---
title: "Breath"
episode: 77
date: 2023-08-31
guest: "Jamie Read"
canonical: https://inclusionbites.co.uk/podcast/77-breath
audio: https://cdn.seech.uk/podcast/episodes/ibs-077/audio.mp3
---

# Breath

Joanne Lockwood talks with vocal coach and vocal health expert Jamie Read about how breath fuels the voice and how vocal choices shape the way we’re perceived in workplaces and everyday life. They unpack how anxiety, confidence, and presence affect breathing and vocal delivery, exploring practical ideas like pausing, posture, and the relationship between emotion and vocal “gestures” such as laughter and crying. Jamie also challenges common myths about projection and resonance, including assumptions about opera singers and the idea that more breath automatically means more volume. The conversation also examines how societal conditioning influences what we think a “credible” or “authoritative” voice sounds like, and how accents and dialects can trigger bias and exclusion. Joanne shares her experience as a transgender woman navigating voice, authenticity, and safety in gendered spaces, while Jamie discusses working with trans and nonbinary clients and the broader issue of misgendering and voice-based assumptions. Overall, the episode is an invitation to rethink what “sounds right,” understand the mechanics and psychology behind voice, and create more inclusive environments where different voices are heard and respected.

## Chapters

- 00:10:30 — Exploring the Non-Binary Singing Experience
- 00:15:54 — Breaking Societal Voice Norms: The Importance of Authenticity
- 00:20:42 — The Physiology of Gender and Voice Differences
- 00:26:15 — Dispelling Myths: Resonating in the Chest and Head
- 00:30:49 — The power of breathing for confident speech
- 00:37:52 — Opera Singers and the Power of Resonance
- 00:41:12 — The Power of Vocal Body Language in Comedy
- 00:45:30 — The Psychology and Inclusion of Dialects and Accents
- 00:50:00 — The societal bias against regional accents explained
- 00:53:50 — The Power of Voice Prints: Identity and Impostors

## FAQs

### Q: Do all opera singers possess big, powerful voices?

No, the size of an opera singer's voice is determined by resonance, not physical size. Power comes from understanding and manipulating resonance through extensive training.

### Q: How do opera singers project their voice without a microphone?

Opera singers undergo training to understand and manipulate resonance, allowing them to project their voice over an orchestra. This enables them to be heard even in large venues without amplification.

### Q: How do opera singers manipulate resonance for better audibility?

Opera singers may use the resonant frequency of a baby's cry (around 2800 Hz) to make their voice more hearable and create sympathetic resonance in the audience's ear canal.

### Q: Is feeling like your voice doesn't represent who you are limited to the trans community?

No, this experience can be felt by individuals across various communities and identities.

### Q: Is misgendering on the phone a common experience for everyone?

Yes, misgendering on the phone is a common experience regardless of gender identity.

### Q: Do non-binary singers face challenges in finding their voice?

Yes, non-binary singers may struggle to find their voice as they do not fit into traditional male or female vocal parameters.

## Transcript

Joanne Lockwood: You. Hello, everyone. My name is Joanne Lockwood, and I am your host for the Inclusion Bites Podcast. In this series, I have interviewed a number of amazing people and simply had a conversation about the subject of inclusion, belonging and generally making the world a better place for everyone to thrive. Join me in the future, then please do drop me a line. Jo.Lockwood@seechangehappen.co.uk that's S double E Change Happen dot co dot uk. You can catch up with all the previous shows on iTunes, Spotify and the usual places. So, plug in your headphones, grab a decaf and let's get going. Today is Episode 77 with the title Breathe. I have the absolute honor and privilege to welcome Jamie Reed. Jamie describes himself as a vocal coach and vocal health expert. When I asked Jamie to describe his superpower, he said that he believes not only does everyone have a beautiful voice, but most importantly, that it should be heard fiercely and proudly. Hello, Jamie. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Joanne. I'm really

Jamie Read: delighted to be here. I'm looking forward to it. Yes, we've talked about this

Joanne Lockwood: for so many months now and we finally got around to it. Excellent. Jamie, why is breathing so important? So,

Jamie Read: somebody much wiser than me once said, life is not measured in years, it's measured in breaths. And I think that's a really beautiful thing. Breathing is the fuel supply for the voice, it's the fuel supply for life. And we all share the same breath, we all share the same air and oxygen. So it's a very equal, very available thing that all of us have and all of us need and breath. As a vocal coach, so I began my career as an actor and as a performer and moved into coaching about 18 years ago. And breath is so fundamental to the way that we vocalize and how we produce our voice and how we express ourselves that it just felt so integral and so important. That's why the word was there in the text that I sent over. That's why it popped out so much, I think.

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, it resonated straight with me because as a professional speaker, and even before I was a professional speaker, when I was maybe a public speaker or a corporate speaker in the corporate world, I'd often find that I forget to breathe. I'd end up, in this time, myself into or painted myself to the corner where I had no breath left and all my anxiety levels or my panic mechanism kicked in. And often think that many people who have an anxiety or a fear of public speaking worry about losing their breath or not being able to get their words out.

Jamie Read: Yeah, it's such a primal thing, it's such an important thing and nobody really focuses on it day to day. We're getting much better in the world at large about being aware of the usefulness and the benefits of mindfulness and meditation and so on. But by and large, nobody's ever thought about breathing because we just do it luckily. I mean, we'd be in trouble if we didn't. But as you say, when you come under pressure, actually the breath, because it's part of the cardiovascular system, if the breathing speeds up or shallows, then the heart rate speeds up or shallows. And those things have an impact on how we feel. And how we feel has a huge impact on how we express ourselves and what we say and how we say it. And actually, I think that's the big thing for me as a vocal coach, because I work with genuinely anyone with a voice. So I've worked with everything from opera singers to rabbis, to people with vocal health difficulties, to business CEOs to actors. I mean, you name it. I do all kinds of different work with voices. And actually, how you feel about yourself affects the way that you breathe, affects the way that you speak, and therefore affects the way that you're perceived. And it's such an important interface for human beings. It's a very tribal behavior. Voice. We hear a voice and decide actually if this person belongs to our tribe or us to theirs, is this somebody I can connect with? It's where we get accents and dialects and you hear that kind of corporate boardroom thing where the voice goes down here somewhere, where everyone's kind of in that space. Or you hear the oh, it's a new baby. Oh, that's lovely. And that kind of space in there. And it's such an emotional response and such a primal response that if we can get control over it, we can really start to feel in in control of how we express ourselves and how we're perceived and how our emotions are expressed and perceived as well. That's so true. I'm thinking about that.

