The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play.
Richard Strauss
Actors’ voices have a strong emotional impact on the audience. Such a quality conceals the extensive practice of many exercises in diction, breathing and stage manifestation. The actors practice these exercises throughout their careers, preparing for each performance, relying on them in repeating their lines over and over with certain intonations, until each word is loaded with the emotions to be conveyed to the audience.
The role that acting exercises play in enhancing the influence of the voice has been analysed in many scientific studies. Some psychological assessments have shown that these exercises help actors to enter a particular mental state during rehearsals and performances, characterised by a strong unification between what they feel, think and say. Psychologists have named this the flow state, which their studies have shown gives actors great efficiency in transmitting emotions through the voice. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
Psychological studies mention that this state is accessible not only to actors but to all those who manage to achieve such a state in actions performed in unison between what the person feels, what they think and what they say. The flow state can thus be seen in lawyers passionately advocating before the courts, in teachers who educate with great dedication, in politicians who give wholehearted speeches and so on. This state probably helped President Zelensky to use his speeches to mobilise public opinion to condemn the invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities committed by the Russian army.
The role of acting in enhancing the influence of the voice has also been analysed in some neurological studies. [10][1][2][3] A study from 2024 demonstrated that the exercises practiced by actors enhance the emotional impact of their voice [11]. The actors who participated in this study interpreted the same text aloud every day for a month in order to charge the words with certain positive emotions. The audio from each recital was recorded and, during training on the first and last day, those involved were given an MRI while reading the text. The actors were also evaluated daily by a team of psychologists1 while the moments in which the actors were able to enter the flow state were identified. The audio recordings from the rehearsals were then analysed using AI algorithms and special technical equipment to measure both the intensity of the emotions infused in their voices and their spectral compositions during the flow state. The results showed that when the actors entered the flow state, the intensity of emotions that were impregnated in their voices was very high, the oxygenation level in the areas of the brain responsible for emotions was high, while the spectral composition of the voices broadened and contained new secondary harmonics.2
Once training had been completed, the actors were asked to interpret a new text (without prior reading) and load it with negative emotions (being opposite to those covered in the training). The new recordings were analysed with the same methodology, with the results showing that the intensity of the new emotions in the actors’ voices was much lower than that of the emotions at the end of training. The results thus showed that the process of charging with emotions is a laborious one and requires extensive training involving many exercises and acting techniques.
Memo
Acknowledgement: This text was taken from the book The power of voice, with the consent of the author Eduard Dan Franti. The power of voice can be obtained from the Memobooks, Apple books, or Amazon.
Footnotes:
- The Zimmer method was used to identify the flow state.
- To be taken into account when designing artificial voices with a view to increasing their emotional impact is the fact that the
impregnation of emotions in the voice is favoured by a wider frequency spectrum and is rich in secondary harmonics.
Bibliography
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[2] M. Csikszentmihályi, “The flow experience and its significance for human psychology,” in *Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness*, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 15–35.
[3] W. Wrigley and S. Emmerson, “The experience of the flow state in live music performance,” *Psychology of Music*, vol. 41, no. 3, p. 292–305, 2013.
[4] S. O’Neill, “Flow Theory and the Development of Musical Performance Skills,” *Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education*, vol. 141, no. 141, p. 129–134, 1999.
[5] C. M., *Flow: The Psychology of Happiness*, Rider, 1992.
[6] A. Landhäußer and J. Keller, “Flow and its affective, cognitive, and performance-related consequences,” in *Advances in Flow Research*, New York: Springer, 2012, p. 65–85.
[7] C. Visser, *Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning*, 2012.
[8] B. Bruya, *Effortless Attention: A New Perspective in the Cognitive Science of Attention and Action*, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.
[9] B. K. Ashinoff and A. Abu-Akel, “Hyperfocus: the forgotten frontier of attention,” *Psychological Research*, vol. 85, no. 1, p. 1–19, 2021.
[10] M. Csikszentmihályi, *FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience*, Harper and Row, 2015.
[11] A. G. Andrei, C. A. Brătan, C. Tocilă-Mătăsel, B. Morosanu, B. Ionescu, A. V. Tebeanu, M. Dascălu, G. Bobes, I. Popescu, A. Neagu, G. Iana, E. Franti and G. Iorgulescu, “The Observation of Actors’ Vocal Emotion Exercises with Deep Learning and Spectral Analysis,” *Transactions on Information Science and Applications*, vol. 21, 2024.
