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VOICE ACTING What's Your 'Sound Emotional Quotient'? LearnHow Listeners Perceive The Sound Of Your Voice  By Kim Handysides Voice Actor & CoachHow high is your Sound Emotional Quotient (SEQ)?
These sounds trigger different emotional responses. Human communication, verbal and non-verbal, also triggers certain
emotions. Music is said to soothe the savage beast, but anyone at a rock
concert can attest to its power to rouse and ignite, as well. Apparently, our brains bundle sound with emotion. Singers and voice
actors study the myriad subtleties and shifts in tone, pitch, rhythm
and cadence that convey different emotions. Both from a technical and a
performance-based perspective. Neurologists also study the emotional
effect of sound. And knowing more about sound itself and how it affects
humans helps to deepen that understanding from the artist's and the
listener's (audiences) perspectives. As voice actors, the higher your SEQ, the more successful the VO performance. LOUDNESS, PITCH & TIMBRE Let's get science-y for a moment. The three psychological characteristics of sound are loudness, pitch and timbre. Your brain perceives the physical structure of sound interpreted into these characteristics. Measured in decibels, loudness
depends on the amplitude, or height, of sound waves. So the "taller" the
wave, the higher the amplitude, the louder the sound is perceived by
the brain. With every 10-decibels, the loudness doubles. A whisper
chimes in at around 20 decibels, a regular conversation is in the
60-decibel range, and someone shouting at close range could be as high as
115 or do damage, as anything above 120-decibels can do. Pitch is the psychological perception
of the frequency of sound waves. The more often the sound wave cycles
from high point to low point, the higher the frequency and perceived
pitch. Think of the sound associated with a car gaining speed. The
sound of the engine starts low and gradually rises in pitch the faster
the engine moves its pistons. This is the same with sound waves: the
more rapidly it cycles through high and low, the higher the sound. Hand
in hand with amplitude, this frequency can affect the perception of
loudness as well. Frequency is measured in hertz, or cycles per second,
and the human ear can hear between 20 and 20,000 hertz. Timbre is a little bit more esoteric,
as it refers to the quality of the sound. The complexity of the sound
wave has a lot to do with timbre. Pure tones have single frequency
sound waves where most other sounds are a mixture of different
frequencies. This messiness and jumble of frequencies is to some degree
up for interpretation by the brain perceiving it.
THE EMOTIONAL CONNECTION A large amount of research has been done on the emotional connection
that humans make to sound. This connection can be quite powerful:
An incredible
shift happened when movies introduced sound:
And not just emotions are touched by sound. Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, describes how sound is a physical touch:
Which
explains why researchers at McGill University in Montreal found a
correlation between subjects observing that a piece of music "gave them
the chills" and the physical release of dopamine, as observed by PET
scan. Sound physically touches the listener and causes the release of
feel-good chemicals in the brain.
HOW MUSIC HELPS US REMEMBER Scientists and researchers believe
that the human brain developed structures to respond to music earlier
than the structures to respond to language, thereby allowing music to
help humans recall information. In an article for CNN Health, Daniel Levitan explains:
This additionally explains why some songs, like the ABC song from early childhood, stick with us throughout our lifetime. Music can also evoke memories.
Certainly, songs with other significance associated with them, such as
weddings or breakups, rites of passage, or significant times of growth
can take the listener back to that time period in their lives. Alzheimer's patients have been known to respond to music when verbal
communication isn't as effective - seemingly underscoring that non-verbal
sound response is etched onto our brains first. UNWANTED SOUND OR NOISE In addition to allowing humans to
develop emotion and memory, sound responses are closely linked to other
survival mechanisms, such as fear, joy and fight-or-flight instincts. But unwanted sound or noise can also cause overwhelm in some brains as in misophonia. (WebMD: "Misophonia is a disorder in which certain sounds trigger emotional or
physiological responses that some might perceive as unreasonable given
the circumstance.") I first became aware of this condition when my daughter, who suffers
from misophonia, came home in tears explaining she couldn't deal with
the kids in her kindergarten class at lunch who chewed noisily and
talked with their mouths open. Triggered by her sensitivities I began to
notice my own personal pet peeves, like the slurping of soup, the
sucking on a straw at the bottom of a milkshake, or repeated scraping of
a spoon on a bowl. These personal tolerances (or
intolerances) are something all voice over artists need to be aware of,
and science has demonstrated it's especially important for e-learning
narrators. Studies show that noise - or the brain's perception of noise
- can have a negative impact on learners, and even something as small as
mouth clicks in excess can be extremely distracting for learners.
VOICE ACTORS AND EMOTIONS So how does this sound emotion quotient help voice actors? Understanding how your audience is going to respond emotionally and
physically to your performance can have a large impact on how you bring a script to life. Uncovering the subtext as well as the content of the message is key to
tapping into your emotional palette to create impactful performances
that resonate with listeners. Again, let's loop in the science. It
takes just one-tenth of a second for our brains to begin to recognize
emotions expressed by vocalizations, according to researchers from
McGill. In their study, they had subjects listen to nonsensical phrases
intentionally lacking any emotional word cues and asked them to assess
the underlying emotion based on non-verbal elements (back to loudness,
pitch, and timbre). The results were obviously telling. Additionally,
Professor Albert Mehrabian and colleagues at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), conducted studies into human
communication patterns in 1967 and came up with Mehrabian's Rule:
communication is only 7 percent verbal and 93 percent non-verbal. (And
of that non-verbal element, 38 percent was tone of voice.) Knowing how
to vocalize the script can have as much or more impact than what words
themselves convey! This helps voice actors create performances that
resonate (in more ways than one.) The higher your SEQ, and the more
tools in your actor's toolkit, the easier it is to have a meaningful impact. ----------------- ABOUT KIM Kim Handysides is a top voice over artist in commercials, eLearning and narration. With a background in theatre and film and a thorough grounding in radio and television, she's a 2019 Voice Arts Awards winner and five-time nominee, and "loves sharing advice, tips and experience with anyone who asks." She also loves dogs, mountains, beaches and story. The next edition of her 6-week online The Voice Over Study group performance class begins August 2 - limited to 12 participants. |
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A very bright lady!!!!