Transcript
Dave Bricker (00:07)
Want to expand your speaking and storytelling skills and grow your influence? This is Speakipedia Media brought to you by speakipedia .com. I’m your host, Dave Bricker, bringing you straight talk, smart strategies, and amazing stories from visionary speakers and thought leaders. My guest is a Los Angeles-based voice, accent, and communication coach. She’s a certified teacher of Fitzmaurice voice work, Knight -Thompson’s speech work and organic intelligence, who combines her experience as an actor and a coach to offer a holistic approach to voice and communication. Her focus on the intersection of voice and performance techniques is based on a deep understanding of how the nervous system affects voice and presence. She works with performers, entrepreneurs, and executives on voice, accents, public speaking, on -camera presence and the intersections between them. Please welcome Ryan O’Shea.

Ryan O’Shea (01:09)
Hi Dave.

Dave Bricker (01:10)
Glad to be here with you. Thank you for joining me.

Ryan O’Shea (01:12)
Me too, thank you for having me.

Dave Bricker (01:13)
So Ryan, let’s jump right in. Most people take the human voice for granted. As babies, we cry and we coo and we scream. As children, we sing in school. And after that, for most of us, our voice becomes just a functional tool we were born with. But the human voice is a remarkable instrument, and it’s one that can be trained to be even more remarkable. So let’s just start off by…

Tell us a little bit about our amazing human voice.

Ryan O’Shea (01:45)
Yeah, there was a quote that came to mind, which is from Daniel Day Lewis. He said, the voice is the fingerprint of the soul. And I was Googling this earlier and discovered another quote, very similar from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that says, how wonderful is the human voice. It is indeed the organ of the soul. And those

Those two quotes really speak to, think, the heart of why voice work is so helpful, that it really is a side effect of what’s happening within me internally. So I actually came to voice work from acting, because I found myself when I was in grad school that my most authentic…

and most truthful acting was happening in my voice class. So that’s really what led me down this direction of, there’s something more to voice work than simply how you sound. There’s something about how it helps you better connect to what you’re feeling and to better connect to your audience. And as a voice coach, that’s very much what I’m interested in—helping people free their voice for practical reasons like being heard or healthily sustaining your voice for long periods of time. But I’m even more interested in how good voice technique can help you more fully connect to what matters to you.

Dave Bricker (03:19)
And I’m very interested in learning from you today because I’m a speaker and like many speakers, I don’t have much acting training. I’ve been to a few of Tom Todoroff’s workshops and gotten a picture of what that can be. But actors get this training, speakers don’t. If you’re in theater school, voice coaching is a foundational part of your education.

Very few speakers have even heard of it. So tell us a little bit more about vocal coaching. Who’s going to benefit from it and why? And especially if the people listening to us are speakers, what’s in it for them?

Ryan O’Shea (04:03)
Yeah, great question. And maybe this isn’t shocking given the bias of my being a voice coach, but I think that everyone can benefit from voice work truly. There’s the super practical benefits of voice work, which are things like if you’re speaking for long periods of time, you want your voice to be able to sustain.

without beginning to strain or fatigue or even lose your voice. You want to be able to calibrate your volume for different environments. We’re often mic’d, but not always. So how can we calibrate our volume to be heard in an attuned way? And then also…

practical things like vocal interest. I want to be able to have dynamism to my voice without landing in some sort of patterns of I’m sort of sounding interesting, but it’s not really connected to anything that I’m saying, right? I want my voice to have interest to be dynamic, but to still feel like it’s authentically connected to what it is that I’m saying. And voice work can help with all of that.

including I think for speakers, it can also help you become more embodied in your speaking. There’s something that I’ll often say, which is that your inner world is the foundation for your outer expression. So having a sense of what you’re experiencing internally is going to affect your voice and therefore how your audience receives you.

I think that’s incredibly important for speakers who are wanting to connect and move audiences.