Joanne Lockwood: We can often our pitch of our voice can increase as our anxiety or our panic, or when we're not maybe emotionally in control of ourselves. And that can lead us to sound less credible or less capable because we associate deep, steady resonance with authority. Yeah,

Jamie Read: which is a curious thing in and of itself. There was a piece of research last year that I was reading not that long ago that showed that a drop of only about 25 Hz, which is a very small drop in pitch in the voice amongst CEOs in the US. Is associated with an extra $187,000 of income for that person per year and something in the order of an increase of about $400,000 in the size of the business that they run. And that's just 25 Hz, which I found that really interesting. But also, I don't know, it's slightly jarred for me because a lot of what I people come in with the idea that there's a right or a wrong way to speak and that just isn't true. That's a hangover from the idea of RP received pronunciation when every on the BBC all spoke like this welcome to the BBC Light Service. And you didn't hear regional dialects, really, until your man from Big Brother in 1999, D 44 in the Big Brother house. And everyone kind of went, oh, wow, what's that? And actually, that sense of right and wrong is something that we really carry. Oh, in this space, I need to be this person. So I get so many women in business coming in to the studio to work with me or working online with me, saying, oh, I need a lower voice because I'm surrounded by men and I've got to be able to command authority. And although part of the work is in that area, the bigger part of the work with those clients is helping them to feel the authority and the authenticity in the voice that they already have and owning their presence. So that actually that audience learns to listen to whatever voice they're hearing, rather than just assuming that this lower pitch range is right in inverted commas in that environment. I get a bit of a beam up on it about it. Joanne. Yeah, I agree.

Joanne Lockwood: As you know, I'm a transgender woman. I transitioned about six years ago. And at the time, I was in this big dilemma about my voice because, as you said, it's a critical part of one of those primary senses of how we categorize people and put them into a box and assess their worth or my tribe or not my tribe. And I wrestled long and hard about my voice, whether I could be a professional speaker, but I could be taken seriously. And I decided one day I was just going to. It's my voice, it's my voice. Why try and educate or train it or do it differently? Because it's another cognitive load you have to deal with. I appreciate after time, after you trained it, maybe after months and months and months, it becomes more natural. But I just decided hey. And I think the awesome thing you just said there was about how that pitch gives a certain level of authority as well. And for me, it's worked as a bit of a shock and awe tactic. So I can stand on stage and just hold the room before I speak. And then when I speak, people kind of look at me and go, wow, where did that come from? I play it to my advantage sometimes.

Jamie Read: Yeah, absolutely. And as I say, the authenticity thing is the big part of it. And actually, the fact that you had that thought and went, do I need to do something about this? Actually, no, I don't. This is my voice. It means something to me. That's the thought that is more important than any other in the vocal aspect, especially for trans and nonbinary clients that I work with, who may be beginning to question how the world might view them or if they're in the process of transitioning. Sometimes the voice can be a hindrance, and sometimes, as you say, it can be something where you go, actually, no, this is really authentically me. I already know this part of myself so well that I don't want to change it, but maybe I do want to optimize it, or maybe I want to be able to have a wider range of color in my voice, whatever the particular thing is. Nine out of ten times people come into the room with one idea of what they perceive the problem to be, and again, I use heavy inverted commas around the idea of the problem, and actually, they leave with a fresh understanding of going, oh, actually, no, I thought it was this. But now, having talked it through and understood a bit more about the process, it's often a really different picture that they leave with, which is a great part of the work. I love that. Yeah, don't be wrong. My

Joanne Lockwood: voice doesn't work for me all the time. There are times, say, for example, I've been in gendered spaces, so public toilets, toilets, and my wife's been with me, and she starts having a conversation through the toilet door, through the cubicle wall, and I don't respond because my voice, without my image, is incongruent. And in that space, it could be perceived as being confusing for people outside. I've actually had someone shout out once, Is there a man in there? And I said, no, it's just Joanne. Oh, sorry, Joanne. So I'm very conscious again about how we print imprint people based on voice and visuals. And so there are times when I do I am very conscious about it in certain spaces. Yeah,

Jamie Read: I can imagine that. I can appreciate what that would be like. And it is, I think, an experience. The particular experience that you describe, I think is really specific to the trans community. But also, I think there are lots of places where people feel that their voice doesn't represent who they are in some way. You often get the reverse thing where somebody's on the it's so common for people to be misgendered on the phone, regardless of whether they're trans or CIS or transitioning or nonbinary or whatever, actually, you get that sense of, oh, you didn't understand who I was, you don't know who I am. And there's a dissonance there that isn't necessarily comfortable. And also, I've been working with a couple of singers recently who are non binary singers, and it's been really interesting because there's a real conversation that's opened up there that if you wanted to sort of almost point to the science, if you like, and go, well, okay. A traditional CIS male voice would have these parameters. A traditional CIS female voice would have these parameters. Often, trans people are working towards those parameters in some way, or understanding which aspects of themselves are represented in one or the other. And for the first non binary singer that I worked with, who came in saying, not only actually do I want to change the keys of these songs and not be singing male or female rep, but actually singing from a mixture of them, I want to find my non binary singing voice. And I kind of went, wow, that's really cool. What does that sound like in your head? And they said, Actually, I don't know. I don't know what it sounds like. It doesn't sound like anything yet. Let's play together and explore. And it was so lovely to have that opportunity to figure out what we were reaching for. Was it pitch range? Was it Tombra? Was it repertoire? Was it a mixture of those things? There's a statistical difference between the pitch sorry, the pace and the inflection of the CIS female and CIS male voices. So was there something in that that we were working toward? And even the breath, which, again, speaks to the inclusion thing and the fact that there are things we don't even notice in inclusion that oftentimes if a person feels they have the right in a certain circumstance to speak to be heard, they will breathe more. They literally take up more air in the room because they will breathe more deeply. And that adds to a sense of presence and a sense of command. And we think, all right, I'm supposed to listen to this person. Often with public speakers, people have been trained to use their pauses exactly as you just said, actually, where you take that moment to let the room land and be in your presence before you start. And sometimes it works really well. And if people aren't employing it as successfully as they might, then there was a famous speech that I'm going to struggle to remember the beginning of now, but that Tony Blair gave, and Tony Blair was a big Pauser. And it was a power pause, because there was that sense that if you kind of stop speaking for a moment, people have to lean in and listen. It becomes really frustrating. You're just like, oh, my God, Tony, get on with it. When it works, it works well, and when it's overused, it becomes a problem. So that sense of power breathing, taking in the breath, holding the air, holding your presence in a space, and then vocalizing from that, you've automatically taken power and oxygen from other people in this space. So we kind of have to fight for that a little bit. I still

