“Speak up!” “Make your voice heard!”
“The squeaky wheel gets the oil!”
“Say it louder for those in the back!”
Our world is full of cliches that make the loudest person the winner. Loudness in these cliches is a stand-in for an even broader concept: visibility. The moral lesson is that visibility is a winning survival strategy.
As many of us walk the Earth, we learn to associate the loudness and clarity of our voice and the voices of others with visibility. Visibility is effective. This visibility often merges with feeling. Effective happiness, anger, or sadness is that which is most visible. This lived experience cross-pollinates with a social-media-driven content ecosystem that rewards instant- engagement. Loudness is visible, and visibility wins.
This backdrop informs one of the most common myths about voice acting: the intensity of the feeling you express and the loudness of your voice go hand-in-hand. This isn’t always true. To put the myth succinctly: To feel intensely means to feel loudly.
While it seems logical and consistent with a lot of lived experience, conflating the intensity of feeling with loudness can actually be an acting pitfall. The reason for this is that in their rawest form, feelings are a loss of control. All feelings are powerless as they increase in intensity. The experienced actor becomes powerless in their happiness, anger, or sadness at the drop of a hat.
Being loud to achieve visibility is often a controlled and deliberate decision. It’s usually an assertion of control, not a loss of control. Loud visibility (or, sometimes, quiet invisibility) are often a stylistic choice. They can be so ingrained in our habits that we don’t even understand them as choices.
As you learn to act with feeling, your brain is building an internal map of how to get to feeling – mapping the connections you need to become overpowered with emotion. Each feeling is like a note of being overpowered. Acting is becoming an instrument of feeling that can play those notes with total freedom.
Stylizing loudness and other attributes of your voice to convey a feeling is not “wrong.” In fact, it can be a valid approach that works for some voice-over scripts and clients. This is often called “affect.” Classic comic hype narrations, various styles of television and radio promos, and often commercial archetypes like “mom” or “consumer” lean heavily on affect.
The challenge is that loud visibility is often an affect, but isn’t necessarily a lived feeling.
In contrast with affect, acting with a “small a,” historically sometimes called “method” acting, involves “feeling the feeling” as your truth. You connect with a kernel of losing control inside of you. The feeling takes on a life of its own. You might sit in the passenger seat as you live the experience of that feeling taking the “steering wheel” of who you are. You may be in an inner battle for control over the steering wheel with every word.
Let’s restate the earlier myth: To feel intensely means to feel loudly. How do you “deprogram” this myth as a voice actor? You practice feeling intensely at a whisper. But not just any whisper. Choosing to whisper, in a vacuum, is just another affect. You practice intense feeling in a lived experience that would give you an organic reason to whisper. One prompt that often works is to speak as though you’re stuck in a cage with a sleeping lion and waiting to be rescued, possibly in there with the familiar face you’re talking to. This is an experience that prompts whispering as a visceral response, not a chosen affect.
Luckily, today’s studio-quality microphones and recording spaces help. Most professional recording setups are so sensitive that even a whisper can sound gigantic with correct audio engineering and mastering.
I’ve coached hundreds of voice-over students with a wide range of learning styles. The ability to feel every feeling at maximum intensity at an earnest whisper is almost universally applicable. It allows you to separate learning your personal map of connecting with feeling from the habit of tying loudness to social outcomes.
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