Dave Bricker (05:49)
Yeah, it’s fascinating you bring that up because it occurs to me that I so often see what I call “pretend dynamics.” It’s really common when you see somebody who’s inexperienced as a comedian and they come up and say, okay, these two guys walk into a bar and it’s like there’s just something a true comedian might say it 99.9 % the same way, but it comes off as authentic. It doesn’t sound like somebody imitating a comedian. And there’s that fine line there, that authenticity line. And I think when you see it, at least for most people, thinking something’s off and I don’t know what it is.

Ryan O’Shea (06:23)
Right, right.

Absolutely. Yeah, we can’t really say for sure that person’s authentic or that person’s inauthentic, but we have a gut feeling. And I’m thinking of myself as an audience member, the best speakers that I’ve ever witnessed are the ones who move me in some way. I’m authentically laughing or I’m authentically really intrigued, really moved by their passion and … their voice will communicate that, but that voice expression is absolutely a side effect of what’s authentically happening in their bodies.

Dave Bricker (07:15)
So maybe there’s an element of self -doubt that they just haven’t been able to get past on the stage and that that’s what’s coming and weighing down that authentic performance.

Ryan O’Shea (07:29)
Yeah, maybe I tend to in my voice work focus a lot on presence. And I define presence as having a fluidity of attention or even a simultaneity of attention. And I think that’s really important there because typically what happens if I hear people that are kind of focused on how they sound, like for example, if I came on here and wanted to sound like a really smart, confident person, I could do these things vocally that might make me think I’m tricking you into thinking I know what I’m talking about but all of my attention has gone to how I sound and I’ve lost that connection to what matters to me about what it is that I’m saying so having that presence that fluidity of attention that ability to have an awareness of myself the sound of my voice, the emotions I’m feeling, the thoughts that I’m thinking, images that are coming into my mind’s eye, and to also be aware of you and where my microphone is, where the audience is, all of those factors, that’s presence. And to be able to have that ability to be aware of and kind of shift my attention accordingly so that I can stay connected to what matters.

That’s a skill that comes with solid voice work and voice training as well.

Dave Bricker (09:00)
And that makes sense because with training there are certain things you can do without thinking about them so that you can put your energy into other things. And I’m going to try to keep us a little bit on track

Ryan O’Shea (09:10)
Exactly.

Dave Bricker (09:13)
could ask you a million questions, but let’s work from the outside in. What are a few common mistakes that people make that will strain or even injure their vocal cords?

How can we avoid those missteps? Let’s get some of the practical stuff out of the way.

Ryan O’Shea (09:29)
Yeah, I think most of it tends to come around volume and having a miscalibration of how much physical effort they need in order to be heard.

Volume, first of all, good vocal support is going to help a lot with that. The nuances of vocal support might take a little bit more time to get into here, but I’ll just name that it’s more or less your transverse abdominis muscle. If I’m pulling my belly in as I speak, that’s modulating my breath in a nice supported way so that I’m not straining, right?

then the volume calibration comes into play by having a sense of where I want my volume to reach. And what I notice where people tend to strain is that they tend to really miscalibrate and think I need to work really hard in order for my voice to be heard. And the ways in which they work really hard are by squeezing, often somewhere in their torso, that squeezing in their torso leads to some excess pressure right underneath their vocal folds. So then their vocal folds are having to work much harder in order to just simply function. And then you do that for long periods of time. And that’s where you lead to strain or fatigue or even losing your voice. So having some tools, some of them might take a while to really practice like learning and integrating vocal support might take a while, but playing with something, a tool that I call line of sound or in Fitzmaurice voice work, which I teach, we call it the focus line. That’s a really simple practical tool for helping me calibrate my volume without strain.

Dave Bricker (11:19)
Yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve been a guitar player all my life, mostly acoustic. I’m used to playing without amplification. And once I get in a room that’s a little bit noisy, I find, why is my playing falling apart? And it’s because I’m trying too hard to play loud. I’m trying too hard to get more out of the instrument than I would if I was sitting with a couple of friends in my living room and all that tension just I’m tripping all over the place. I feel like what happened? I could play this thing yesterday. I guess the same is true with the vocal cords.