Joanne Lockwood: remember that type of, as you say, that extra pause. And I think it's because it's an unnatural pause in a mid sentence. If it's kind of at the end of a paragraph or on a virtual page turn of a chapter, then you can allow the audience to refresh in bed to soak it in. But if you're trying to trick your audience into, as you say, leaning in and trying to grab their attention, it can become a bit exhausting for the audience, can't it? I think that's the trouble. It wears you out listening to that. Yeah. You don't want your audience to be working.

Jamie Read: That's the last thing you need. You want them to be engaged, but not having to work, I should just say, by the way, I'm going to apologize to you and the listeners. I'm currently being buzzed by a helicopter over the top of the studio I'm speaking to you from, so if there's background rumbling, I apologize. There's something flying very low overhead.

Joanne Lockwood: We live not far from Goodwood Airport and we often get light aircraft or helicopters flying over here as well. Yeah, we're

Jamie Read: on some training route for I think it's RAF Benson. So the helicopters were on a training route down here. They followed they Buzz the canal, which is about chinook in the house. Twin,

Joanne Lockwood: twin prop chinooks. They fly quite low, as I don't.

Jamie Read: Think you're talking of those making a guest appearance. You talk about nonbinary singers and the person springs to

Joanne Lockwood: my mind, me, is Sam Smith, and I find Sam's delivery, because they have such a huge vocal range, the high notes, and they can also bring the depth and the real resonance in there as well. I get drawn in to the song, to the words, because I find they really speak to me. And if I wasn't aware of Sam's gender, I wouldn't even care, because the song is the delivery is so powerful.

Jamie Read: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think Sam Smith is a great example that when you are not attached to what society tells you someone is supposed to sound like, when you can in some way unattach yourself from that, you open up a whole range of possibility in terms of both pitch range pardon the pun, but also in terms of the manner of delivery, the expectation of how heavy or light the sound is going to be. So there's a real opening up there because actually, so much of it is societal conditioning that when you look at Western CIS male voices as a statistical analysis, the sense of, oh, I must have a low voice is more or less society. Saying men are supposed to be, again, heavy, inverted, commas, big, loud, strong, all of these kind of adjectives that have tended to be used. And girls are supposed to be light, small, unthreatening, and it's such nonsense, but it tends to be what society has told us. So, for example, statistically, the CIS male voice, the pitch range that is acceptable to society in this country or in the west at large, is lower than it is, for example, in West Africa, where a high male voice is quite celebrated, especially in singing. But actually, there's no sense of, oh, you have to speak low. Using a much wider kind of pitch range is completely acceptable. And actually, by the same token, the traditional CIS female voice, the pitch range can be lower in south africa and in some of those areas than it is in Asia. So there's a lot of societal conditioning and fundamentally, we all have the same instrument. Some people are born with a Steinway and some people are born with a pub piano, but it's basically the same instrument and anyone can learn to operate the thing, whether you're singing or speaking. And so knowing that physiologically for the vast majority of people, there are very few differences between our voice and the next person that we're going to meet, maybe some structural and size things, but actually, basically, we've all got the same kit in there. It's society that tells us what we're supposed to sound like. And actually we can answer back by saying, well, no, I sound like this, and this is where my authenticity is, and this is my voice. And the voice is where we tell people we love them and where we tell people we hate them and where we scream and where we cry and where we laugh. And I only half joking quite often say to people that actually the larynx is such an emotional thing that on Valentine's Day I think we all ought to give each other cards with larynxes on because it's much more emotional than the heart is. That's so true.

Joanne Lockwood: Your voice can crack and lose stability, if you like, under emotional stress.

Jamie Read: Yeah. And laughter is a vocal we call them vocal gestures in voice science. Laughter is a vocal gesture. Crying is a vocal gesture. And a lot of the time you get people what I spend most of my time doing is actually encouraging people to make sounds they can already make and then using them in a different context. So, for example, if people kind of think of that really moany teenager voice like, oh, mom, it's not fair, that kind of space in there. Actually, if you take that into a song voice, I don't know, if I just kind of sing a note and just go, Ah. And then if I kind of cry, I didn't go money teenager becomes more operatic in its tonality because there's something called thyroid tilt. There's a movement in the larynx that is produced when we make the vocal gesture of crying. Whereas on the other hand, if I cheer, which I'm going to back away from the microphone, because I don't want to explode people's AirPods, but if I kind of cheer in the opposite direction of the computer and just go, hey yay. If I do that and hold it, I'm basically belting a rock song going, Yay. It's cheering. It's a vocal gesture we can already do. So when you were talking about Sam Smith, they use such a wide range of vocal gestures that include the kind of the falsettoe, very light sound, the cry sound, the belt sound, and they're all things that actually each of us physically can already do, but mentally, do we have permission? Has society or have we ourselves, or have those around us, given us permission to make that sound and to own the noise that we make? And that's where the work is often needs to be done.

