At a recent meeting with a potential client, we discussed his desire to transform himself from a reader of scripts to a creator of experiences.

He said that in the old days, one gave a speech at a business symposium in order to have the text of the speech distributed to the media after the event.

Now, the speech is a video, and it goes on Youtube.  If you’re lucky, it’s interesting enough to get people to watch.  And if it’s really good, you get invited to deliver the talk at many other meetings.

A speech is always an experience for an audience.  After all, they live through it.

But an experience that is not surprising, or unexpected, or emotionally moving, is soon forgotten.  It is a plain vanilla experience, and settles to the bottom of the mind.

An experience for the audience that is novel, exciting, and memorable is what he’s after. He reminded me that we are all in the experience business.

So true.  So simple.  And so “not easy.” 

Whether you agree with his policies or not, you have to admit that our current President won the office in large part because of his ability to speak well.

A lot goes into speaking well. It’s a big topic. But one of the key ingredients is an appealing speaking voice.

Now, I’m NOT saying that President Obama has a PERFECT speaking voice. I’m sure most of us have a quibble here and there.

But compared to John McCain and Sarah Palin, Obama was a Caruso to their PeeWee Herman.

His sound is open and resonant, whereas both McCain and Palin have high-pitched nasal sounds.

Candidate Obama’s enunciation, for the most part, was crisp and professional. I say for the most part because he occasionally lapses into slangy sounds that, I suppose, are meant to make him sound folksy.

McCain and Palin, both impressive people, projected vocal images that were less Presidential. McCain sounded young, his squeaky tenor voice seeming less authoritative than Obama’s.

And Palin’s voice was a serious liability. Her resonance was squarely in the bones of her face and in her nose, and those sounds, coming from a strong-willed woman, are not likely to win the hearts and minds of men.

Vocal Presence is an interesting concept. It suggests that sound itself, independent from substance, can have a decisive effect on a voter’s decision to say, “Yes,” to a candidacy.

I would be interested to learn if in our history the candidate with the deeper, more masculine speaking voice was more likely to be elected.

I know it’s true about the taller candidate. If it were also true about the voice, than we would have known early in the primaries that Barack Obama was the favored candidate.

His voice speaks so loudly that it almost doesn’t matter what he says.

When I was in acting school in New York, I was sent to a famous voice and speech teacher named Marian Rich. She lived in an apartment on East 16th Street, and taught her group and private sessions in her living room. As a group student, I sat in a circle of folding chairs and got to know the other students rather quickly.

Marian had taught many of the luminaries of Hollywood and the Broadway stage, including Marlon Brando, Geraldine Page, and Al Pacino, to name a few. She was a demanding teacher, and did not tolerate bad attitudes or behaviors.

She taught us that the voice is a wind instrument, and that to use it well, we must start by learning how to breathe. This we did, lying on the floor, observing our lower abdomens, floating ribs, lower backs,and upper torsos as we inhaled and exhaled with care and precision.

We learned to find the energy of the voice in the breath stream rather than in squeezing the throat or lifting and dropping the sternum.

We learned to speak with an open throat, to find our optimal pitch and resonance, and to expand our range of expressiveness. I recall Marian saying that in well-spoken English, there is a change of pitch on every stressed syllable.

Most of us don’t like hearing our own voices. One reason is that we normally experience our own sounds through the conduction of bone, whereas a recording is made through air–the way others hear us–two very different media.

The sound of your voice is a huge part of your presence in this world. If you have an attractive voice, people give you the benefit of the doubt.

If you have a deep, powerful, authoritative voice, people are more likely to agree with you.

If you have a tentative, whiney voice that goes up at the ends of sentences, you are more likely to be dismissed as a lightweight.

The great thing is, your voice can be developed, expanded, strengthened. It is there for you to mold into a thing of beauty and power.

If you don’t like the sound of your own voice, you can change it. 

I know this, because I did it.  And it’s not a phoney, cosmetic change.  It’s basically knowing how to use the equipment you were born with.