Ryan O’Shea (11:55)
Absolutely. Absolutely. If I don’t want to blast the mic, but for a moment, I remember, you know, in 2020 when everybody was moving to Zoom, coming onto meetings and going, this person’s going to hurt themselves because all of a sudden they’re talking like this, like imagining that maybe the person they’re speaking to is so much farther away than they actually are. My microphone is a few inches away. I don’t need to push to be heard in that way, and yet so many people are really missing that line of sound as if they’re sending it hundreds of feet away instead of six inches or one foot.

Dave Bricker (12:34)
Right, because they see a gallery of people on the screen and they’re thinking, that’s my audience. I’d better speak out so I can reach them.

Ryan O’Shea (12:41)
Exactly. Yes.

Dave Bricker (12:45)
amazing some of the cognitive disconnect that’s automatic. Another practical vocal question. We’ve all experienced times when we get hoarse, especially if we have a cold. Or we have to speak up in a crowded room full of noisy networkers. That’s the one that gets me. Or maybe deliver a 50 minute keynote speech or sing through a two hour play and then greet the audience afterward.

What can we do to take care of our voices and develop that stamina we need to perform?

Ryan O’Shea (13:19)
Yeah, that final thought that you’ve said to develop that stamina, I think that’s really key. I’ll often use the metaphor of if you signed up for a marathon, you probably wouldn’t just show up on the day of the race and go hope this works out. You’re probably going to be training for that for months, if not years in advance. And that training is going to be adapting based on where you are in your skill set, as your thresholds are growing, your training will increase as well. There’s all sorts of variables that you’ll be adjusting, right? So for long term, it might be if your voice and your instrument is something that’s really important to you, working with a coach or getting in a class where you’re able to reliably and sustainably change your warmup, that can be really useful. Or,

I think the best warmup is the one that you’ll do. So whether that means you’re finding 10 to 15 minutes of the same warmup that you’re doing every day or at least multiple times a week so that you’re staying in shape, if you will, that’s really key. And the main areas that I would consider for building that stamina are we want to warm up the body, stretching the body, creating more resonance in the body so we can breathe more easily. I want to connect to my vocal support so that as I’m speaking for long periods of time, it’s as efficient as possible. I’m less likely to strain. And then I’ve got that volume calibration. That’s a big part of it. I would also add that I really love what are called SOVT exercises.

SOVT stands for semi occluded vocal tract and there any exercises, any vocal exercises that you do where your vocal tract is somewhat closed, right? Semi occluded. So that might mean that you have a straw and you’re blowing bubbles and playing with your pitch as you do so. Lip trills are an example of SOVT exercises.

even

you are a little bit fatigued because you were speaking for a long time in a really air-conditioned room and it was really dry. know, there are all sorts of things that are out of our control that are affecting our voice as well.

Dave Bricker (16:18)
It’s really fascinating, so thank you for that. And here’s an area where you’re an expert. Talk a bit about breath work. What does breathing have to do with vocalizing, and what breathing techniques can we use to improve our speaking and our singing?

Ryan O’Shea (16:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great. And I would differentiate first breath work that you might do, say, with a meditation or where you’re doing like box breathing, something like that, that’s more kind of meditative, where you’re holding your breath or slowing down your breath as a way of calming yourself. That’s separate from the way that I would consider breath work for our voices.

you know, of course our voice is an instrument. You brought up the guitar as an instrument as well. And all instruments have three components. There’s the power source, the oscillator, and the modifier. For our instruments, the breath is the power source. So you can’t have your voice if your power source is weak, if your power source isn’t as efficient as possible.

As far as techniques go, there are endless techniques for working with the breath for speaking and for singing. But I would say that the techniques that work best are ones that first aim to free the breathing so that you have easy breathing capacity. So those are exercises that are aimed at opening up the ribs and helping them become more mobile, aimed at softening the belly and letting the belly and the back and the pelvic floor become more mobile. And I’m also really considering developing that mobility without effort. In other words, if every time I breathe, I have to think about shoving my belly out or like really efforting to expand my ribs, that’s probably not going to be so useful. Exercises that feel nice and easy, nice and relaxing so that then I’m noticing that mobility coming in pretty organically. That is so useful. And then the second piece of that, once the breath is nice and released, the other piece of the breath work, the breath control, if you will, is that vocal support, that transverse abdominus muscle coming into play so that I’m modulating that breath as efficiently as possible.