Joanne Lockwood: You said just now that we all have the same instrument. Some of them are just a bit rougher at the edges, a bit larger, a bit smaller, whatever it may be. Yeah. So how much of our voice and the way we sound is nurture rather than nature?

Jamie Read: I would say a large majority of it. So the only physiological difference is to do with the hormones that hit us at puberty or in some cases, in transition. But when the larynx gets a hit of testosterone at a male puberty, or for a trans man, if they go on to testosterone, the larynx grows at that point. And because the larynx is bigger, the vocal cords are longer and the instrument you're playing is bigger. And that's why it has a more bass Tombra to it. So if you think of someone playing a trombone and somebody playing a flute, they could play the same note as each other, but the Tombra would be noticeably different because of the size of the pipework of the instrument. So when the larynx gets a testosterone hit, it gets bigger and as you've already touched on, that can happen. So for trans men, when they're transitioning, if they go on to T, the larynx will grow and they go through a voice break process. For trans women, if they have been through a CIS male puberty, you can't ungrow a tree. So once the larynx has grown, it doesn't shrink back. So actually, for trans women, the coaching work is necessary if they want to change the way that they sound. And as you've already touched on, there's no need for that to happen. It's entirely kind of down to the authenticity of the person. But apart from that one difference of testosterone causing the larynx to grow, essentially, the physiology is the same across everybody. We all have the same capability. I was having the conversation for 15 years. I ran a drama school and was working with actors in training on a full time basis. And one of my colleagues there is a woman with a very low bass resonance voice. She's got a really lovely, rich, kind of beautiful, butterscotch kind of voice. And actually, my spoken voice is quite high and my singing voice is quite high. And we were talking to the students about voice and gender and characterization. And when you're working, in fact, as we are, when it's just a voice that people are hearing, how we're perceiving that sound, and how, as an actor, you can engage that audience. And somebody said, oh, yes, but women have higher voices than men. And I said, well, no, it's not that you can have a more bass Tombra to it, but actually, if I stand next to Claire, who is my colleague and we both say the alphabet to you. I have a little gadget I use on my computer that shows you the pitch that the speaker is using and lo and behold, Claire was a good few hertz below me in our natural speaking ranges. But it's the Tombra that can change. We can work with the Tombra and move it up and down. So a lot of what we perceive as vocal differences are in fact vocal similarities. Just with a few little nips and tucks around the edge. Could you just explain to me what Tombra

Joanne Lockwood: is? Not sure. Yeah,

Jamie Read: for sure. So for example, this is going to sound very odd for your listeners now. So stand by everybody. Do not adjust your sets. I'm actually making these noises so I'm going to hold one note so that I'm not changing the pitch. So the actual pitch, if I were to make a pitch change I'd be going and you'd hear a change of note. Yeah, exactly. Kind of moving up and down. What I'm going to do is hold one note. So if you imagine in your head a graph, the graph is flatlining, there's no undulation in it. E. And then what I'm going to do is change the treble and bass in that sound. So you'll hear a bass frequency and a treble frequency and I'll move between so e. So that's the same note throughout. So therefore, if I speak to you from this position here with my larynx really low, I sound a little bit like EOR actually from Winnie the Pooh. But if I kind of speak with my larynx quite low down here, it's got a bass Tombra but I can speak quite high in my pitch range and still keep that kind of bass voice in there. Whereas on the other hand, like I said, do not adjust your sets. This is actually happening. On the other hand, I can talk in a lower pitch range but if I raise my larynx up and make the sound smaller, I've got more treble frequency in there and I kind of turn into as mayor of the munchkin city in the county of the land of ours. So pitch and Tombra, that Tombra is to do with the texture of how much bass and treble is in the sound and often they're attached. So often we'll think of kind of the low voice with the bass Tombra and the high voice with a small Tombra, but they don't have to be, you can move between them. Wow.

Joanne Lockwood: I'm sort of fascinated. Fascinated. This is a real educational slot for me today. So I'm loving this. This is a yeah. And you're amazing use of your voice there. Yeah,

Jamie Read: it's kind of the day job really.

Joanne Lockwood: I can imagine being one of your students or clients and you've got some amazing ways of giving an example of what you're trying to explain because I didn't have this idea of tombry in my head, but now I understand it's around the base, the treble, the richness and all those things. It's not just around, as you say, the pitch or the note. It's about everything else, isn't it? But I guess the other side of testosterone is lung capacity. So presumably a lot of resonance comes from the chest, doesn't it?

