Understand Your Voice and Its Value

Voices come in many shapes and sizes. Some are big, some are small. Some are soothing, some are piercing. Whatever voice you have, there IS a purpose for it. You just have to find it. And we’re here to help.

The best way to understand your voice and its value is to use it. It’s as easy as that. Try the exercises below to get a better baseline understanding of your natural speaking voice.

Listening Exercise No.1

Take a deep breath. Calmly and slowly, record the below sentence as a voice memo on your phone.

“The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.”

Do not listen to it.

Start again. This time, have a sip of water. Take a deep breath. Without thinking, without affecting an unfamiliar voice. Speak with the voice you speak to yourself with inside your head. Do not use your grandma’s posh phone voice (I see you!). Now, calmly and slowly, record it again.

Now listen to the first recording and then the second.

What do you notice? FYI, this is the hardest part of your whole journey as a voice actor. You have to ENDURE! No one likes the sound of their own voice. We’ve been doing this for years and we can assure you very few people actually like the sound of their own voice.. Experienced voice actors just get used to it and understand it’s an essential part of the job. You’ll get used to it too.

As you’re listening to your own voice, listen out for the following:

• Where does your breath fall?
• Does your voice sound like it’s coming from the back of your throat or from the bottom of your belly? Or somewhere in between?
• Can you tell if your jaw was relaxed? or was it slack?
• How pursed were your lips?
• How did you handle the consonants? How did you handle the vowels? Were they short? Elongated?
• Did you get your mouth around every syllable?

This isn’t about assigning value judgments, labelling these things as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, this is simply about observing and noticing.

Listening Exercise No.2

Listen to these:

Example A

Example B

Using the same parameters set out in exercise 1, listen again.

Obviously, the actor for Example A is a cis woman with a Canadian accent. The actor for Example B is a cis man with a regional British accent. Ignoring their accents if you can, listen to how they tackle each part of every word, and the sentence as a whole.

Listen again, this time on a piece of paper, make a note of which of the following words best describes the voices of each example:

• Pitch – Low/Average/High (also known as ‘range’)
• Loudness – Quiet/Average/Loud
• Timbre – Soft/Average/Hard
• Rate – Slow/Average/Fast
• Pauses – Infrequent/Average/Frequent

We get the following:

Example A: Average, Average, Soft, Average, Average

Example B: Low, Average, Average, Average, Average

What did you get? There are no right or wrong answers here. It’s really quite subjective, if you’re male listening to ‘Example A’ you might argue that her pitch is higher than yours and therefore average. Using the numbers below, give each example a score.

Pitch: Low [1], Average [2], High [3]

Loudness: Quiet [1], Average [2], Loud [3]

Timbre: Soft [1], Average [2], Hard [3]

Rate: Slow [1], Average [2], Fast [3]

Pauses: Infrequent [1], Average [2], Frequent [3]

We get the following:

Example A: 9

Example B: 9

It’s important to note, there is no bad outcome here. A lower number doesn’t mean a ‘bad’ voice, and a higher number doesn’t mean a ‘good’ voice. It just means that they have different uses.

Now let’s look at these numbers on the energy table:

Using the numbers on the coloured row to match against the numbers we gave to each Example A and Example B, it seems that we have both examples a level 9 on the Voice Energy Table and therefore on the lower end of moderate. What did you get?

We can then use this information to source a range of scripts that reflect their natural range, and one or two from above and below to show variety.

Listening Exercise No.3

We live in a culture that makes us constantly question, doubt and chastise ourselves and our own voice. We learn to distrust it, undervalue it and even dislike it. This is not your fault. But the sooner you can make peace with how your voice sounds, the better.

You have to get past those fears, that doubt, the imposter syndrome.. Like now. Stop it. Don’t let your inner critic run the show! It might seem like we’re going full tilt here, but honestly we’ve been in the game long enough to know that you have to acknowledge there is a massive psychological aspect to this work. If you can’t get that inner critic out of the driver’s seat ,you’re in danger of constantly finding ways to talk yourself out of diving in and making a voice reel.

Ok, so now that pep talk is out of the way. Here’s the next thing to do…

Send your voice memo to people you trust, not necessarily your mates. Choosing this handful of people carefully is important. You want to send it to reliable, kind, trustworthy colleagues, acquaintances and/or good friends who you think would be up for answering a few questions about your voice.

DON’T send your recording to someone who will

• Tease you
• Discourage you (i.e. tell you it’s impossible to get work as a voice actor)

If you can bear it and you have some connections to people who have no other reason than to support your voice journey, send them this message (in your own words of course):

“Hi X, I’m in the process of recording a voice reel as I’m looking to begin working as a voice actor. It would be really useful for me if you could listen to the voice memo attached and answer the questions below. Thank you in advance!”

