Dean Frenkel April 23, 2013
Has Julia Gillard been getting voice and breathing training to improve her speech? One voice coach reckons she has.
Just 15 days before Julia Gillard became Prime Minister in 2010, a Fairfax Media poll asked who among our leading politicians had the best speechmaking skills. The results are much more surprising now than they were then.
Julia Gillard won by a healthy margin. The names behind her were Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Lindsay Tanner and more. At this time she seemed ready to step up into the top job.
But Ms Gillard's ascension was not accompanied by a lift in communication performance. It declined.
When she became PM, her speech skills were mostly very good with a few significant problems. She performed strongly in spontaneous challenging circumstances such as Q&A but poorly for prepared speeches. Her delivery was too wooden, speech rate too slow, resonance too throat-based, articulation heavy and her dominant sound accentuated the negatives. The overall impression she left listeners with was that these flaws dominated and overshadowed her good points.
Despite being a naturally fast speaker, her advisers have probably suggested she slow down her speech rate to seize the moment, enhance clarity and appear statesmanlike. But those advisers failed to tell her that when speech rate is slowed, the range of the speech melody should expand.
Anyone can try this: read a sentence very quickly, then very slowly. Note how faster speech requires less melody, slower requires more.
During her first two years in office Ms Gillard and her speechmaking skills were under inordinate pressure. Her confidence had diminished and she was leaving a dissonant impression on many Australian voters. Her speech manner was so widely discussed among voters that it had become an issue.
But not any more. Julia Gillard's communication skills have stepped up. She has established her own public speaking manner for the electronic formats of media conferences, formal speeches and media statements; this is where the improvement has occurred.
Each day her ''listenability'' continues to improve. Ms Gillard has removed the edges off her voice and added a mixture of strength and softness. Her voice has more body. She speaks with a grounded deep resonance that sounds more relaxed. There is more strength in her voice and she no longer sounds stilted. She is relaxed enough to reveal more of herself. The floor of her voice is more solid and it now dominates her overall sound. Her degree of projection control with microphone technique takes considerable respiratory and vocal strength. And she has better control over her nerves.
Has she learned some yoga breathing to calm herself before speaking? I think so.
These identifiable changes reveal evidence that she has been working on her voice. Her new ability to deliver with projection control and an established consistency is most likely the result of practice and coaching.
Yet it appears that Ms Gillard has consciously decided to defiantly maintain her controversial accent and articulation patterns. Interestingly there has been no effort to refine them, which is probably a reflection of her personal values. The way she articulates may be a product of her union background or perhaps is her way of expressing her Australian pride. Which begs the question: does poor articulation make you more ''Australian''?
Here are some of her articulation bloopers: 'd's sound more like 'dge's as in 'ed(dj)ucation revolution'; 't's are expressed as 'd's as in 'bedder' (better), 'ee's become 'eryees', as in 'berleryeeve' (believe) and 'a's become 'eyes' as in 'Ostrylya' (Australia) …
Ms Gillard has different speech manners for different formats. Her inter-personal manner where she puts in more emotion and colour has not changed - and her resonance is mostly throaty. In Parliament the controlled resonance is gone. She projects well with a slower speech rate and more throaty resonance. Yet she can change her intensity and speech rate by many grades. She certainly amped-up the passion when she delivered her ''misogyny speech'' which broadcast her unmistakable accent around the world.
Ms Gillard's most impressive speechmaking skills are her quick mind, memory, speech fluency and an ability to rarely stumble when she's talking. She shares with Kevin Rudd the rare ability to deliver dialogue without any stumbles or mistakes (other than perhaps when he's speaking in Mandarin.)
Some of Ms Gillard's values are detectable through her speech. She is very proud to be Australian. She wants to appear solid and grounded and is prepared to sacrifice colour from her delivery. She always has a sense of purpose and wants the world to know that she has strength. The dour demeanour is consistent with trying to project that she wants us to feel we are in safe hands. We will know if that's worked on election day, less than five months away.
Dean Frenkel is a speech analyst, coach and author of Evolution of Speech (2011).