Jamie Read: Well, now, actually, that's something of a myth. So we talk about chest resonance and head resonance, and they're useful bits of terminology as imagery, but they're not actually physiologically true. So the voice is fairly linear. The air comes up from the lungs, through the chest and up to the throat, and at the level of the larynx is where it meets your vocal cords, and that's where the vibration happens. And the sound then travels up and out through the mouth and all the resonance happens beyond that point. So if you were resonating in the chest, you'd be inhaling and speaking out at the wrong end, because you would have to have air flowing into the chest in order for resonance to be down there. Also, the chest, although it feels empty because of the thoracic cavity, needs capacity for the lungs. Actually, it's a sealed unit and you can't resonate anything in there because you can't get any sound into the empty spaces. However, and the same with the head. One assumes that the head is also quite full, one hopes, and you can't resonate the sound outside of the oral cavity. You can't get it outside of the mouth or the nose. You can't resonate in the forehead or in the mask or these are all images that we've used in voice training to help people understand the sense of the thing. Because actually what it feels like is just as important as what it actually is. So you can try as the experiment and listeners can do the same thing. If you put your hand on the top of your chest and make the lowest kind of rumbliest sound that you can, wherever that pitch range is, you'll feel vibration there, but you're not actually resonating the sound there, you're feeling sympathetic vibration. The bits of your body that are at the same frequency as that sound vibrate in sympathy with them. So head and chest are useful ways of describing a set of vocal behaviors, but actually, all of the resonance is done in the throat, nose and mouth in quite a small space, so it's a linear system. So lung capacity has an effect on the voice in terms of how long we can phrase for how long we can keep going and how long we can keep speaking. But it doesn't affect the volume or the resonance of the voice, because the other myth, that's one that most people carry, again, mostly because society tells us this actually, is that more breath does not equal more voice in the same way that more petrol doesn't equal going faster. You just overflow the. Petrol tank and you can feel it really easily. So again, another experiment we can all do over the magic of the airwaves is that if you put your hand in front of your mouth and just make a really quiet breathy sound or any comfortable pitch, doesn't matter where the pitch is, you can feel the air there. And now if you put your hand in the same place and yell at it yay. If you yell at it there's no air or there's less air. So the louder we are, the less air actually comes out of your mouth. The quieter we are, the more air comes out. It's a real anomaly of how we perceive things. But all of that said, I draw a little bit on NLP, on Neuro Linguistic Programming and a lot of mirroring work with my clients. So when somebody comes into the studio they might say to me, I have real problem resonating my voice in my chest because it all seems to be stuck in my head and I need to resonate in my chest more. And if I say to them, oh well actually that's not what you're doing, and unpick it all, I'm probably just going to bamboozle them. So in my head I'm going okay cool. What we're actually working on is thick vocal folds and a low larynx and what have you. But then I'll give them what they asked for and say yeah, can you feel that? There. Now is that satisfactory for you? Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to feel. That feels good. And then some clients will come in and want to get into the nitty gritty and understand it and some clients just want a quick fix and other clients think they have one idea and we need to meet in the middle. And so it's a really flexible thing actually of meeting the clients where they are.

Joanne Lockwood: So what's going on in my head and my body then? Because I'm so if I'm at a function and someone says to me joe, can you get everyone's attention? We need to get everyone back in the room. And first thing I do is I take a massive breath, I expand my body and my chest and I roar with the deepest voice I have and I feel that whole exercise is digging into me and throwing it out. But what you're saying is psychological, not reality, is it?

Jamie Read: It's a little of each, but mostly on the psychological side because like I was saying earlier on, actually, when you take in a big breath, you increase your presence, you grow physically, you increase your presence in the room and you tell your body that everything is fine. Because when we feel short of breath we're normally in panic and we don't like being in that state. When we feel we can take a big breath in, we feel in command and in control. So actually we're releasing chemicals from the brain that are helping us to feel in control and in command that will help us to vocalize in that manner. But when you're making that roaring sound, if you put your hand in front of your mouth, you'll find not much of that air is actually coming out. So for the vast majority of people, they lose air by being quiet. So actually, if we think of that kind of whispery sound leaning in on the mic a little bit and kind of doing the sort of Mariella Frostropapodo co UK kind of a thing in there, that kind of breathy sound is very inefficient because the fuel of the voice is breath. And so if there's breath leaking through to make it breathy, then actually we've got a fuel leak. Whereas actually, if you're kind of in your Brian Blessed voice in here, you're in a much bigger, more robust vocalization, which means that although there might be lots of air in your body, it's not going anywhere very quickly. You can keep doing that for much longer. So it's about the psychological cue of feeling like you own the space and you have the right to take in that amount of air and produce that amount of sound. And also, when we gather the body in that manner, we encourage muscular work in the back, in the lap muscles, and also in the lower abdominal muscles in the pelvic floor that help to stabilize the larynx and the breath mechanism to make the voices optimal call that process anchoring. So there is an amount of that going on as well. So taking

Joanne Lockwood: from that, I should be able to create the same impact and presence with just a relaxed posture and believing that just by making my voice loud without puffing myself up, it should have the same effect.

Jamie Read: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you think about the times in nature, because that's what it always comes back to, is actually, what were we designed to do with the vocal gestures? So if you think of somebody walking along the high street, they've got their earphones in, they're on Snapchat and they're about to walk in front of the number 17 bus, you don't have time to stand there, take a big deep inhale, present your body and go, Stop. Because that sucker's smoosh, they're gone, they're out of there. Right, in that moment, you've got to take a short, sharp breath. Stop. Look out. Sorry, I'm deafening. You have to do a bit of mixing on this one, but you take a short, sharp gasp to power the voice into that energetic vocalization. Whereas actually, when you're going to cry when something's really sad, we take that really low, slow kind of breath and that's a slower, lower place, because it's going to use more air to do it, so it's always coming back to naturally. What does the body do in similar circumstances? If I were wandering about in a swamp, wearing a skin and carrying a club what would my voice do in this set of circumstances? And that normally tells us what to do. I think that's a sort of blueprint for life, actually, quite often is. What does our instinct tell us to do in this moment? So the whole

Joanne Lockwood: posturing, the puffing up, the presence is around making ourselves, as you say, drawing breath in. And when we take breath in, we create a kind of a presence around us that people then see that authority, if you like, from that presence. So that's what we're really doing is creating that listen to me, everybody stance.

Jamie Read: Yeah, exactly. And allowing ourselves to feel that to be in our presence and go, I'm feeling strong, I deserve to make this sound. And the physical strength and the breath often go together, but they don't have to. If you think of a great political speaker or a rock and roll singer, somebody who uses their voice quite loudly and confidently, they're usually really physical with what they're doing. They gesture the sound. And actually, even me saying those words there for your listeners because obviously we can see each other on the link that we're on. But for the listeners, if I punch the air as I speak, you hear that energy in the sound. So we use our physicality to engage the muscles that support the voice. But I can kind of create the same effect without doing it. It's just less you feel more riled up about it. You see the rock singer thrashing into the guitar or hanging onto the mic. That's that anchoring idea of the body feeling physically strong and giving us permission to hit these sounds. Whereas when we're feeling not in our power, not in our presence, when we're feeling under threat, we get physically smaller and the breath becomes weaker and shallower and the voice will therefore follow suit. Now, I can kind of hold a posture like a kind of strong man. I can still speak in a really kind of quiet voice, but it feels odd to do. It looks probably quite odd as well. But if I kind of shrink my posture and allow myself to kind of come into a smaller space it feeds the psychology of what the voice is doing. Yeah,

