0210 – Michael Caine on How Your Voice Pitch Can Be Affected By Nerves

0210 – Michael Caine on How Your Voice Pitch Can Be Affected By Nerves

Nerves and Pitch

When you are nervous and your body is tense it has little breath support, and you will tend to start a sentence in the upper half of your natural pitch range, which restricts your ‘intonational ability’: you simply have less ‘vocal head room’ in which you can give words and phrases their due inflection.

Even the most illustrious of names can have nerves affect their voice pitch: (AUDIO)

“I was nervous when I first did it, because your first film is always the most nerve-wracking. I remember Cy Endfield when he did the first take said ‘Cut!’ halfway through and he said ‘Michael… your voice has gone up about three octaves’, and my voice was up here with nerves and they could hardly record it, and we had to start again and then I brought my voice down. But what had happened was, everybody had come out of all the production offices because they were sure this cockney couldn’t speak like that. And I was sitting on this horse and I suddenly turned around and there was the entire crew, office people, staff, producers, everybody who’d never been on the set before, just standing there staring at me… and this is what threw me for the first take.”

Michael Caine, speaking about ‘Zulu’, “The Many Faces of Michael Caine”, BBC 2020

Through these around-5-minute episodes, you can build your confidence and competence with advice on breathing and reading, inflection and projection, the roles played by better scripting and better sitting, mic techniques and voice care tips... with exercises and anecdotes from a career spent in TV and radio studios. If you're wondering about how to start a podcast, or have had one for a while - download every episode!

And as themes develop over the weeks (that is, they are not random topics day-by-day), this is a free, course to help you GET A BETTER BROADCAST, PODCAST AND VIDEO VOICE.

Look out for more details of the book during 2021.

Contacts: https://linktr.ee/Peter_Stewart

Peter has been around voice and audio all his working life and has trained hundreds of broadcasters in all styles of radio from pop music stations such as Capital FM and BBC Radio 1 to Heart FM, the classical music station BBC Radio 3 and regional BBC stations. He’s trained news presenters on regional TV, the BBC News Channel and on flagship programmes such as the BBC’s Panorama. Other trainees have been music presenters, breakfast show hosts, travel news presenters and voice-over artists.

He has written a number of books on audio and video presentation and production (“Essential Radio Journalism”, “JournoLists”, two editions of “Essential Radio Skills” and three editions of “Broadcast Journalism”) and has written on voice and presentation skills in the BBC’s in-house newspaper “Ariel”.

Peter has presented hundreds of radio shows (you may have heard him on BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 4, Virgin Radio or Kiss, as well as BBC regional radio) with formats as diverse as music-presentation, interview shows, ‘special’ programmes for elections and budgets, live outside broadcasts and commentaries and even the occasional sports, gardening and dedication programmes. He has read several thousand news bulletins, and hosted nearly 2,000 podcast episodes, and is a vocal image consultant advising in all aspects of voice and speech training for presenters on radio and TV, podcasts and YouTube, voiceovers and videocalls.

The podcast title refers to those who may wish to change their speaking voice in some way. It is not a suggestion that anyone should, or be pressured into needing to. We love accents and dialects, and are well aware that how we speak changes over time. The key is: is your voice successfully communicating your message, so it is being understood (and potentially being acted upon) by your target audience?

This podcast is London-based and examples are spoken in the RP (Received Pronunciation) / standard-English / BBC English pronunciation, although invariably applicable to other languages, accents and dialects.

Music credits:

"Bleeping Demo" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/7012-bleeping-demo