"Vocal Affect" - and the Building Blocks of Communication

Larry Wilson, our Host, discusses the use of vocal affect by using example of the TV Show "Fraiser", and what happens when you watch a TV Show in a foreign language or is dubbed. In general, vocal affect can contribute to our symbiotic response to communication. One clear point made is that speaking slower and in a concise manner definitely improves the quality of communication and helps express an idea verbally.

Hosted by Larry Wilson
Produced by: Verbal Ninja Productions
Producer: R. Scott Edwards
Sponsored by: The Wilson Method

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Transcript

Larry Wilson 0:01

Hi, this is Larry Wilson and this is How to Talk to Humans. This is the podcast that shows you how to improve your communication skills. Are you looking to get a better job? Are you looking to find a relationship? Are you trying to do things in your life that have frustrated you and unloaded you so far? Or I can show you so easily how to change that. Now, I can only do it with humans. If you're looking to deal with vampires or zombies, extraterrestrials, this is not the show for you. But if you're really looking to improve your communication skills, I can show you what I've learned for 40 years in the show business working with the biggest celebrities and superstars in the world, and their secrets are unbelievable. What I'm going to be teaching you during the course of this podcast every week are tools that you can use to communicate toward success. Hi, thanks again for joining me for another episode of How to Talk to Humans. I have a particularly unusual episode today, and there's no telling what my producer may do with what's presented here. So it's uh it's a wild free-for-all, I think. I spoke on an earlier episode about facial affect and how you could uh experiment and practice observing in different situations where there were lots of people. Uh the one of the examples I thought of originally was the airport, where I'm always looking at facial affect that people are presenting. And then it started me thinking about vocal affect, even if you don't speak the language. And so I thought, hmm, all right, here's a good example. I thought, how could you practice this? How could you see that as it's actually happening? And I realized the perfect opportunity. If you take an episode of a sitcom that you enjoy, and the more familiar you are with it, the better. Uh I won't suggest one because uh I don't know what your favorites are, but something that you really like and watch a lot. If you find an episode that you really like, and the platform that you're streaming on gives you the option to show it dubbed into another language, it's a great opportunity for you to really uh step back from the words so you don't have to listen to the actual words. Now, if it's a language you uh a foreign language you speak, it won't have as powerful of an effect. But if you don't speak Spanish or French or Japanese or whatever it may be dubbed into, put that on and watch the episode that hopefully you're very familiar with. That you know all the characters, you know what they're like. Uh maybe if you really know the episode well enough, you know what the actual words are, you know the lines of certain different things. Uh I keep thinking I'm a huge fan of the show Frasier, not just because my old and dear friend Anne Flette Giordano was working on it, uh, writing so many episodes for so many years, but the writing is so sharp, so funny, it's so clever. So if you put on an episode, say of Frasier that has been dubbed into Spanish, you will immediately see how the rhythm of the language and the again, the only word I can think of is affect. That is, all the different textures and colors of the sound of their voice paints a great deal of information for you. And this, of course, is semiotic information. It's information that signal to you, now in this case, it's someone speaking. But if that person is speaking a language you don't understand, then I think it can be considered semiotic. You're not getting your information from the actual meaning of the words so much as the sound, the pitch, the tone, all those sorts of things. And if for no other reason, I promise you, you'll find this enormously entertaining to see characters you know very, very well speaking in a foreign language, you'll see right away how much of, for example, in a sitcom, the comedy, it's not just the words. It clearly is delivery. And that delivery is vocal affect. Some number of people, not a lot, a couple of people, email me to ask how important that really was. From another episode, I talked about warming your voice up, uh, not only to protect it so that you could speak for hours in certain circumstances if you had to, without damaging your voice, but also so that you could project your voice, so you could fill a room without a microphone or a PA system if you needed to. But also it gives so much more color to the words you're saying. It really rounds out so much of what you're trying to communicate. I know that uh because some of you have commented, sometimes I'll lean towards the camera. That's clearly semiotic, but also sometimes my voice, I'll drop my voice to a conspiratorial, almost a whisper, right? Well, that may not seem like a big deal, but it is. It's huge in terms of connecting with your audience. And I don't just mean if you're telling a story, whatever you're saying. Or I may raise my voice to the level of some sort of state uh oratory, you know, some kind of crazy uh speech making situation. So all of these things affect it. And that little trick with the sitcom dialed in to have a different language, it's you like I say, you will not only find it amusing just to see your favorite people, but you will learn so much about vocal affect. And it will show you, because sometimes uh I've told this to people in my boot camp on more than one occasion. One of the reasons I'll record them to play back. I don't ever share any of that material. Everything that takes place in boot camp is proprietary and privileged and is never posted anywhere, it's not shared with anyone. Because I want you to feel free to do whatever you're going to do. But I want you to be able to see it. So sometimes I'll record, you know, using the phone just to say, try those lines, try, say this, introduce yourself, whatever it is. Because your idea of what you look like and sound like are frequently wildly divergent from what the video will show you. And it's important that you know, uh all the time, people, if you give them some direction saying, oh, I want you to do this really big over the top, they'll do something that they think is big over the top. Then you show it to them in playback and they go, Oh, wasn't seemed much bigger when I was doing it. Well, yeah, from inside it may feel like it's huge. But if you're trying to present something, whatever it may be, whether you're supposed to be outraged or amused or suspicious or whatever it is, you would be surprised. So I want you to be able to dial that in closer so that you're in control of that. So that when you are presenting an idea or a proposal or anything that you might be doing, maybe it's simply introductory meeting online with someone. Maybe it's uh, you know, just a get to know you online. Well, you're gonna