Chitter Chatter
As an umbrella topic, we all talk. We talk to one another and when we’re not talking, generally we’re listening to someone else talk. Whether or not we’re invited to or we’re imposing. When speaking to someone it is polite to make eye contact and express modes of active listening such as agreeing and shaking your head yes or no, based on what the person is saying.
As a person with background in voice talent, I am often amused with not only what people are saying but also how they are saying it. In today's lecture I was lost not in the subject matter but purely in the delivery of it. Specifically, in one of my classes a professor of mine has a particularly high-pitched voice and I often times wonder if it is natural or forced? Several clues allude to whether or not this is her God-given tone, or if she speaks in one based out of emotion. She seems like an introverted person and sometimes when these types of people are placed in an atmosphere such as this nervousness can move in and affect how one speaks. Her breath support is strong, which is surprising, although she is not quite petite so she most likely has the capacity for a larger diaphragm, which would make sense that this tone is her own. She makes good use of each one of her articulators for the most part, but flops on certain words almost hinting at some sort of accent. Although from which specific dialect it’s origination is, I am unsure. Her speech is also interesting to me because of the way she delivers. We talk to people of different status than we in different ways. For instance, you normally wouldn’t talk in the same tone to your supervisor as you would to your small puppy at home. This professor in particular talks to us in the same tone as my 1st grade teacher did to us. Sometimes it’s amusing, and other times it’s cute, but the times I hate it the most is when she’s being rude. She’s so pleasant about it. There’s something dissatisfying about that. I suppose I demand variety in tone of speech in certain settings. I had a supervisor one time that sounded like a 5-year old, come later to find out, that she had done voice work for the Nickelodeon show, ‘Rugrats’; maybe I should make a career-change suggestion to her. I think I’ll wait till the end of the term for that though.
This is interesting, particularly the interplay between a more-than-passing look at how your professor speaks and the emotional/intellectual responses it drives in you. What if you opened up and married research in how tone of voice has been studied along with a broadened personal look at more of the voices around you?
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