My Voice Portfolio

                                        Voice

With my voice I don’t feel like I have many good qualities about it, I don’t even really like my own voice and hate to listen to it played back. I may have some good qualities like I feel like I can be quite confident when speaking and have a strong voice if I know the lines well. My projection has got better but there are still things to be worked on and I emphasise words well.

There are a few main things that I need to work on as they've always been a problem when it comes to performing. These are projection, pace, articulation and elongating words. Both Karen and Sally have pointed out that I elongate my words and that I need to make them snappy. My previous voice teacher Sarah always pointed out that my articulation needs improving and my previous drama teachers said that I need work on projecting. I’m happy Karen has gave us this task as I hope to make massive improvements in my voice and I think pointing out my weaknesses and then finding exercises to help improve and record myself doing them will help loads. Due to the fact I will be able to see the improvements and hopefully keep them up in the future so they become my strengths.

Vocal warm-ups

Projection is a key thing when performing as it’s important the audience can hear you throughout the play. I think the exercising I’m going to use to help improve is a breathing exercise. I’ve learnt that the key to projection is efficient working of the lungs, intercostal muscles and diaphragm. The diaphragm helps push air out of the lungs, it should move down and push the belly out when breathing in, and move up, pushing air out of the lungs and pulling the belly in when you breathe out. In order to make sure my diaphragm does this and my projection improves I will be carrying out the following exercise every day for 15 minutes.

 http://www.salt-box.co.uk/uploads/1/0/1/9/10196192/3-simple-techniques-to-improve-your-voice-projection.pdf

Place hand on your belly (below the ribcage, over your belly button) and one hand on your back. Breathe in slowly, and feel the gap between your hands get wider as your belly moves outward. Take a few deep breaths in and out and feel the hand on your belly moving out and in as you do so. Now place your hands, with fingertips touching, across your belly, just below the ribcage. Breathe in and feel your belly move out, then breathe out making a hard, quick “Huh” sound – you should feel your belly contract as the sound comes out. Repeat several times.  Practice this abdominal breathing regularly so that it becomes normal and natural (in the car, watching TV – anywhere). Then try making different sounds. Hear how much stronger and clearer the voice is, and how much more it projects when you breathe abdominally.

Pace when delivering a play is also key because the audience need to be able to understand what you’re saying in order to know what’s happening. I always find it really hard to slow what I’m saying down because I always want to pick up the pace if it’s an intense conversation on stage. Something that I’ve tried doing when learning a script is using the punctuation to help me slow down. I think the best exercise to do would be to record myself saying a speech normally, listen back over it and then mark down where in the speech I could take a breath or pause a little and then record it again and keep doing this until clear improvements are shown.

Articulating is one that I really struggle with I think but when I concentrate more when reading a play, I feel like it has been improving slightly. There are so many exercising to do and I think the breathing technique I will be doing with help a lot too because you need good breath control. The exercises I’m going to be doing is first a simple one which is just stretching the articulation muscles by running my tongue along the walls of my mouth and stretching the jaws. I then will continue by going over the following:

·         How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?

·         The thirty-three thieves thought that they thrilled the throne throughout Thursday.

·         Roberta ran rings around the Roman ruins.

Elongating my words is my biggest struggle at the moment as I keep doing it at the end of each sentence when it needs to be short and snappy instead of long and high. The best way to help improve is to probably work on saying the words as one syllable so they don’t drag out. I’ll probably do the same thing like I am for pace and record myself speaking and then re-record myself saying it with my syllable so I don’t elongate and it should hopefully sink in after doing it so many times so that I end up not doing it anymore. This will also help the scenes to flow nicely and not drag out.  

This table shows roughly when I plan on doing the exercises and how long they’re going to be.

Days of the week	Morning	Afternoon
Monday	Projection Exercise 15 min
Tuesday		Pace exercise 20 min
Wednesday
Thursday		Articulation 20 min
Friday	Projection Exercise 15 min
Saturday
Sunday		Elongating 15 min

Reflection

All the exercises have clear benefits that will help on stage and in general conversation. The benefits of the breathing exercise are to help the diaphragm by allowing more air to get to the lungs. This is important so we can breathe from the diaphragm and excel out, speaking loud and clear. After doing it for a while it should become natural and it will no longer be a weakness. Hopefully once doing the pace exercise that will also become natural thing so I won’t have to go over and over something to slow it down. It will also help with my general conversation with people and stuff because I tend to speak faster when I’m annoyed or excited. Articulation is about using your whole mouth when speaking to get the right sounds and pronunciation which is obviously a benefit. Once I stop elongating words, lines will flow much nicer along with the scenes.

I have been doing the exercise for over two weeks now and I’m starting to see an improvement that I hope as I continue will show much more obviously later on. I feel as if I am already beginning to speak much clearer and louder. My pace is still fast but as I continue to practise it should slow down to a normal pace and when I stop elongating my lines should be smooth and clear. I hope after doing these exercise for a while I won’t have to do them so often and it will all become natural and be a big improvement to my voice and my performance’s.

It’s been five weeks since I started my voice warm ups and I’ve noticed an even bigger improvement in my voice. I feel like I’m speaking clearer and able to project and have good articulation which I’ve always found hard. My pace has definitely improved in the last three weeks as using the punctuation is flowing nicely now.

