Let's talk about pitch, simply whether your voice is high or low. And that varies all the time. And we'll come on to pros of the president in a moment, which is the singsong. However, some people have a higher pitched voice. Some people have a lower pitched voice. And again, you can focus on this.

Margaret Thatcher, the former prime minister of the UK, had vocal training to reduce the pitch of her voice to lower her voice by a couple of tones, because she knew something which has been borne out by research, which is that we tend to take things more seriously. When their tone is lower. we vote for politicians with deeper voices, believe it or not, other things being equal, of course, now this is associated with sighs Of course, deep voices tend to mean big things. An elephant has a much deeper voice than a mouse, which is actually hypersonic. For us. We can't hear it.

Cats can hear most voices, but we can't they squeak so Hi. So small things tend to be high, big things tend to be low and big things are more threatening than small things. So therefore, it's kind of genetic, that we pay more attention to lower voices. It's an automatic response. And it affects how passionate or how energized Your voice is. So if I say, Where did you leave my keys?

That sounds very normal. If I say, Where did you leave my keys? I'm obviously much more energized. Now, the pace of those two deliveries was exactly the same. It's simply is that the pitch? The pitch has affected how passionate or excited or aroused I am in what I'm saying.

So depth is authority. I urge you again to work on moving down to the chest resonating from the chest and lowering the tone of your voice if you want to be taken seriously. Pitch can be very significant in how you're received. Now pitch is Constant prosody or prosody, as I like to say it is a wonderful aspect of speaking, which gives so much of the meaning and the emotional content to what we say. It's the sing song. It's the difference in pitches as you move through words.

And it's also the pacing of the words themselves. So presently is the difference between reading something without any kind of intonation. Or if I were to deliver everything at a constant pace at a constant tone, I don't think you would find this course so interesting. It would actually become very tedious and monotonous and of course, the root of the word monotonous monotone, is an unchanging tone. It means boring, it is boring, and people have different natural degrees of prosody. Again, this is cultural Scandinavian presently tends to be very restrained.

You know, you talk to somebody from Scandinavia, yes, we're very excited about this. They are but that's their prosody. It's not wild like Mediterranean prose, a wow, you know this kind of enormous exaggerated singsong of speech. So culturally it changes but also from person to person. Some people have naturally more prosody than other people do. And again, my suggestion to you is to work on range here to practice wildly exaggerated prosody, so that your natural prosody becomes more liberated, freer, larger range that you can play with.

It's an extremely powerful way to get your message across. If you tend to speak with repetitive prosody, every sentence going down at the end like this, using the same tones every time it gets, again, tedious for people to listen to. Now, there are some pros of these again, around the world which have become habitual for a lot of people, which I don't think are particularly useful in in particular, there's one called hi rising terminal, or Australian questioning intonation. Because it started in Australia, where every sentence is ending going up as if it were a question. Now, not every sentence is a question. The typical presently that we've been used to, for a very, very long time, is that when you get to the end of a sentence, you go down.

That means I finished, and it's time for you to talk. If when you get to the end of a sentence, you go up. There's a kind of timorous sness about that a questioning a lack of confidence. There's an elided question in there. Do you agree? Is that okay?

Settle, right. It's a kind of checking in all the time, which gives a lot of the power to the listener, and shows the speaker as somebody who's not that confident, In what they're saying, I do, again, urge you if that's a habit that you've fallen into challenge it, please challenge it. It's much more powerful to use strong, downward intonation at the end of sentences. It sounds as though you know what you're doing and you're completing something. There are plenty of other procedures which become habitual, whether it's lack of prosody altogether, or exaggerated prosody, which can equally be irritating if somebody's somebody's really sort of going like this. Again, it can become quite frustrating to listen to record yourself, as we'll suggest in the last chapter on public speaking, record yourself listen to you appropriately ask your friends if you if you have friends, you, you know well enough to get a sensible and honest answer.

Listen to other people. Pay attention to it become conscious of presently it is worth it and work on extending your range.