The Power of Voice Training

Effective presentation relies heavily on understanding how the voice works ... A new kind of training shows how to master it

In a quiet studio in the heart of London's Soho, strange things are afoot. Bare-footed lawyers wobble on small round wooden balance boards, with arms stretched high above bean-bag covered heads, holding large inflatable beach balls.

And as if that was not a sufficiently taxing feat, these usually sober business executives read poetry out loud from giant cards suspended in front of them - the cards, of course, move to and fro and the reader must resist the temptation to follow in order to avoid falling off the wobbling board.

It may sound like a scene from It's a Knockout but these antics are in fact part of a new kind of voice presentation training programme set up by tutor Angela Caine in April this year for people who, in the words of the handbook that accompanies the training, 'want to use their voice more effectively in their private or working lives'.

Caine has taught voice, in its various forms, for 25 years - from re-introducing singing to Coventry schools, to teaching opera singers to sing whilst doing cartwheels to training Lonrho executives for presentations. The basic premise of her six-session voice workshop course (recently taken by the training division of Pearl Assurance) is that before anyone can learn to present, they must first learn how to use the voice. She is critical of the traditional thinking which often focuses on voice projection as the solution to presentation problems.

'I am desperately trying to get people to stop projecting because they are ruining their voices and wrecking their presentation skills,' she says. I'll probably be sued if you print that because that's the way most presentation skills are taught.'

So why do people assume that poor presentation, voices that crack up half way through a speech, or simply cannot be heard, will be cured through better projection?

'Because that's the only training that has been available until quite recently. We are still teaching voice in the same way as we taught it in the nineteenth century.

'Now we have bodies that are performing the most amazing athletic feats, but we're not applying the same training principles to the so; people can play squash, tennis, football but they don't believe that the way they run their body is the same way as the way they run their voice.'

She insists that the whole body, including the voice, is a mechanism that runs on one system -just as the body and the voice function together, they should be exercised together - hence her highly physical approach to voice training that involves climbing, balancing and even bouncing on a trampoline while singing and citing poems printed on her studio walls.

Caine trained originally at the Guildhall School of Music and taught singing. At 30, she 'lost' her voice and could not 'find anyone to give me the information to get it back'. 'It wasn't that I couldn't speak, but I sang out of tune and was almost blowing people away with the way I was talking to them. The more panic- stricken I got about the state my voice, the more forced and aggressive it began to sound.'

She spent three years teaching the Alexander Technique, to understand the body mechanism and was motivated to put the voice workshop course together by working with businessmen who 'did not know anything about their bodies'.

'I saw businessmen crump- ling under the weight of giving presentations - and crump- ling needlessly because they were putting effort in places where it was not needed.'

But what does she mean by 'crumpling'? She refers to business people who learn their speeches word for word and, guided by their presentation training, make notes on small pieces of paper.

'The first thing a business-man will do is to find his legs and stand in what he thinks is a position of control to give him plenty of attack and projection. In fact that is a position of tension.'

'With his pieces of paper in hand and having learned the speech by heart, he will keep looking at the paper because it gives him confidence and everybody knows what is going on. They know he has got the little bits of paper and all they are doing is seeing how successfully he deals with the techniques which they deal with and nobody is listening to what he is saying.'

023 8039 0555