Joanne Lockwood: I really get this feel for it. It's not just your voice, it's your entire psyche and body and posture and how you're perceived. It's a real package, isn't it? And your voice is just one component of this presence. Yeah,

Jamie Read: absolutely. And in that kind of chicken and egg scenario of the package, actually, for some people, if they don't feel physically confident in a particular space, their voice won't demonstrate confidence. And by the same token, the other side of the same coin is if the voice isn't confident, they won't feel confident in that space. So there's a whole kind of chicken and egg thing there with speakers. And that's not just professional speakers and singers, which I've referenced a lot in this kind of conversation, but actually for people just at work who use the phone a lot or on zoom a lot, and they're using their voice professionally without realizing it because no one's saying, oh, you're a professional speaker. But actually they're a call center worker managing 6 hours of telephone calls on a shift. They're a professional voice user. And if they are not feeling confident about what their voice is going to do, they won't feel confident in the space that they're in, whether that's the work environment or their physical body.

Joanne Lockwood: Okay, I've got a bit of confusion now. So why do we tend to see large size opera singers? We have this belief that all of this deep power of an opera singer comes from this big chest cavity that they can dive into. What you're saying here is a lot of this power doesn't come from the residents because you say the air is traveling in the wrong direction at that point.

Jamie Read: Yeah, exactly. And some of that is just about the kind of image that we hold of the sort of Wagnerian soprano with the horns, with that we hat on, that we kind of hold that image as going, oh yeah, that's what an opera singer looks like. But actually, very often when you look at great opera singer, there are, of course, you think immediately of Pavarotti and Brin Turfil, for example, who are quite physically large guys. But equally, if you think of Jose Carreras, who was one of the three tenors as well and was a contemporary of Pavarotti, he was a tiny little guy. If you think of some of the contemporary opera singers now, Elizabeth Llewell and Pamela Hay, they're small built, slight people because the power of the voice is not in the size of the instrument, it's in the resonance. And the reason why opera singers trained for so many years is because actually they're going into it's like hearing in three dimensions. They're going into incredible detail about the resonance of the voice. That, for example, we talked about that sympathetic resonance before, the fact that one part of the body vibrates in sympathy with another. The most audible frequency for human ears is, give or take 2800 Hz, somewhere between 2000 803,000. That's the frequency of baby cry, which is an evolutionary advantage because it sits at a point that it's audible above anything else. But actually, if we emulate that sound as an adult, we finish up with a voice that's like this, which is really annoying. And the reason the voice is so annoying when you hear that person on a bus and you're like, I need to find where that person is and stop them. The reason we have that sensation is because it sits at the frequency that blocks out every other thought we're trying to have because from an evolutionary basis, it allows us to hear this baby cry. So opera singers and performers in general have often learned to use this resonant frequency at 2800 Hz, because at that frequency, the space above the larynx that you're resonating in is about 1 CM wide by 3 CM long, which is roughly the same size as your ear canal. So you're getting sympathetic resonance in the ear canal of the audience. So they're not louder than the orchestra. They're singing over with no microphone. They're more hearable. They're putting on a vocal high vis jacket and sitting at a frequency that's just a bit jazzier for our ears. So when we talk about projecting the voice, that's what we're doing. We're actually again, it's the perception versus actually what we're doing. We think if I kind of go into quite a big into my sort of interfa voice down here somewhere, that kind of resonance in there. The resonance comes from a narrowing and creating a really small space in the throat. But we think of it as being a really big space because it's a louder sound. But the loudest thing that we know in day to day life usually is baby cry. And babies are tiny. They don't need a big chest cavity. They can hit 2800, get straight across the frequency, straight into our ears. This is

Joanne Lockwood: absolutely fascinating. So there's a few well known comedians that have an annoying baby type voice, isn't there? Do you think that's natural? Do you think it's just that they work on that?

Jamie Read: I think they're probably milking it. I think they're probably working on it because it gets a laugh. It sort of refers back to what you were saying about when you begin speaking somewhere that actually, if there's a dissonance between the person that we see and the voice that they come out with, it gives that shock and awe tactic. And if it's a big, powerful voice, we're like, all right, okay. Whereas actually, if we expect it to be a big, powerful voice and it kind of comes out in here somewhere, it's kind of funny because we tend to avoid that sound. People don't necessarily want to go around talking like that. We know immediately that's a sort of punch and duty stock character. It's a stock comedy character in the same manner as the big opera singer with the horns on the head. It's the comedia Del arte version of that character. It's heightened. And we know what to expect from that. Yeah. And that just led me on to another thought, Joanne, which is this that quite often there's an emotional response to a voice that we're not aware of, where when we hear that voice, we instinctively know that it's funny. Because actually, when we laugh, the larynx often rises up there in that kind of so if I kind of speak in this place, we want to join in with what we're hearing, and it makes us laugh when we do it. So there's such a thing as vocal body language that actually we adopt the physical postures in the body and the breath of the voices that we're hearing in order to understand how they feel. So if someone rings up and goes, hey, Joanne, how are you? You're right, chances are you'll go, yeah, I'm fine. Yeah. We vocally mirror them because partly that's making them feel comfortable, but more importantly, it's allowing us to register the emotion that they are feeling by physically experiencing what that emotion feels like. By the same token, hey, oh, my God, guess what? I don't know what happened. We join in with that energy to the point where it's so embedded in us that one of the primary ways we understand how other people feel is not just by listening to them, but also by mirroring, muscularly, what that person is doing to try on their voice. So if you hear someone pretend to cry, you understand intellectually that it's sad, but you don't feel sad if you hear someone actually cry. Your voice joins in with those gestures and you feel sad. The same with laughter, the same with cheering, whatever the vocal gesture is. There's the famous bit in the musical Le miserab where the main character, Jean Valjean, sings a song called The Prayer, people generally know as Bring Him Home. And it's high, it's in this sort of light, falsetto place, which you can do just in a pure falsetto. So if I just I'm going to sing a couple of bars only and just go, God my prayer. So it's light and falsettoe, but actually it's really sad and he's pleading. So if I take that sound and if I take a moment to set up the sensation of crying in my breath and my voice, and then I sing, it good. We have a slightly different emotional response as an audience because we sense that this person is sad even through the music, and so we make that emotional connection through the voice as well.

