The Sound of Experience

BY AMANDA ROBB
MORE Magazine
MAY 2007

The day of my fortieth birthday began the way many of my days do: on the phone, conducting an interview. This particular someone was a textile maven who was enlightening me on the hallmarks of first-rate camel hair. I’d thoroughly prepared for the interview and was, if I do say so myself, prompting him with well-researched, insightful questions. Midway through a detailed explanation of the molting habits of Bactrian camels, the expert stopped short to ask, “Sweetie, are you sure you’re following me?”

I wanted to say, “We’re talking about shedding animals, not neuroscience, and yes, somehow—maybe thanks to my 10 years’ experience as a journalist, or my graduate education, or just by dint of four decades on the planet as a sentient being—I am keeping up.” But I held my tongue. Not out of professionalism or politeness, but because I knew in my heart that he was a genuinely concerned windbag. How? Because I’d say, conservatively, that about 70 percent of my phone acquaintances assume I’m an idiot.

Why? Because as every other part of me has ripened and matured, my voice has remained defiantly young. Truly, from my accomplished mind and vigorously maintained body comes forth a nasal, insecure Valley girl who, at least once during her every conversation lasting more than five minutes, is asked to repeat herself because not only does her voice have Peter Pan syndrome, she mumbles, to boot.

I despaired. But as promised in The Sound of Music, when God closes a door, somewhere He opens a window. Lousy interview plus my birthday equals huge gift to self. And what was my heart’s desire? A new voice. A mature, smart-sounding, intensely appealing one with which to share my bits of brilliance with the world.

In less than an hour on the Internet, I found the Voice and Speech Trainers Association. The group’s mission is to “practice and encourage the highest standards of voice and speech use and artistry in all professional arenas.” There were about 30 voice trainers in my area. Most had résumés that boasted training such as Associate in Fitzmaurice Voicework, Estill Voice Craft Level 1, and 5 Rhythms Mysterium Workshop. I chose Patricia Fletcher because she had a master’s degree in voice and speech, and I understood what a master’s degree was. On the phone, she had just the kind of voice I wanted. Superaticulate, but not elitist sounding. Confident, but not strident. Absolutely female, but not flirtatious or fawning. Still, before signing up for the lessons, I quizzed her on what actually makes a voice sound gown-up.

Pat suggested I think about voices on sitcoms—voices intended to be silly or stupid. If you say ow! With a mature voice, the sound suggests that the speaker is hurt, she explained. But if you say it in a sitcom way—“smile and make it really bright and put the sound into the front of the face—ow! sounds funny. “So going up in pitch, being nasal, strident and thin, all of that makes the speaker seem not as powerful, not as grounded, not as experienced…maybe someone who wants to please a little too much.” Another authority sapper, she said, “is being breathy.” Pat did a killer Marilyn Monroe impersonation by saying with a sigh, “This makes me sound uncertain, a little weak.”

I asked to start classes the next day.

It turned out that I vaguely remembered Pat from her 1980’s role as a housekeeper on the ABC soap opera All My Children. And I was still feeling a little starstruck when she flipped on a tape recorder and asked me to recite “Humpty Dumpty”.

As a character in the musical A Chorus Line sings,” I dug right down to the bottom of my soul…”

“You breathe in a very high way, from your collarbone,” Pat said. “And you have back-of-the-throat and tongue tension that makes your sound escape out your nose more than it needs to.”

“Curable?” I asked.

She instructed me to just breathe for a few minutes. With her watching so intently, exchanging oxygen form carbon monoxide seemed an extremely complex, rather than an involuntary, task.

“Dancer?” she asked.

I beamed. “Ballet three times a week!”

She groaned and told me that good dance posture is terrible speaking posture. Holding your abdominal muscles right and high, for example, prevents the breath from dropping into the bottom of your lungs, which is basically your belly, which you need to keep soft so it can fill up with air.

It was my turn to groan. My rock-hard tummy (with a wee bit of padding since I had the baby, um, seven years ago) was my pride and joy.

“Look, I’m not asking you to get fat,” Pat said as I hemmed and hawed and edged toward her door, “just to relax your abs.”

Only because she’s much thinner than me, I decided to attempt a few of her exercises, the first of which require positions that bring to mind things that don’t, per se, involve the voice.

In the first one, we lie down on Pat’s floor with our legs up on her sofa. The idea was that by securing the pelvis and shoulders, the belly would be the only thing that could move as we breathed in, saying k-ah. On my inhale, lo and behold, my rib cage blew up in a way I thought it only could during pregnancy. To my enormous relief, on the h-ah exhale, my frame entirely recovered its dainty proportions. When I accomplished this several times, Pat announced it was time to “F” Humpty Dumpty.