Dave Bricker (18:58)
Love that. Thank you. So something I’ve observed from coaching speakers and doing workshops, so many of us lose a lot of our vocal range as we get older. And I’m not just talking about the range from low to high pitch. Really, it’s the volume, the power. I listen to little kids on the playground and the volume that comes out of those tiny people is astounding.

Ryan O’Shea (19:01)
Mm -hmm.

Dave Bricker (19:27)
And then someone says, act civilized or says, use your inside voice. And I think it happens to the ladies before it happens to the boys, right? But then so many adults, when you ask them to shout or speak softly, they just can’t do it. They’ve been trained by parents and teachers not to do that. And now there’s a muscle, a muzzle on the most expressive part of their body. And I’ll ask people to shout and they go,

Like they choke it back as they try to get it out and they can’t find it. I mean, what do have to do? Beat them up and make them angry enough to release it? I’m not going to do that in coaching, but it’s fascinating how many people lose that. So what can people do to recover that range and why should they?

Ryan O’Shea (20:17)
Yeah, I sort of liked your slip where you said they’ve got a muscle or a muzzle. It makes me think of the practicalities of a lot of it can be mechanical, right? That if I’ve developed some habits over the years of, for example, disconnecting from my vocal support so that the way that I’ve compensated for speaking has been by squeezing the ribs or by straining and pushing.

I compare that to if you’ve got a garden hose and you want to stop the flow you just have to bend that hose and put a kink in it. And then that flow is much more limited, right? That’s similar to what happens to us if our bodies develop more mobility over the years. It’s as if there’s a little kink in our vocal hose and that expression becomes much more limited, right? The mechanics of things.

I would also add, you know, I appreciated that you were naming kind of the psychological things that might happen if we’re told we’re too loud, if we’re told to shut up. and especially in some more formative years, we might develop some habits that help us inhibit our voices to fit in or to survive in those environments. Right. So if I’m an adult or, even a young person and I’m going, Hey, I’m ready for people to hear me.

I would actually start by getting curious about why I want to be heard. What is it about using my voice and becoming much more expressive that matters to me? And I think if we start there, that’s going to help me connect to my voice in a way that feels really good and helps me connect to a more embodied place versus if I’m just focusing on what I dislike about how I sound or alternatively, if I’m just trying to mimic what I think is good sound, then I might just develop some new habits that are not so useful. So personally, I think start with why is it that you’re interested in improving your voice, in growing your range? Is it because you want to connect more? Is it because you’ve really got something important to say and you want people to hear you? and then start training from that place. It’s a much better place to begin, I think.

Dave Bricker (22:47)
starting with a why. That’s wonderful. If you’re just joining us, you’re tuned into Speakipedia Media for aspiring and professional speakers and thought leaders who want to make more money by changing hearts, minds, and fortunes. My guest is vocal coach Ryan O’Shea, and we’re talking about your amazing human voice. And I like that we have been getting into the emotional side of this puzzle because it’s easy to talk about the pure technique. But for example, I’ll watch a speaker who’s clasping their hands in front of them and I know they’re nervous. They don’t know that that’s their tell or I’ll see women play with their hair when they’re speaking. There’s all sorts of things that people do to release that nervous energy. And the way we use our voices says so much about our state of mind, our self image, our confidence.

And so many people, they have no idea they’re slipping into their head voice because they’re scared or the timid or they’re shy. And no matter what we happen to be saying, what do our voices say about us? And what are the benefits of becoming vocally self -aware? There’s a long question for you.

