Devoicing for Emphasis

I commented to a client about a tendency to devoice when emphasizing a word, and I thought I pass the clarification on to everybody on the blog. The tendency is for the voice to fade and the throat to tighten when going up in pitch to stress a word – high and tight.

Notice I gave in to the tendency a lot of people have when they do this – jutting the head forward on every emphasized word. Looks especially goofy with my pencil neck!

I actually had a question from somebody about a comment that I made of the pitch going up, how people often times devoice when they're speaking.

Going "Off Voice" or "Off Tone"

So it's really common when some people are speaking that they kind of go up, and for their word that they emphasize, they tend to go sort of off of their voice, and they'll weaken - even if they had some resonance before, they'll emphasize a word by going up like that. "So I don't know, you know?" "Well, yeah, I was thinking that." "I was thinking that." "Yeah I was thinking that maybe I would..."

Yeah it just tends to devoice, and one of the things that somebody can do to work on that is to get used to being able to go up for something and not go off of their voice, but have that available to them, is to actually try sliding up there and finding it and going a little higher than what you might be used to, or a little higher than you might ever go to, and getting comfortable there, and then finding your way around it and exploring it so that eventually you could stay on your voice even for an emphasized word.

I have this happen a lot with students that I work with, so I know that it's an ongoing issue for a lot of people. But if you work on staying on your voice, then you'll be able to do it.

Quite frankly, I think the biggest thing is just that you need to be made aware of the fact that you're doing it, so that you move from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. You know you're doing it. And I think that's the big key.