Voiceover Actors: Try the Chewing Hum Exercise!

Here's a helpful voiceover exercise:

We call it the "chewing hum." It can warm up the different areas where your voice will resonate. Once again, when your voice resonates, it bounces around a certain area of your body, whether that’s up in your face, nose or head area, your throat, or your chest or belly.

Here's what you do:

1. Keep your mouth and lips closed and begin to hum.
2. Start chewing, as if you were eating something tasty, as you keep humming.
3. Now use your hands to feel the vibration in the front of your face, your nose, your cheeks, and gently allow your hands to move to your neck and throat, and perhaps even onto your belly so that you can feel how your voice resonates in different areas of your body.

Now to begin to identify where your voice is resonating, let’s concentrate on specific sounds that tend to resonate in different areas. Certain sounds we create generally vibrate more toward the head, while others, because we use different muscles to make them, may vibrate lower, toward the belly.

If you can learn to control where you choose to place your voice, you can begin to use it in more powerful and interesting ways.