Find Your Voice … And Someone Else's!

Do you enjoy a good audiobook as much as I do? Australian actor Humphrey Bower voices hundreds of characters—men and women with accents from around the world. I've listened to over 350 hours of his narration work in books like Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and many of the Bryce Courtenay books like The Power of One. In this audio interview, he joined me from Australia to talk about speaking and storytelling.

One of the most engaging ways to vary the dynamics of your speech is to switch voices and act out dialog. As Humphrey Bower wisely suggests, you don't have to try to fool people into thinking you're of a different gender or nationality. Just bend your voice enough so listeners can hear the difference. If you emulate a foreign accent, you don't have to be polished enough to fool a native from that country. In your childhood story of confronting a bully, give that bully a deeper, more-menacing voice. And use a child's voice to distinguish the in-the-story dialog from the after-the-story narration.

Where can you learn accents? If you live, like I do, in a city like Miami that people from all over the world call home, you may find yourself picking up local dialects by osmosis. I can imitate Cuban “Spanglish” because I grew up hearing it everywhere. Watch British and Australian television to expose yourself to a smorgasbord of delightful accents. A broad selection of American accents—New York, Chicago, the Deep South, even the Valley Girl voice—provide endless opportunities for enhancing your speaking performance (and no small amount of humor). YouTube offers plenty of help.

How can you speak like whatever gender you aren't (assuming you claim association with one but that's a different story. As with accents YouTube videos offer number of excellent tutorials for speaking like a female and others for helping women speak like a man.

The human voice is the most versatile instrument in the world and yet, most of us only use a fraction of its potential. Combine your practiced voice with an informed ear to position yourself far above the many “lecturers” who can only claim to be dynamic speakers.