Oftentimes times voice actors can struggle with diction and enunciation. This is referred to in the voiceover community as mush mouth. This is Gabby's go-to solution for getting her students past this condition and sounding like a pro.
This is an amazing way to solve the dreaded voiceover mush mouth.- 5:21
I'm so happy you guys are here. Gabby, why are you speaking Italian? Stick around, find out.
I have touched on this topic a little bit before on the channel and I want to address it again in a slightly different way. I am talking about what is commonly referred to as "Mushmouth," a lack of addiction, right? A lack of clarity in speech. This is a problem that affects not just voice-over actors, but it can affect anyone who does any type of public speaking or who does presentations for work, or, you know, any number of things that might involve a public speaking assignment. Voice actors, of course, are incredibly aware of this problem and I may have a potential solution. As you know, there's more than one way to accomplish numerous things inside of VoiceOver. So today, I want to address how Americans, for the most part, have really lazy speech. If you speak another language, you know exactly what I'm talking about. As the child of immigrants, I am a firm believer that one of the things that makes English such a difficult language to learn for foreign speakers is the fact that we kind of eat our words. We tend to speak really closed mouth, and we don't move our lips a lot when we talk, and our tongue just sort of stays in the same spot and never really moves. And you see what I'm doing, like how everything in the jaw, how tight everything is, that's common, that's how most people speak. Now, if you compare that to what I normally do, the lower half of my face, my mouth, is extremely exaggerated, and when I enunciate, I make sure that my teeth don't really come together too often or not harshly. I make sure that my tongue has a lot of room inside of my mouth to articulate and to do all the fun things that it needs to do, and I make sure that my cheeks, my jowls, right, the area inside of my mouth isn't ever actually connecting with itself. This is also a great way to avoid mouth clicks or mouth noise which we hear a lot about if you're somebody who's dealing with suffering from any of these. If you think that you have a problem with diction, if you think your speech isn't clear enough, if you feel like you're a bit mush-mouthed when you speak, or if you're dealing with a lot of mouth noise and clicks, here's what I want you to do. Go ahead and download one of the numerous apps that are out there that help you to learn a foreign language. Duolingo is great, but there's loads of others. And so what I want you to do is select from one of the romance languages, Spanish, Italian, French, Latin if you can find it. The goal is to start moving your mouth differently and training it differently, and sometimes by introducing ourselves to foreign language it's a better exercise and it's more of a linguistic challenge than just practicing in our own language. Now, I do not expect you by any means to write, become fluent in, or pick up a second language this way, but you're going to pay very particular attention to the differences in consonants and vowel sounds, and you're going to learn really fun things like how to roll your r's, you know, because Americans are really, for the most part, kind of shitty at that. It's not a skill we've ever picked up, but by contrast, our Latin friends can sit there all day and roll their r's with the best of them. That is something that as a voice actor, you should be able to do. Your mouth and the muscles that make it up, your tongue being the biggest one, they should be nimble, they should be flexible, and you have to exercise them, right? This is just another way of looking at tongue twisters or some of the other kinds of warm-up and vocal exercises that you can do. Get yourself wrapped around some foreign language, some very basic Spanish is a great way to go about this, singing in a foreign language too, that also really, really helps, and you'd be amazed at the kind of difference it can make for your speech overall. I hope you enjoyed this video. Thank you guys so, so much for your continued support. Like, subscribe, and as always, bring me your questions. I would love to answer or address one of your concerns or thoughts on an upcoming episode of "The Gift of Gab."
704-674-8294 / GabrielleNistico.com / gabby@voiceovervixen.com
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