Ryan O’Shea (24:03)
Yeah, it’s a long question, it’s a thorough question, it’s a complex question and answer. You mentioned in my bio, I’m really interested in the intersection of nervous system and how that affects our voice. And part of what you were describing of, I’m in my head voice and that happens a lot. Like if I’m getting really nervous or if I’m getting really emotional, that’s a fight flight response. That is the intensity has bumped up so much,

The sympathetic arousal is online and what happens is my larynx has gotten pulled up, my tongue root has gotten pulled back and my voice can get kind of stuck there. If the intensity bumped up even more I could go into kind of a freezy place and that’s where monotone really comes in like where like I’m just don’t really have much expression or much sensation, emotion that’s online in that moment. So having those kind of vocal patterns there without pathologizing ourselves and our voices can though be really useful clues for what’s my state of mind when that’s happening? Where’s my attention going when that’s happening? I find that I’m thinking of something that…

Famous in the voice world anywhere, Patsy Rodenberg is a relatively famous voice coach and she has a book called The Second Circle where she talks about there being three circles of presence. First circle is more like internal, I’m maybe kind of like speaking to myself, I’m in my head, I’m shy. Third circle is the other end of the spectrum, I’m in this kind of blustery place, I’m imposing my energy on you.

Second circle is there’s an exchange of energy. I’m aware of myself I’m aware of my audience and there’s an exchange of energy that’s there I find that if we’re more or less able to find and stay in that kind of second circle place or as I said earlier that fluidity of attention Simultaneity of attention place then what tends to happen is I’m I’m more relaxed

I’m feeling more at ease. I’m more present to my audience, to the people that I’m speaking to. And then it feels like this pleasurable exchange and my voice reflects that instead of reflecting the fear or the concern or what are they thinking about me, whatever it is that my attention is on in that particular moment.

Dave Bricker (26:48)
Wonderful. I bet people come to you all the time and you’re thinking, I could probably tell you your life story after listening to you for a minute. Just listening to how you speak. Much as I can watch a speaker very often and it’s all of those unconscious tells they don’t know how much they’re communicating by the way they communicate.

Ryan O’Shea (27:15)
I would say I like to think that I don’t make a ton of assumptions or guesses about people, but I can certainly say I can certainly make some guesses about their current state, about whether they’re feeling especially relaxed and at ease with me, or maybe if they feel like they need to impress me more or if they’re more nervous.

Certainly, there are tells that are physical or vocal that are indicative of what state they’re in,

Dave Bricker (27:50)
Right. So resonance is an important quality of a strong, confident voice. And it’s easy to talk about this idea of resonance, and you can demonstrate it, but I find it’s very difficult to verbally explain how to find that resonant center. And I’m wondering if you as a vocal coach can talk a bit about resonance, perhaps explain it a bit and help people develop it, find it.

Ryan O’Shea (28:20)
Yeah, so resonance is more or less a vocal quality where there’s a sense of the sound being really rich, really full. And when it comes to how I encourage my clients to experience resonance, I tend to encourage them to feel it in sensation. So for example, as I’m speaking right now, I’ve got my hand on my chest and I’m feeling all of the vibration of my voice in my chest.

I’m feeling it on my spine and here I am touching my cheeks, is my like mask area and feeling the vibration there. That’s my resonance, right? There are all sorts of exercises that focus on resonance and that could be really useful tools for waking up your resonance.

For example, if I want to open up my chest resonance, I might do some like Tarzan type exercises where I’m pounding my chest and making some sounds with my lower voice. If I want to wake up my nasal resonance, I might do some nasal consonants like a mm -ng shape and play with my voice. There’s all sorts of things like that.

I tend to include resonance exercises as part of my warmup and then let go of the attention as I speak. In other words, I’m almost never, like right now I’m thinking about my chest resonance and I’m consciously widening my pharynx and lifting my soft palate and there’s much more chest resonance here, but that makes me feel less connected and less embodied. So

I might do that as part of my warmup, but then I’m going to let it go and trust that whatever is happening as I’m speaking will have my resonance online as much as it can be.

