Resonance and Topping Up the Breath

I was thinking about what David had said in class about not keeping your story from your listener but sharing it with them, and the different things that we do with either our posture, movements, or voice that can take the story back from the room to the speaker. While thinking about this and reading through the text I stumbled upon a little bit of advice on this from Rodenburg. While this isn't an answer to the problem of holding back a story, it provided some further insights to me of things to look for, and work on.

On pages 78 and 79 of the Rodenburg text, the author explains about females who adopt an unnaturally high vocal pitch and how that can keep them from working in the natural middle range where they can explore richer, fuller resonances of their voice. To experiment around with this, Dwayne and I tried out different voices in different ranges and felt the difference in resonance. It was a fun activity and I would suggest trying this if you think it might be interesting.

Rodenburg also talks about something that happens to females (but I would assume almost everyone would have experienced this at least on a minor level) where the breath is held or they will "top up the breath" in anticipation of getting to add a comment to a conversation but waiting for a break in the flow of conversation to speak. Well, she says that sometimes we experience this holding in of the breath even when not in a turn taking conversation. So I think that is useful information for trying to see if any if us exhibit that habit when we speak.