Finding My Voice (It Was Here A Minute Ago)
Knowing what kind of “voice” you have seems like one of those things that would be pretty obvious, right? But surprisingly it’s not. It’s like when you think your place in a friend group is “the cute” one, only to finally figure out everyone is actually just hanging out with you because you have a pool. Not that I’d know from experience. (Go the YMCA if you think pools are so cool, Stephanie!)
Where was I?
Right, it can be surprisingly difficult to know how your voice comes across to others. I’ve been told I have a warm, sunny, engaging voice which works well for many area of voice acting. When I first started out, I had it in my head that I had a deep, commanding, evil villain kind of thing going on, because that’s a voice I loved to make. But I had to figure out that, in general, most voice over artists get roles based on their own natural voices, and so it was important to learn good adjectives for my natural speaking voice.
One of the aspects of natural speaking voice is accent. Up until recently, the bulk of voice over focused on the neutral American accent, which is actually my natural accent. I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and while there can be a more pronounced “Ohio” accent, it’s generally found in the southern part of the state. When I was 14 I moved to the Western New York area, where there is a slight kind of “flat vowel” accent. It’s not super thick like one might hear from a New York City accent or a Boston accent, but it’s definitely there. The “Western New York” accent-ism I notice the most is the tendency to turn the letter combination of “al” into more of an “ah” sound. So “palm” becomes “pahm,” “calm” becomes “cahm,” “almond” becomes “ahmind,” and so forth. When I moved to the area I was already interested in theater and language so I made a point of not adapting the local accent.
One thing I found particularly difficult was labelling my voice a certain way because I’d done a lot of work to develop my character acting and character voice abilities; to be able to tap into my different registers and voice placement within my mouth to create characters with distinctive voices that are sometimes very different from my natural speaking voice. I have done a lot of work to develop kid voices, for example. I can provide a voice for babies, children and teenagers of any gender. I love my spunky young boy voice especially and I’m always excited to use variations of it. But it’s a much different voice from my normal kind of pleasant, enthusiastic, bright voice. So again, in the beginning I was stumped at how to “label” my voice, because I’ve trained it to do so many things and I wanted to showcase them all! But there’s only so much information you can get into a person’s brain before full shut-down, and on the whole, for the majority of voice actors working today, the focus needs to be on the normal speaking voice. There is a time and a place for fun voices and that it every day at pretty much every moment buuuuuuuut, knowing where your voice sits and a handful of powerhouse adjectives to describe it is essential.
So if you are looking for a warm, friendly, sincere female with a general American accent - look no further! Here I am! And if you also need a young boy, super villain, hero, scientist, elf, warrior, dragon, CEO, mother, child, bunny, swamp monster, lobster, 300-eyed demon, or anything else you can dream up - you’ve come to the right place!
…just don’t make me say “ahmind.”
JK - I’d totally say “ahmind” if it meant keeping my clients happy!