I was deeply intrigued.

Note of candor: It wasn’t that great.

Note of caution: If you try this at home, definitely do it lying down. You will get dizzy. What the exercise involves is making a series of F sounds to the beat of “Humpty Dumpty,” with no more than three syllables per breath. By the time the old egg is sitting on his wall, you get the point that you want to breathe deeply to talk.

Pat declared that I was ready to stand up. I practiced breathing while looking in a mirror to make sure that all my relaxing was not making me slouch. “We don’t want to be collapsing on ourselves to get the breath to release,” she said. My homework was to keep a hand on my middle as much as possible to make sure my rips were expanding every single day, all day long.

My husband said that my walking around holding my ribs made me look as if I were always about to yell at him, but that he was willing to put up with it if it meant I’d be audible for the last half of our lives.

“Thanks,” I said, extremely audibly.

My next nine sessions with Pat were devoted to relaxing my jaw, throat and tongue, which were a shockingly uptight trio. I never actually mastered “jaw shakes,” but I either stopped clenching enough or got frustrated enough that Pat let me move on to stretching out the tongue, which had been shamelessly lounging in the wrong place in my mouth. Your tongue is supposed to rest low in your mouth with the tip behind your lower teeth. My tongue sat up very high, sending a lot of sounds out my nose. But the only sounds in English that are supposed to come out of your nose are m, n and ng.

Trust me, it is harder to train a tongue than it is to train a puppy. The thing just goes where it wants to go. Pat’s exercise for this one was basically tongue stretches, done by saying k-ay and remembering that your tongue is a muscle that extends all the way down your throat. And it really is a muscle: When I left Pat after the tongue sessions, my lingua was licked.

Finally, it was time to get to what I thought we’d start with: enunciation. I told Pat that I’d like to speak like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or Alan Rickman in any performance. Pat frowned, then said either dialect would be pretentious for a 40-year-old woman raised in Reno, Nevada. She suggested we work on well-pronounced neutral American speech.

“Who talks like that?” I asked.

“Jim Lehrer,” she said, “on the PBS News Hour.”

But although I had long harbored a mad crush on Jim Lehrer, I didn’t aspire to speak like him. That night I asked my husband, “Wouldn’t it be exciting to be married to someone who speaks like Katherine Hepburn or Alan Rickman?”

He said that really he just wants to be married to someone he can understand and that under no circumstances did he want to be married to someone who sounds like Alan Rickman and really sometimes I am so strange he thinks I’m making him lose his hair.

Gee, I wanted to save the Sturm and Drang for bigger fish. I accepted neutral American speech as my dialect goat. Pat tried, with great patience, to teach me how to say sounds correctly. “Vowel sounds must be open,” Pat said, “with your vocal cords nice and wide.” She opened her mouth wide enough to put my head in it.

Show-off, I thought.

“If the vocal cords half come together and half release, you’ll get a sound that’s sort of scraping. And that’s a young, not-serious sound that I hear from women much more than men,” she admonished.

I repeat about a million phrases, such as “step in,” “paint it” and “pick actors.” Pat was very hard to please, and I swear to God my tongue cramped. If it could have, it would limped right out of my mouth. After three sessions, I moved up to sentences, such as “Can you explain why you refused to reply?” I start over-enunciating. Pat reminded me that “English. Is. Not. Spoken. As. If. A. Robot. Is. Talking. As in French, our words blend together. The important thing is to say them clearly, with breath support and the tongue in the correct place, and to finish saying them.”

“I understand,” I told her. “Really, I do. Everything you’ve taught me is firmly rooted in my gray matter. But sometimes it feels as if you’ve taught me the mechanics of a triple salchow. As well as I understand it, I’m never going to speed along ice, leap off one blade, turn three times in the air and land on the other. Sorry.”

“You said that beautifully,” Pat said. I swear she had tears in her eyes. “Gorgeous breath support, deep intonation, clear articulation. Even intentionality.”

I beg to graduate. Pat says, “OK.”

I know that I have not become anything close to a perfect neutral American speech speaker. But I have made progress. If I do my exercises, if I think hard before speaking, my interviewees don’t lose their train of thought for fear I’m barely post-adolescent. But the second my well worked-out speaking apparatus slips my sometimes bushed brain’s attention, it’s “sweetie” all over again.

AMANDA ROBB IS A NEW CITY-BASED FREELANCE WRITER.