Dave Bricker (30:23)
Yeah, it’s an odd thing and it’s certainly something that you feel. as I started really exploring vocals myself, I found, wow, I’m spending a lot of time in my head voice. I didn’t realize that. And I began to just cultivate the habit of staying in that resonant place, finding that it… perhaps in simplistic terms, it’s your FM radio DJ voice, it’s your jazz station voice, but finding that and then trying to become self -aware. Am I drifting away from that? Why is that? And I found that I’ve spent more time with that resonant center that I have been much more comfortable doing that automatically and that I have a lot more vocal stamina as a result of that.

Ryan O’Shea (31:16)
I, it makes me also think about playing with musicality. I’ll often play with the tools of musicality with my clients, but with the caveat that I’m not thinking about, like, for example, pitch is one of the main tools of musicality. I, I’m not consciously thinking about changing my pitch as I speak. And yet my pitch range won’t be there for me if I’m not also playing with it on occasion. So if I want to wake up a particular area of my voice, whether it’s my resonance or my pitch, my volume, my pacing habits, my articulation habits, if I want to open up new possibilities, the way to do that is to consciously play with them, probably not in the middle of a speaking engagement so that your audience isn’t watching you do a voice class, but doing that as part of a warmup, super useful.

Dave Bricker (32:18)
Yep. So the human voice has so many different modalities. There’s speech. And as we’ve been discussing, there’s a lot more to just speaking than most people think. And then there’s singing, which includes everything from Pavarotti to Louis Armstrong to Ella Fitzgerald to screaming death metal. So from your perspective, how are they similar and how are they different?

Ryan O’Shea (32:43)
I think in a lot of ways, the mechanics that are in play for speaking and singing can be very similar. Like, good, I’m putting in air quotes, good breathing technique or voicing technique for both singing and singing, or singing and speaking might include my ribs expanding sideways on the inhale, my transverse abdominus muscle pulling in on the exhale as I’m speaking or as I’m singing. That’s happening both ways. My oscillator or vocal folds are working in both cases. My modifier or vocal tract is adjusting in both cases. I would say once we get into singing, that’s why there are singing specialists because for all of those styles that you described,

There are so many other things we can modify in order to achieve those particular results. Like I can tilt my larynx or voice box to achieve one sound, more of a twang, or I can shift and hold my larynx in a particular place for a different style. There’s all of these different nuances that I can adjust to help me sing differently. I mostly do voice work for actors and for speakers, so where the voice is really in speaking land, right? And in that case, I’m much more interested in helping people feel lots of freedom in their expression. So again, I like to help people play with the dials and then go, and now let all of that go and what wants to happen as you’re expressing yourself. Whereas in singing, I might be much more likely to be focusing on the technicalities of the instrument, that’s probably not so useful when I’m speaking.

Dave Bricker (34:43)
It’s very interesting though. I’m trying to wrap my head around your perspective. So I can hear a guitar player and I think, okay, they’re playing a G6 chord. They’ve got their fingers here and you’re hearing somebody speak or sing. And I’m guessing that you’re actually visualizing the instrument as it works to some degree.

Ryan O’Shea (35:04)
I do tend to go, their support’s online, or I don’t think their support is so online. I can hear things like that. I think I’m almost more imagining something like, I think of, I love musical theater, for example. And I love the musical theater where the acting is incredible and the voice, the singing is really beautiful kind of secondarily. In other words, I would rather have really moving, beautiful storytelling where the singing maybe is every once in a while slightly imperfect, but I don’t care because I’m so moved, right?

versus if I’m going to an opera or if I’m going to something where singing is the focus, they’re going to be much more aware of and focusing on the mechanics and the instrument and staying in that technique, which means that there’s less attention available on emotionality and the connection to the audience because there’s so much attention on the mechanics.

I love that too, hearing beautiful singing that is so technically correct. It’s wonderful. When we’re talking about voice work for speaking though, I think most of us can agree we would rather have someone who seems to be connected to what they’re saying. And in that case, having an awareness of mechanics is useful, but I don’t want to be focusing on or thinking too much about my mechanics while I’m speaking.