want to be speaking in a certain way, you're gonna want to be making eye contact with the camera in a certain way, you're gonna want your face, your voice to be doing things that might be very different than if you were presenting to your team, to people who know you very, very well, who are very familiar with you. And, you know, it comes back to this idea that I'm trying to think, I I keep thinking of Frazier because I like the show so much. But if you're used to seeing Frazier Crane's brother Niles come in and in his droll manner sort of say, good afternoon, if you suddenly see that as Buenos Dias, you suddenly realize, oh, the words don't matter nearly as much as the affect of what you're presenting. Now, I I hope no one thinks I'm saying the words don't matter at all. Of course they do. I'm talking about building blocks of communication. Obviously, the huge respect and admiration I have for great writing, something like that show Fraser, if you give great actors great lines to speak, then with vocal affect they're able to bring so much more to those lines than they appear on paper. But as uh many people will tell you, if it's not there on paper to start with, it's highly unlikely it will show up in the finished product. So don't be afraid to try that. And with that same thing in mind, I hasten to point out uh I had a conversation this morning uh with someone who uh was very interested in bootcamp, wanted me to tell them more about it, and we just talked about it. And it was very interesting because uh this is a young man uh who had a very faint accent, very faint, not in any way difficult to understand what he said, but I said, you know, those of you who speak English as a second language, now this guy I almost think most people wouldn't even realize he had an accent. That's how faint it was. His English was perfect. But sometimes there have been people who've trained with me who speak English as a second language, and they do have a discernible accent, and they're self-conscious about it. I'm here to tell you, this can be your secret weapon. I just did a uh corporate training for a Fortune 500 company, that's as far as I will go, because I'm not really at liberty to name them. Small group, I think 35 people. They were great, fantastic. But every single one of them in that room, and there's some brilliant people there, they all spoke English as their second language. I don't think they all have the same first language, most of them may have, but English was not it. And some of them were, even though they were very accomplished and high up in this company, they were a little diffident. They were a little shy about their accent. And I pointed out to them the same thing I'm telling you right now, that it can be your secret weapon. Do not make the mistake of trying to speak as rapidly as a native-born English-speaking person does, because if the audience is native-born English-speaking people, they'll have no trouble understanding that person. But if you speak English as a second language, take advantage of that. Speak slower. A lot of people I know who speak English as a second language think, oh, if I speak very rapidly, it will make me sound uh more articulate, it will make me sound more fluent in English, it'll make me sound smarter. I disagree. I think it will make you sound like a used car salesman. This is not good. I want you to be the most you that you can be. I want that sounds like I'm starting to do a Dr. Seuss thing there, doesn't it? I want you to be your most authentic self. And in this case, if English is not your first language, don't try to pretend it is. Instead, take advantage of that, speak more slowly, because when people hear your accent, it will force them to lean forward and listen to you more carefully. When they see that, or hear immediately that it is not your first language, they will pay closer attention. Now, they may not be aware of it. They may clearly be aware that they can hear you have an accent, but what they may not be aware of is unconsciously, they may be thinking you have to pick and choose the word you're going to speak more carefully. They might be right, they might be wrong. Uh I don't really speak any other language fluently besides English. But if you've you may be one of those people who has an incredible command of another language, you might have several languages, and you might have incredible depth of vocabulary in all of those languages. But the person hearing you doesn't necessarily know this. So if you speak more slowly, the person you're speaking to unconsciously feels that you're really searching specifically for the exact right words. And this has a powerful impact in terms of communicating whatever your message may be. Now, if it's just social, well, I wouldn't be as concerned about it. You want to be light, you want to be able to uh introduce yourself and what you do and try to interact with them. But if it has anything at all to do with business, by slowing yourself down, you actually have more power. And there's a corollary in theater, I think almost all directors at some point or other will tell actors this. Sometimes the actor feels like they're having trouble with a certain line of dialogue or a chunk of dialogue. I was always trained when I was younger. If you feel it needs to be faster, that's a sign you need to slow down. Why? I don't know. I just know that that's the case and that it works. That maybe it's a sense unconsciously that you think if I go faster, I'll get to the part where they understand what I'm saying. Maybe that's what I don't know. But I do know that it's absolutely mission critical that your audience, whoever is the recipient of your communication, is able to understand you very, very clearly. Without any question, they're able to understand exactly what your message is. When they do, now hopefully there'll be interaction. They may say something to you, and hopefully you're employing active listening to then be able to respond. But again, don't feel like you have to fire immediately at this. In a previous episode, I mentioned about a support group of people who've been trying to pry themselves loose from the grip of AI chatbots that they have been using for social interaction. And one of the people who was uh mentioned an article I read in the New York Times about this particular group was commenting how the way he got loose was to start engaging with humans again in chatting and speaking. Because the AI chat, he said, could answer almost instantly. There was no hesitation. He said, Whereas with a real person, you say something, it may take them a moment to think about what you've said, and then they say, you know why, and then they respond. That's because communication is human. Thanks for joining me again. I hope to see you in another week with another episode of How to Talk to Humans. This has been Larry Wilson. I want to thank you for spending this time with me, and I hope you found this information useful. If you're looking for more, you can find it at thewilsonmethod.com. There's a ton of stuff there. With that, or if you want, you can even speak to me because I'm human. Send me an email at info at wilsonmethod.com because I read every single word. I hope that you'll join us next week in this continuing journey. And you'll be with me for the next episode of How to Talk to Human.