Joanne Lockwood: I'm sat here in awe. This is an absolutely incredible conversation. Another thing that's going through my head right now is you talked about we mirror and you talk about someone comes in bouncy and happy. We tend to mirror that bouncy. So is that what's happening when we hear maybe a strong regional accent or something? Because I've got a friend who comes from Tobadon in Yorkshire and he always comes in and says everybody who greets him will always say, Hi, how you doing? It's like, Why doesn't he mirror us? But we always end up mirroring him. Yeah, it

Jamie Read: is. Dialects are a really interesting one, and accents, just the whole field of that is something that really fascinates me, because all of us are aware that we have slightly different voices for different scenarios, usually. So we have our kind of I'm speaking to the mum on the phone voice, which might be different than I'm out with the girls for a night voice. We have these slightly different vocal behaviors and dialect. When you've got a strong regional dialect, you've either got a person who's got a strong identity that comes with that or someone who has got the flip side of it and has got outsider impostor syndrome in the environment they're in. So it depends on how that person is psychologically feeling in that moment, can I come into this space and proper own it and be myself and everyone will join in and that'll be great? Or actually, am I arriving here and everybody talks like this and it's all in islington you need to fill the face with that as well. Sorry, islington people. So if you're kind of in that place, then suddenly you find that the accent slightly starts to die away, and you just get occasional moments of it because we're trying to figure out whose tribe is dominant. And that's to do with the psychology of actually in that moment, who's the person in the room who's presenting the most confidence? And I'm absolutely terrible for just taking on the accents of the people around me because I'm so used to doing it. Firstly, as an actor, years ago, it was something that I found that I was quite good at. And actually, I'm bilingual, I speak German as well as English, and I think growing up with two languages meant that my ear is quite attuned to what we call prosody, which is the musicality of speech. So each of us is musical. I'm going to just say one sentence on this because I go off on a tangent otherwise, but there's no such thing as people who can't sing, there's just people who haven't sung yet. That's a whole other conversation. But we're all musical because we learn as babies that is an angry musicality and is a happy musicality, and so we learn these shapes and accents have that prosody to them. So if you think of like a kind of scouse sort of Liverpoolian accent, there's that kind of slight sort of sing song to it when you speak that, you can go up. But if I take that into my own voice and try and speak to you like that, it sounds absolutely ridiculous because the musicality is wrong. And equally, if I take the prosody of my Southern English Berkshire accent and take that into actually, it's really hard to take that into a scouse. If I try and take that kind of monotonous prosody into a scouse, I just sound really bored all the time. So you've got to find where the dominance is in the room and what musicality you're matching with the other people around you. And I do it so instinctively. I walk into spaces and start talking to someone and I accidentally finish up doing an impersonation of them just because it's become so much a part of what I do. But we can use that in an inclusion sense if we're aware of that sense of prosody, that musicality that if somebody enters a space and everyone is saying to them, sorry, what? Pardon? A excuse me, sorry. Because they have a regional dialect or an international dialect, they're speaking English as a second language, or because the voice doesn't seem to match the person that you see standing in front of you, or because they don't feel in their power. So they're kind of devoicing here. Those are things that, from an inclusion point of view, are really important, actually, to allow people not only to understand what they can do with their voice, but also communication is two way. There's no point learning how to make sound if you don't learn how to listen to it as well. So what is happening in the acoustic landscape of the workspace that you are in, or the family life that you're in, or the friendship group that you're in that is being inclusive or exclusive of certain people? And vocal exclusion is a really genuine thing that people experience. Yeah, I was going to ask you this. So

Joanne Lockwood: there are many studies that show regional accents can introduce holiday bias based on candidate suitability, intelligence, capability, all these things. So is it a learned thing? So the Scouse accent, because we associate people from Liverpool or that area as being stereotypically. I don't want to get into the stereotypes we can have from Scouse people, but do we associate the stereotypes? We have the scouts with the accent, or does the accent create a distrust in us? Which is it chicken and egg there? In my

Jamie Read: opinion, in terms of the research that is out there, it's very much a deeply ingrained societal bias against the accents. And it really comes from the time of the beginning of recorded media. So as soon as we start getting the radio, and the radio is being broadcast from London and we have RP receive pronunciation. So as I said before, you kind of get this terrible BBC voice with everyone wearing their tuxedos on a Friday night. That's what we start to hear. And we get the idea of the Queen's English. The King's English? There's a correct way of speaking. And actually these things are not true. But as soon as you get mass media, we can start to put out the message that this is what people are supposed to sound like. So RP as a dialect receive pronunciation, is a non geographic dialect. People use RP all over the country. It doesn't belong to a region. It belongs to a sense of a bygone era where class was a thing that you could refer to and would have a certain vocal sound. So the idea of the upper classes in those heavy inverted commas, again, of having this particular way of speaking that was better than everybody else, which of course it isn't, but that didn't belong to a geography. So you then immediately in whatever place you're in, if you're in I don't know, Devon. I was talking to somebody from Devon on a call this morning that actually you've got somebody there who's the lord of the manor who speaks in this way, and somebody else there who's got a kind of more relaxed Devonshire accent. There's a them and us. There's the lord of the manor and the serfs kind of thing that is just so wrong, but so ingrained in us, that even if you say to people who would consider themselves not biased in any way, that would consider themselves working class, that would consider themselves open to all sorts of different things. If you said to them, can you imagine a time where the Prime Minister would have a Brummy accent? Most of them would instinctively chuckle at that and go, well, no, you couldn't do that. Why not? Why couldn't you? But we have this ingrained bias that the comedy characters are the regional dialect and the serious people are not. And that's a real issue, actually. It's a real problem. And it's something that, since mass media at the beginning of the 2000s has become much more inclusive of regional dialect and different voices in general. There is now a sense that maybe we'll eventually start to push back on this, but it includes things like speech impediment, like learning disability and physical disability that have an impairment on the voice and of course, gender as well.

