Vocal Branding: How Your Voice Shapes Your Communication Image | Wendy LeBorgne | TEDxUCincinnati

hi it is my pleasure to be here with you all today in those 13 syllables you all just made judgments about me about my socioeconomic status my intelligence level and whether or not you're going to sit here and listen to me for the next 10 to 12 minutes based primarily on the perception of my voice right generally none of us likes to listen to the sound of our own voice however have you ever considered how others perceive you based on the sound of your voice we've all made that phone call and listen to the person on the other end of the phone had this image in our head of what they look like only to find out that when we meet them in person they don't look anything like that image we have in our head right your voice is like your thumbprint or your facial features it is unique and authentically you whether you are a fortune 100 CEO a student looking for their first job or one of my elite vocal performers your voice is your calling card and it is the most important element in your personal brand if we think about marketing and branding for a moment and when things go into a logo or brand we talk about fonts and colors and images that are designed to evoke a certain emotion from a target audience and if we don't hit that target then we go back to the marketing drawing board we recreate that and it's the interaction of those elements of color and logo that ultimately go into that emotional response we take that and we'll parallel that to personal branding and your voice is the most important element of your personal brand it is how people perceive you and personal brand is that thing that people say about you right when you leave the room so what are those elements that go into voice brand as a voice pathologist for the last 20 years my job has been to look at what elements go into the most elite voices what gets them hired in the professional arena and how do we maximize those elements it goes far beyond the words we say right so there's that old adage it's not just what you say but how you say it and there's lots of coaches that talk about intonation and things like that but the reality is it's the combination of certain elements that go into creating your voice brand so let's take a look at these five elements the first thing is intensity of voice intensity is something that we can measure we measure intensity in decibels our perceptual correlate of intensity is loudness and our biases are cultural biases our personal biases our aesthetic biases of loudness influence our perception my 13 year olds perception of loudness is much different than my threshold of loudness but intensity is something that's measurable we know that there's a comfort level for intensity if I take a simple sentence I need you to get this done today and the only element that I change is intensity I need you to get this done today all of a sudden you all take a little step back because I'm all of a sudden perceived as being aggressive assertive or potentially if I was at a sporting event enthusiastic if we take that same sentence and all I do is change intensity I need you to get this done today I'm potentially being perceived as shy or uncertain of what I'm talking about so intensity as an element alone contributes to this overall idea of vocal brand the second element that goes into voice brand is in flexion or intonation in music we very rarely hear a piece that is on one note all the way through from the beginning at the end they'll be pretty boring right so the international patterns of speech are what make it interesting in the two extremes we have a highly sing-songy rate where it sounds like you're talking to a two-year-old all the time and you're perceived as being unintelligent in what you're saying or we have the complete opposite where someone totally doesn't change your tempo or their inflection at all I need you to get this done today they're bored they're uninterested in what they're saying and they're not connected to it in today's culture one sound of inflection that tends to be really pervasive in everything that we hear is this idea of up talking everything ends with a question there's never a statement and what we know is that it is actually preventing people from getting jobs because they're completely unsure of themselves the third element that goes into your brand is rate that is how fast or how slow you talk the average rate of our favorite TED talk is somewhere between a hundred and sixty two to a hundred and seventy five words per minutes I hope I fall within that range I haven't actually measured my rate of speech and I'm pretty sure it's sped up today standing in front of you all right now but average rate of speech is important and oftentimes we'll hear people say slow down your rate slowing down your rate alone is not going to change the overall vocal brand again it's the interaction of the components that are gonna change your voice brand so if we have a super fast talker I needed you to get this done today all of a sudden you feel super you're slightly agitated and what they're having to say right similarly if we slow down that rate of speech I need you to get this done today I'm perceived as condescending because I'm talking down to you because I'm talking so slowly just like in music it's the give-and-take of the pace of what we do that makes it interesting so if we take that sentence I need you to get this done today and within that sentence we change up the rate or the tempo I need you to get to stun today that makes it much more interesting for our listeners right the fourth element is frequency frequency is measured in hertz and we know that there are normative data for men women and children here in the United States and abroad of what the average fundamental frequency should be for us to like their voice if the pitch of your voice is too high I need you to get this done today generally for females high-pitched voices are perceived as being young albeit slightly less intelligent mm-hmm if we drop the pitch of the voice I need you to get this done today in women that is perceived as authoritative sometimes if we also increase intensity with it I need you to get this done today we've all read all of a sudden crossed that line into being aggressive interestingly the average frequency of women's voices dropped after 1960 because in the era of women's lib when we had to come sit at the table with our male counterparts we needed to compete vocally so the average fundamental frequency dropped in this country after 1960 because we know that men with lower voices make more money father more children and hold positions of higher leadership and that's not just true in the human species it's true in the animal species as well with the exception of making more money because I'm not sure that the animals make more money but the male's of the group with the lower voices are the leaders of the pack and they make more frequently which inherently results in more children so frequency becomes important the fifth parameter that is interesting in our voice brand is quality and quality can range from clarity of voice to hoarseness a voice or a rough raspy voice in my elite vocal performers uniqueness gets hired it is not always a perfect voice but it's an interesting voice and sometimes that means that voice might be slightly hoarse one of the pervasive elements of quality today is this idea of glottal fry which is what you heard me come out doing I need you to get this done today we hear this all the time especially in our upper middle-class white women it is pervasive and actually part of a social social culture phenomenon that we see thanks to some of the Kardashians but that glottal fry is super pervasive and what we know is happening is we now have the technology called voice biometrics where when you call into an HR firm for a job and I say hi my name is Wendy they run my voice through an algorithm and they determined that features of my voice are not pleasing and I don't even get an interview so those five elements are ultimately what constitute your voice brand so we'll take our sentence I need you to get this done today in a sexy voice in light of the fact that it's Valentine's a week for females intensity we to drop to be perceived as sexy inflection highly inflected the rate is slowed way down the frequency of my voice will drop and the quality adds breath eNOS I need you to get this done today good you all perceive that as some version of sexy right at the end our voices are made up of cartilages and ligaments and muscles and we can train those elements of voice brand went forward one slide too many we can train those individual elements of voice brand using the exercise physiology principles and motor learning principles to maximize what you have because your voice defines you and your voice can empower you so you want to think like a vocal athlete and maximize those elements to create your ultimate voice brand thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 118,454

Rating: 4.8746438 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Brain, Language, Psychology, Sound, Speech

Id: p_ylzGfHKOs

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018