In this video, we're going to talk about vocal pitch. What it is, why it matters and how you can improve your vocal variety. So, to begin with, pitch is just the highness or lowness of a tone. A pitch matters. So, when you're speaking, pitch naturally goes up and down and we call this intonation. And intonation provides a ton of clues to listeners about how to actually decode what you're saying. And in fact we can talk about intonation units. An intonation unit or prosodic unit is just a segment of speech. It's a chunk of talk that exist under a single pitch contour. Now, an intonation unit's not the same thing as a sentence and that's important. So for example, this is an intonation unit, but then again, so is this, okay. That was all one sentence and the punctuation more or less mirrored the unit breaks or at least how I performed that sentence. Now, the problem emerges when we have a really long sentence that doesn't include the important intonation boundaries in the punctuation. So if you look at that, that's a proper sentence, but without intonation it's kind of harder to parse. And that's because that one sentence has lots of little intonation units in it, so it could sound something more like this. The problem emerges, when we have a really long sentence, that doesn't include the important intonation boundaries in the punctuation. So hopefully, that was easier to understand. But written out it looks a mess, okay. Now listening to a speaker with a narrower pitch range, so they're just not going high and low as much. Listening to a speaker like that makes it harder to pick out intonation units. And this is one of the reasons monotone speakers are harder to listen to. So we don't want to speak in a monotone, that's a given. Now, the opposite of monotone isn't to have crazy, wild pitch swings throughout the talk, right. That would sound crazy. The problem emerges, when we have really long sentences that does not, right. That's nutty, okay. We don't want that. Now, the opposite of monotone is appropriate contrastive tone. Contrastive tone helps us sort out the structure of a sentence by hearing its elements contrasted. And in fact, a couple of studies have looked at what people think of as vibrant speech, and pitch variance with lots of contrastive tone in there is usually pretty high on that list. So how do we do this? How do we have good contrastive tone? How do we speak with speech variance? I think there's a couple of things you could be doing but before I get to those, let me throw out a caveat. Your natural pitch variance is, in many ways, a function of your voice, your background, your vocal habits, a whole bunch of other stuff. So, for example, having good contrastive tone can be really difficult for non native speakers. So let's say, you need to do a speech in English. Well, English does a lot with pitch variance, that's just what the language does, and that's going to be easier if you're a native Dutch speaker, right. As a Germanic language, Dutch and English have some similarities. Now if you are a native speaker of Mandarin Chinese, the pitch similarities are going to be far fewer. And that doesn't even get into the issue of fluency. So, if you're still in this stage of learning the language, you probably need to focus so much on the vocabulary, maybe even the syntax, that really driving your attention there means that pitch and avoiding monotone and stuff like that. Well, that takes a backseat. So that's it, caveat over. Here are some things, three things you might be thinking about in order to move you a little bit away from monotone and a little bit more towards vibrant pitch. So what are these? First, avoid reading too much. So, one of the dangers of reading a speech is that so many of your natural pitch cues get flattened out in the process. So you might be reading faster and not inserting as much contrasted tone. You might be ignoring the intonation boundaries in the text because it's not there in the punctuation. And you might have really long written sentences and these are often harder to deliver with good pitch variance. So when possible move away from reading because odds are your natural pitch variance is going to be better. Second, if you do have to manuscript sections out, make sure you're writing for oral performance. So as I'm talking about pitch, don't take this lesson to mean that every read speech is going to be monotone. It won't be, right? The entire profession of speech writing is premised on being able to write for the ear. Now, writing for the ear is tough though. So, as you're practicing a draft, listen to what you want to say, maybe not what you actually wrote but what you want to say there. What passages in your practices do you keep stumbling over, if you do, change them. Peggy Noonan who was one of Ronald Reagen's speech writers had this great line, where you falter, alter. Finally, you might try doing some vocal warm ups. So, a good warm up not only gets your instrument ready, it kind of reminds you to use that full vocal range. So, if you're going to do these before a speech, find a private spot because [LAUGH] you don't want your audience to see you doing vocal warm up because they are not flattering, you will look ridiculous. But you can do good old, like, mi, me, ma, mo, mu. Mi, me, ma, mo, mu, that opens up you a little bit. You can do sirens. Sirens, are really good at stretching that pitch range, so [SOUND]. That was ridonculous. You can talk up and down a scale, whatever feels good and gets you thinking about a broad pitch range. So in the end, pitch is a big deal, it's one of those key factors in vibrant speaking. But it's also something that takes practice. I will say that my pitch range, my pitch variance increases the more I perform the speech. So if I'm in a speech and I'm really trying to convey my investment in or my excitement about the topic, that pitch tends to go up and down a little bit more. You can do this as well, you might think about what you sound like when you're really passionate about a topic. And use that voice to guide your speaking and I guarantee you, that voice, that voice isn't monotone. [MUSIC]