1. With one word for each, please describe the following:
   • Pitch (how low or high my voice is) (Low/Average/High)
   • Loudness (Quiet/Average/Loud)
   • Timbre (Soft/Average/Hard)
   • Rate (how fast do I speak) (Slow/Average/Fast)
   • Pauses (Infrequent/Average/Frequent)

The questions above stem from Emotional Prosody and we think they are useful at measuring the energy of a voice. We cannot iterate enough that this is NOT an exact science. It’s something you might do once to wrap your head around your voice and then move on. Do not get stuck here. It’s a silly little exercise if you’re a bit stuck and want to make it fun for yourself.

Here’s what to do with the results:

Listening Exercise No.3 The Results

Record the results of each person that gets back to you. Allocate the numbers 1-3 to each persons’ responses as we did in Exercise No.2. You should be left with five numbers for each person. Add these five numbers together for each person to get one number per person. Then add each person’s number together and divide by the number of people. The table below gives you an example:

Example C.

As you can see, the average number that came out of Example C is 12. Number 12 would place this particular voice on the energy table around the Moderate-High Energy category.

Again, not a science. Like we said at the start of the exercise, it’s good to get a baseline to understand how people hear your natural voice.

There are other experiments you could conduct too for other outcomes, such as Nielsen Norman Group’s The Four Dimensions of Tone of Voice to measure your tone and affability. Or The Four States of Mind exercise to measure attention span. You could think of it from an emotional response perspective (fear, sadness, anger, happiness, surprise, disgust) to measure the effect of your voice in terms of how your voice makes people feel. But we think you can gather enough information from the question outlined above to get you started.

Understanding your voice and its value

The world of voiceover requires voices at every level of the above scale. From low energy, through moderate, all the way to high. So whether you like your voice or not, you cannot argue that it is not valuable. We’ve listed below the business, industries and sectors where the different voice energy levels can thrive. So no more! We won’t have it. We’re agreed. Your voice IS valuable, you have to use it.

Choosing your script

Now you have the information above to describe your voice, you’re going to want to leverage it when choosing your scripts for your voice reel. If you hire us to create your reel, we’ll pick scripts for you based on listening to your voice and chatting with you about your ambitions as a VO artist. Or if you’re keen to DIY, keep on scrollin’!

Remember, your voice reel should cover as much ground as possible. If you’re hovering around the lower energy level, try to source at least some of your scripts to pull you up a bit. If you’re floating around the high level, try and source material that brings you back down a little here and there. Balance is key here. You want to show that you have an understanding of energy and how to shape it with your voice.

Below, we’ve paired the energy level types with suggested samples and starting points you might think about exploring in your voice reel. The best way to tackle this is to imagine what audience does your natural voice energy resonate with the most, what products connect to that market, and go from there.

Low Energy

Commercial Copy – Luxury food, luxury cars, luxury holidays, real estate, fine dining, travel, massage, consumer, day-to-day, mattresses, pillows, gardening, healthcare, cosmetics, hair, beauty, insurance, etc

Corporate Copy – policy documents, instructions manual, training, real estate, government, council, public transport, public health, etc

Audiobook – fiction, drama, romance, novels, biographies, etc. Low energy can be perfect for audiobooks.

Documentary – art, history, science, etc. Low energy perfect for some documentaries.

Characters – sombre, sad, dopey, funny, monster, magic, children’s stories, animation, cartoons, video games, etc

Moderate Energy

Commercial Copy – vehicle, vehicle assistance, vehicle products, consumer market, high street, matter of fact, adults, family, seniors, dialogue, healthy and beauty, DIY, retail, shopping centre, home products, exercise, gym, memberships, sports, etc. 

Corporate Copy – Announcements, PSAs, training, government, council, inspiration, medical, pharmaceutical, charity, non-profits, technology, HR, first aid, public sector, jobs, employment etc.

Audiobook & documentary – Lower moderate energy levels are good for almost all audiobooks and documentaries. Higher moderate energy levels are good for light entertainment, uplifting biographies, non-fiction, educational, inspiring, self-help etc

High Energy

Commercial Copy – Kids, kids toys, kid holidays, kid clothes, car insurance, cosmetics, hair, beauty, action, adventure, theme parks, discounts, sales, high street, budget, promo, garages, retail, etc. High energy perfect for commercial copy.

Characters – loud, wild, scatty, children’s stories, animation, cartoons, video games, fun, aliens, monsters, animals, etc. High energy is perfect for playing characters.