Welcome back! 

The topic that we have been studying in our last session is Voice Projection, and teacher Orlando was explaining to us that it is very important because it allow us to create effective communication with the students. Also, it is vital when we need to share knowledge with the students and we need to keep their attention.

We did some exercises in which we had to do sustained notes in low and high pitch. Then we started to do some imitations, at the beginning we had to imitate voice of children, and then, boys had to try to imitate the voice of a girl and girls had to try to imitate the voice of a boy. It was very funny and of course I could not make the voice of a girl because my voice is kind of deep sometimes. We also watched some videos of a vocal coach (as far as I can remember) and he was talking about ways in which we can “train” our voice and explaining how to do some vocal warm-ups.

We moved to a part of the class in which we had to make more challenging exercises, one was about using a pencil in our mouth and try to talk to a classmate. It was not easy at all because we had to make a lot of effort when trying to speak; at some point of the activity, we had to move away from our classmates, jump and try to talk to them, all at the same time, and always keeping the pencil in our mouth. I ended up exhausted. 

Teacher Orlando mentioned that this exercise is designed to help us to develop greater control over our facial muscles and to strengthen the muscles that are involved in speaking and projecting our voice, so this exercise will also help us to make better articulations of the different sounds when trying to speak. Also, it will help us with the development of our breathing skills since this is a key point in our voice projection; breathing provides the power and support needed to produce sound.

Later, we started talking about some of the different types of intonations used for advertisement, we just focused on Institutional, Sales and Neutral. In a nutshell, Institutional voice intonation aims to establish trust and credibility, Sales voice intonation seeks to persuade and encourage action, and Neutral voice intonation focuses on providing information in a straightforward and objective manner. Teacher Orlando provided us a text and asked us to try to read it using the three types of intonations that I previously mentioned; this is the text: 

We had the intervention of our classmate Nidia Rodríguez, she is a radio host, and I paid attention to every detail that she said. She was explaining to us the different types of intonation, how to sound more natural, things that she used to do back in the days when she was starting in the radio, how to “educate” our voice, ways of improving our intonation, and other tips. She had some scrips for us to practice and here is a clip of María giving her best shot:

I had more photos from the sessions but I found them very “cringy” (not only for myself but also for my classmates), so I decided not to post them. :)

This was my summary about Voice Projection, I hope you liked it.

See you in my next entry!