Acting on the mike? Do not take it for granted!
Did you ever try to put your hands like a spoon on your ears? It allows you to listen to your voice in a completely different way you ever experieced before. It opens up a new universe to everyone curious to know more about themselves.
People who are more “musical” are still fascinated by the voices of the famous people which stimulate their fantasy. Famous people voices or simply familiar!
Italy is also the country where lip sync dubbing has spread more than anywhere. Something considered a real form of art. In this case dubbers have become real stars, thanks to their voice given to famous characters.
However, famous voices fenomenon is not what we’re talking about in this article, which is dedicated to the deep aknowledgment of ourselves and to improve the communication techniques in public, that have their keypoint in our voices.
We all have a beautiful voice and we can put its qualities to good use, if we know how to train it just like an athlet does with his body. Then we can also discuss about talent, the rare ingredient that makes a beautiful voice a famous voice!
Learning how to express ourselves at our best through the microphone.
In my training courses on italian voice acting, I adopt the microphone as a key instrument to let my participants to deeply get in contact with themselves. Of course nobody wants them to become famous voice over artists, on the contrary, the microphone can give them opportunities to look at their souls, and understand what they really want to be.
Six, seven participants are hosted in our italian recording studio, in front of a mike, wearing headsets (the tech-solutions instead of hands on ears I was referring at the beginning of this article). The very first impact is brutal: like you need to learn to walk for the first time: the voice gets uncertain, breath become more frequent: “who’s this stranger talking to my ears?”
Passed the confusion, as usual, it’s time to get more confident and natural: “Have I really such a deep voice?” or: “Let’s try if I can reach higher tones”, and again: “I would like to imitate some reknown voices from famous movie scenes”, etcetera, etcetera…
In our era (It all started with movies, then with tv) we are able to take models and make them our own, desiring to look as they are. Same thing happens when we imitate some other’s voices. It’s an easy way to joke with friends, laugh at the flaws, just because we recognize them: the very first step to eventually correct them, if we want to. Sometimes, which is ok, a flaw becomes something precious, something describing our personality. And makes us understand that it distinguishes us from the others, making ourselves special and one of a kind.
Let’s take for instance the french “R” or a typical dialect accent: they talk about us, our sensitivity, our origins, our roots. Artists like Eddie Murphy, just to quote the first I have in mind, are just great sensitivities serving comedy: they really know themselves…
Imitating voices is not just an objective, but a medium to understand how versatile is our voice. Just keep in mind we’re an “unicum”, and we need to enhance what distinguishes us from the others in order to affirm our personality, and be reknown by our social community.
Look at authenticity to know who you are: learning to be yourself
What is the course me and Roberta Federici (a great actress and voice talent) teach for? What kind of advantage “the ability to communicate” can give to the participants?
We are not willing to transform all our students into italian professional voice talents, we just aim to reconnect their personalities with the vocal instrument anyone has at his disposal, the one we use to establish relations with friends, our professional community, in order to achieve the maximum results from our skills and talents. It is not only about technique: having a beautiful voice is not enough. Being able to train it to better interpret the nuance of our emotions, in order to organize effective communications using our voice at its best, is an objective we can achieve only connecting “who we are” to “how we speak”.
Knowing who we really are, accepting our intimate being. That’s whay the imitation of other peoples’ voices exercise is a great instrument. “It’s not my real voice, I am just imitating, it is not me, I am playing a game”. That’s how we are able to “suspend our disbelief” and free our voice. When our voices are influenced by our state of mind, they get altered, nervous, whispered. When they are really free to express they look round, warm, full, profound.
A course experience designed for “non professionals”
The “ability of communicating course” is not only about imitating voices, of course. It’s about getting the most important tools for an effective use of our own voice: Tone, Pace, Colour, Pause.
An important module is dedicated to the active listening and improv exercises. True listening is the base to express ourselves, getting in touch with the people we have to deal with, deeply understand what they need and want to say, then aswer with the right words, because communicating is a building that we make together.
Body and voice, those two rivals, become all of a sudden friends, inseparable parts of one uniquess. We become truly ourselves, our voice are not caged in unknown bodies, we are coherent, grounded, present.
The second part of the course is dedicated to organizing a good speech with right keywords and kpi. To be recognized in our context, we need to be effective in our communication, simple, which does not mean banal. Me and Roberta help in this designing step. Putting together meaning and look, who we feel we are and how we get perceived.
It has to deal with acting, requires technique, talent and training. A soul path capable to reconnect our inner wires that sometimes, while we live, get broken.