Dave Bricker (36:43)
Right. It’s the music, not the music theory. And I like that and respect that. So, Ryan, you and I share a love for accents. Most speakers won’t go near them. A lot of actors, let’s just say they do a varying job at them. But this is an area of voice work you’ve studied intensely and you offer workshops on. And this is just one more area where we can expand the range of our expression.

Ryan O’Shea (36:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Bricker (37:12)
Share a bit about how you learn an accent, what makes an accent authentic, and how do you teach accents to others?

Ryan O’Shea (37:22)
So I’m trained in a methodology called Knight-Thompson Speechwork. And in Knight-Thompson Speechwork, we have the four pillars of accents. So this is what I would consider in any accent that I’m going to be learning or teaching. The four pillars are people or the cultural context. Who is it that speaks this accent, in other words.

The second pillar is posture or oral posture. How is it that I’m using my articulators? What’s their sort of home base? Like for example, if I were to drop my jaw as I’m speaking, I’m not really changing much else about my accent. And yet because my jaw, this posture is really changed. The sound is really changing, right? So posture is part of that.

Prosody or musicality. That’s another pillar.

Then pronunciation is the final pillar. Of course, there’s all sorts of specificity and nuance and complexity within each of those pillars. But where the authenticity comes in, I think it starts with finding real samples and considering the people pillar. So for example, if I’m working with an actor and they’re working on a British accent for a contemporary play, but they’re doing sort of an accent like this.

that cultural context is a little bit off and it starts to feel inauthentic because they’re doing a version of the accent that actually is not quite accurate for this particular context. So the authenticity starts by finding authentic samples that make sense for the world in which you’re playing, right? And then from there, I’m breaking down the pronunciation shifts. I’m breaking down the postural shifts.

I’m finding any musicality patterns that I might want to play. And then I’m playing with it over and over until I get to that place of embodiment so that it also feels authentic, not just sounds authentic.

Dave Bricker (39:31)
That’s amazing. And I know I will be signing up for one of your accent workshops one of these days just to dive deeper into that because it’s, it’s just fun to do. And it’s really surprising to play characters on stage within a speech. When you’re doing a dialogue, I said this, they said that, that’s boring. That’s just narrating. But when you can actually play the characters and jump back and forth, that just adds a whole other

Ryan O’Shea (39:38)
Great.

Dave Bricker (40:00)
dimension to a speech. So expect to see me catch up with you on that. And Ryan, share a little bit about the other programs, the various programs you offer, and how our listeners can discover more about you.

Ryan O’Shea (40:03)
It’s fun. Yeah.

Great.

So I am regularly teaching classes, workshops, private coaching, both online via Zoom. I’m based in Los Angeles, so I also do private coaching in my home studio, and I do workshops in Los Angeles.

I’ll also just add that I have a course that I offer that’s called Foundations of Voice Work, and it is a pre-recorded self-paced class where I go through the foundations of voice work. So there’s a module on presence and exercises for helping you feel more relaxed and beginning to cultivate that simultaneity, simultaneity of attention.

Then there’s the module on freeing your breathing. That’s our voice warmups and a module on developing vocal support and breaking down what that is. And then finally a module on volume calibration. So if anybody is maybe new to voice work or wants to get a sense of like, what are the basics? My foundations of voice work course is of course I’m biased, but I think a really solid place to start.

And you purchase the course, and you keep it forever. So you can also use it as a guided warmup before particular engagements. It’s a solid resource if you’re looking for a place to start.

Dave Bricker (41:45)
Excellent. And where could people find that?

Ryan O’Shea (41:48)
So my website is voiceandspeechwithryan.com and you’ll find that on my website under services, the foundations of voice work course.

Dave Bricker (42:02)
Perfect. So Ryan O’Shea, I have been looking forward to this conversation for quite a while and I was not disappointed. It’s a delight talking with you and thank you so much for being my guest today.

Ryan O’Shea (42:15)
Well, it was such a pleasure and thank you for having me as well.