It’s been two months and I am so happy with the progress that I’ve seen in my voice. My voice has improved so much and I’m so happy with the way I deliver speeches now. My diction and articulation have improved massively but I feel like there is still a little work to be done as I still mess up a little. My pace is good; I no longer rush unless my nerves get the better of me. I feel like having a good pace has helped my projection as well, I feel like I’ve improved really well. I don’t elongate on my words either and even though I’ve been doing the exercise it feels like it happened almost naturally. I’m really happy and actually starting to like my voice now that I’ve improved, I really want to keep it up and maybe look into other exercise to help my voice overall.

Voice work

Radio is the thing we are currently working on and will be recording soon so it’s something we’ve been focusing on in voice to help us. Voice is key as it needs to show the different emotions during scenes and the different tones between different characters. The play I’m doing which is Atching Tan is very all over the place with emotion and it’s not clear when scenes are changing and we have to show that through change of tone and emotion. For example, I could be in a heated scene with my parents and then it goes onto me being half asleep and talking to Norah. I think that’s the thing I’m finding hard the most, the quick change in tone and to show emotion, especially when I show emotion better through actions and eye contact with the other person.

When rehearsing the play in voice, Karen gave us some feedback to help.  She said we need to bounce off each other and that I need to say my words with one syllable to make it flow more. She also said to pronounce the T’s to show her being a bit spiteful. When hearing myself back I also think I need to show a change in scene by using a different tone depending on who I’m with and the environment. More emotion in the voice and react with lines from the stage directions.

When doing Shakespeare, I found it quite hard to get the hang of because to me the lines don’t make sense as I don’t understand Shakespearean language. Which is why it was so helpful when Sally made our first lesson about the language and then suggested we all look up words we don’t know in what we say to help us and it was such a big help. For example, playing the character Ursula my line was “The Pleasant’s angling is to see the fish, cut with her golden oars the silver stream and greedily devour the treacherous bait: So angle we for Beatrice; who even now is couched in the woodbine coverture. Fear you not my part of the dialogue.”  This line is basically Ursula saying how they’re going to trick Beatrice into thinking Bennedick loves her. I did this throughout the play which helped me a lot when thinking about my tone of voice and actions to do.

When performing in front of the Karen my feedback was for my first scene to put emphases on certain words so I went through my script and underlined the words that I would emphasise. When it came to the scene where we are planning the trap for Beatrice and Bennedick, Karen said to say it ‘in a nearly whisper’ and all excited like we’re dare devils because we really want it to work and get really carried away with it. At the same time, it’s important to not rush because I have a thing to pick up then pace when I’m really excited about something or trying to sound excited. So it was important that id didn’t do that and that I project when speaking. When I rehearsed in class I got feedback tease more when talking about Beatrice to make it more funny and slow it down. Luckily I didn’t have any difficult words to say which made it a lot easier for me otherwise I would have struggled much more.

We’ve just started doing Greek chorus in voice and my group which was me, Lewis, Luke and Matt are doing the second chorus part and our ideas on the vocal delivery were for kids watching TV, on social media and in a salesmen conference.  We decided to do the salesmen and that we would do 3 lines each and have a drum. I knew it wasn’t going well because we were all shouting, I suggested whispering some of the lines but by the time I had suggested it we had to show what we had to Karen. Luckily the following week there was much more of an improvement, Phoebe and Brandon also joined us. We moved our decisions forwards by saying the lines as if we were trying to sell stuff at a market and we were all going to say our now two lines each differently and then we all said the third line together. Our product we were going to be selling was the word ‘justice’ so we repeated it after every 3 lines. Finally, with the last two ‘justice’s’ we were going to shout and then whisper the last one and say the last line “With your blade” with pausing in between each word.

Whilst rehearsing it was difficult as everyone would constantly shout the third line which made it so you couldn’t hear the different ways people were saying it. We wanted it so everyone could say their two lines and their ‘justice’ that they said after their three lines however they wanted to go with the marketing theme. Then with the third line everyone joins in saying each one a different way to get various tones in there to help with the variation of the speech. After going over it a few times and constantly reminding everyone to NOT shout the third line it started going really well and I think we ended up with a good and powerful peace with loads of different variations of tones of voices in there.

I’m not a big fan of Greek Chorus stuff. I found some of the words to say hard, like I couldn’t say Agamemnon at first. I kept having to get people in my group to say it so I could get the pronunciation right. The same went for Atreus too. I found it easy to do a salesman at a market voice after Phoebe did a demonstration for us.  Then once I got through all that and figured out how I was going to say all the lines I was saying it went really well in my opinion. I was pleased with my delivery and don’t think it could have gone any better.

                             

                              

My solo speech that I’m doing is Sasha from the play Ivanov. I really liked this speech because I feel like I can connect with the character more. Sasha is a kind, compassionate and always helping others and finding the best in them. Which is why when performing the monologue, I want the passion to flow through and for the audience to feel what I’m saying. I think I really connect with this monologue the most because I understand what she’s saying and feel the same way. I want it to be passionate and happy as I deliver the speech. I’m going to deliver it in a normal pace, with a good clear tone and hopefully good articulation and diction. I’m going to perform it standing and focus on a spot behind everyone to allow me to have better focus too. I didn’t really have any struggles with this monologue, the language is quite easy and modern and there were no difficult words or anything so I had no difficulties learning it.