Joanne Lockwood: Yeah, again, another reason I opted not to do anything about my voice, because I have a kind of a Hampshire Home Counties type voice. People say I have like a radio, nighttime radio voice. If I'm easy to listen to, I thought, well, if I mess with it, I might mess with something that is important, that people resonate with. And I'm also aware that people have told me my voice is very distinctive and they can pick my voice out as a unique person more than maybe I could about other people. Because I was speaking to someone, though, they phoned me up and said, I've just seen you on television, and they live in Sweden. And I took part in a TV documentary some years ago, and they were broadcasting that TV documentary in English in Sweden, and they were in the kitchen. They went, Hang on a minute, that's my friend Joanne. And they ran into the lounge and there I was on telly. So I'm also aware that we have this voice print of people, don't we? So we do. As well as the visual cues or the other cues, the subtle stuff that voice print is also very strong.

Jamie Read: Yeah, it is. And that's a really nice way of putting it, actually, through the idea of a voice print, that we have that sense of who we are so embedded in the way that the voice works that, as you say, people can pick us out of a crowd often. People can pick out an impostor, if you like, with a particular regional dialect. I know I'm doing sort of various cod dialects during the course of the interview. But people can pick out the impostor and sometimes the otherness can be beneficial. So I spent ten months living in the US when I was working out there on a show, and we were in a very curious place called Branson, Missouri. I don't know if anyone's ever been, but Branson, when I was there 20 odd years ago, had 47 theaters and the Kmart, and that was it. And it was in the middle of nowhere and Dolly Parton was there and the Osmonds were there, and Andy Williams Godreston was there. And they all had these theaters that they did their shows and they bust the tourists in and you all watched seven shows in a day and all got bust home again. So at nighttime, you just had actors and tumbleweed, really. And I remember going down to the supermarket and every week I went down there, I'd meet someone at the checkout that'd be so thank you very much. I'd just have a conversation with them, oh, my God, are you from England? Where are you from? And it would become a conversation and it was really lovely and it was very warm. But then after a while, I was like, I just want my shopping. So when I was in the supermarket, I'd work in a North American dialect that wasn't specific to the area that they were in, so I couldn't be caught out on the little specifics of it. So I was working in a slightly different dialect, but it just meant I could get through the supermarket quicker. So it kind of became I was avoiding my voice print in order to get through the supermarket quicker. But by the same token, it was used years ago when I was a child. I was at a state school as a kid and I filmed a commercial in the States back in the 80s for biscuits out there, or cookies called Fruit Newtons. And they specifically wanted a British kid on the advert because this was in the days before streaming and what have you. And when the commercial breaks came on, people got up to make a cup of coffee and they knew if they heard a British accent, people would come back in to see what was on the TV. Because the Americans generally love the British accent. And so they hired a British kid to do the commercial and they made it as cod British as possible. I was lying in a bed wearing silk pajamas with a suit of armor on either side, but it meant that people listened and heard and came back into the room and the advert ran for years. Actually, it was quite funny. Once I was older, I was like, oh, cracky, here we go again. So you can use it for or against. I worked for

Joanne Lockwood: bank. It was Coots Koots and Co, the bank of the Royal family. And. The Upper Royal Bankers. Yeah, and I was in Beverly Hills, in Rodeo Drive, and they had a small, little office there. Not really a bank encounter, but just where their clients could come in and meet their relationship manager. And when I was there doing some It work, they sort said, would you mind recording our answer phone message for us? I was like, they wanted a posh Bush's accent for their Bodes message. I'm guessing they've erased it by now, but, yeah, must have run for years. That's brilliant. Yeah.

Jamie Read: So that the idea of voice print, that idea of who am I? What's my vocal identity? That's what kind of ties it all together, really, and who do we want to present ourselves as out to the rest of the world?

Joanne Lockwood: And on that note, Jamie, I'd love to dive into singing. I'd love to be able to sing. I'm one of these I know I can sing, but I just haven't found the right note yet. Amazing. Honestly. That was a truly entertaining and inspirational conversation we just had. So how could people get hold of you? Because I'm sure everybody wants to find out more.

Jamie Read: So I'm prolific across most social media. I encourage people. If you're listening to the podcast, come and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm often on there. My LinkedIn profile is just the normal LinkedIn.com, and then it's Jamiereadvoice, so really easy to find. Jamie Reedvoice. I'm also on Instagram and on Facebook and on Twitter and quite active on social media channels. And I just kind of love having a chat to people about where they are, just answering quick questions on things. So don't feel that it's going to be a sales call or something horrible. I'm not that guy on LinkedIn. Just kind of reach out and make contact and, yeah, I'm always happy to speak to people. Fascinating.

Joanne Lockwood: And every time we've spoken, I've come away inspired. So, yeah, I'm sure people will take you up on that. So, thank you so much. And also a huge thank you to you, the listeners, for tuning in, for getting this far. If you're not ready, please do subscribe to keep updated on future episodes of the Inclusion Bites Podcast that's B-I-T-E-S. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, share the love. I have a number of other exciting guests lined up that I'm sure you'd be equally inspired by over the next few weeks, months, of course, if you're listening and you'd like to be a guest or, you know, someone who would like to be, get them to make contact. And I would also welcome any feedback and suggestions on how we can improve future shows, if that's possible, please email me Jo dot Lockwood at SEE Change Happen dot co dot uk. And finally, my name is Joanne Lockwood and it's been an absolute pleasure to host this podcast with you today. Catch you next time. Bye.