Tone and Telling

Omigosh! David's talk on tone in telling hit me like a sack of bricks. I thought it was so cool how a storyteller can shift and change the "energy" of the story and even the listener, by making down- and up-turns in his or her speech. I bet there are so many ways to play with this concept and use it to set the "tone," either by using regular down-turns to calm things down and then sudden up-turns to electrify the telling, as if for a really exciting part, or to characterize certain characters, etc. (regular down-turns for a sleepy or slow-witted character, regular up-turns for a hyper character, etc.) I am going to start canoodling with this idea more in my stories.