
Joanne Lockwood: Amazing. Honestly. That was a truly entertaining and
Joanne Lockwood: inspirational conversation we just had. So how could people get hold of you? Because I'm
Joanne Lockwood: sure everybody wants to find out more.
Jamie Read: So I'm prolific across most social media. I encourage people.
Jamie Read: If you're listening to the podcast, come and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm often
Jamie Read: on there. My LinkedIn profile is just the normal
Jamie Read: LinkedIn.com, and then it's
Jamie Read: Jamiereadvoice, so really easy to find. Jamie
Jamie Read: Reedvoice. I'm also on Instagram and on
Jamie Read: Facebook and on Twitter and quite active on social media
Jamie Read: channels. And I just kind of love having a chat to people about where they
Jamie Read: are, just answering quick questions on things. So
Jamie Read: don't feel that it's going to be a sales call or something horrible. I'm not
Jamie Read: that guy on LinkedIn. Just kind of reach out and make contact and, yeah, I'm
Jamie Read: always happy to speak to people. Fascinating.
Joanne Lockwood: And every time we've spoken, I've come away
Joanne Lockwood: inspired. So, yeah, I'm sure people will take you up on that. So, thank you
Joanne Lockwood: so much. And also a huge thank you to you, the listeners, for
Joanne Lockwood: tuning in, for getting this far. If you're not ready, please do
Joanne Lockwood: subscribe to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites
Joanne Lockwood: Podcast that's B-I-T-E-S. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues,
Joanne Lockwood: share the love. I have a number of other exciting
Joanne Lockwood: guests lined up that I'm sure you'd be equally inspired by over the next few
Joanne Lockwood: weeks, months, of course, if you're listening and you'd like to be a guest or,
Joanne Lockwood: you know, someone who would like to be, get them to make contact. And I
Joanne Lockwood: would also welcome any feedback and suggestions on how we can improve
Joanne Lockwood: future shows, if that's possible, please email me Jo
Joanne Lockwood: dot Lockwood at SEE Change Happen dot co
Joanne Lockwood: dot uk. And finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood and
Joanne Lockwood: it's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast with you today. Catch
Joanne Lockwood: you next time. Bye.