Some people have a voice that commands attention: Sir David Attenborough’s slow, jazz-like syncopation dances us into a trance of attention, while Morgan Freeman’s rumbling baritone gives anything he says gravitas.

With voices like theirs, you’d think they would make great teachers: how could children not pay attention?

But does your voice really matter in teaching? That question was already an important one before the coronavirus outbreak forced more teaching online. But in the past weeks, tone of voice has become even more significant because, for the most part, the classroom context and non-verbal communication have been removed.

Teachers are relying on their voice now more than ever. And there is evidence to suggest that the kind of voice used can have much more of an impact - and in different ways - than you might expect.

How each individual voice sounds depends on three components.

“You’ve got pitch, timbre - which is the tone colour, the emotional bit - and the volume,” explains Lesley Hendy, co-author of The 5 Voices, an educational programme for initial teacher training.

She says that conducting these elements for the best effect does not come naturally.

“Learning how best to use your voice is like learning to play an instrument,” she explains.

“We tend to assume that everybody knows how to use their voice, and, of course, they don’t. Everybody has an optimum pitch, a note in their voice that is their strongest and clearest, and that is what makes your voice what it is.”

Finding this optimal pitch is key, and it doesn’t matter if you have an accent or an unusually high or low register, Hendy says.

“There’s no such thing as the perfect voice. Everybody’s voice is different,” she explains. “But if it’s not trained, it’s like giving somebody a violin and expecting them to play in the orchestra that same evening without any teaching.”

OK, so clearly most of us don’t fall into our optimal vocal range automatically. So how do we find the optimal tone?

First, according to Jo Palmer-Tweed, executive director of Essex and Thames Primary Scitt (school-centred initial teacher training), which insists on voice training for all its trainee teachers, you need to know what to avoid.

“For example, there’s a myth that when you’re talking to younger children, you should match their pitch,” she explains. “So you hear a lot of primary school teachers speaking in a voice that’s completely wrong for them, and then the children just tune them out, because it’s not comfortable.”

Similarly, there can be a temptation to use a stern “teacher voice” in the belief that a more commanding and demanding tone might bring troublesome pupils into line. Silke Paulmann, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Essex, has researched how the brain responds when instructions are given in different tones of voice. On first look, her research would seem to support the use of a “stern” teacher voice.

“We looked at brain mechanisms underlying ‘controlling’ and ‘supportive’ voice patterns, and we can see that listeners immediately respond to controlling or pressuring-sounding voices, but they don’t show the same quick brain responses to encouraging or supportive voices,” she explains.

This suggests there is “a special mechanism [that] makes us tune in to those pressuring voices - kind of like a higher alert response”, she says.

One hypothesis for this is that there could be a release of the steroid hormone cortisol in response to hearing a particularly controlling voice, which might get someone’s attention.

“We still have to test that theory,” Paulmann says. “Currently, all we know is that we have a strong brain response to pressuring or harsh-sounding voice patterns. That doesn’t mean that the encouraging or supportive-sounding tones of voice that we use in our research aren’t attended to; it just means that they are less salient to listeners and may take a bit longer to process.”

However, it does not automatically follow that a more authoritative tone is better for learning or for the child. There is a downside to the harsher tones: Paulmann’s research on adults shows that listening to these kinds of voices leads to lower levels of self-reported wellbeing, even when we don’t know who is speaking. And while you may think a more assertive tone will lead to better behaviour, that may not be true if you are dealing with teenagers, she argues.

“In a school context, this [type of voice] could lead to pupils feeling ‘unsafe’ in the classroom,” Paulmann says. “What we have seen is that pressuring tones lead to defiance in adolescents.

“That is, if you are trying to get a student to learn something, or to do something, they might react with the exact opposite behaviour of what you are trying to achieve.

“Long story short, based on previous evidence, we hypothesise that staying clear of that controlling voice pattern for most of the day has benefits to students on a range of outcomes [like] interpersonal closeness, cooperation and engagement.”

So use your stern teacher voice sparingly, and aim for supportive tones as much as possible. What about sarcasm? “Just don’t,” says Hendy. “It’s absolute poison. We have got to get rid of that sort of talk.”

So, we know what not to do, but how do we find our best voice - that optimal tone spoken of earlier?

Well, it seems that the trick is finding your “centred neutral” tone, and mixing in a bit of variation when it is required. Your centred neutral pitch is your unforced register - it’s how you speak naturally. That should be your base and you should then vary elements around that, such as pitch or pace, but always return to the base.

“The reason that Morgan Freeman gets asked to narrate so often is very, very simple,” says Palmer-Tweed. “It’s because he’s on the right note - he’s on the centred neutral.”

Suzanne Parke, co-developer of The 5 Voices programme and a teacher, agrees that Freeman “gets the gig because his voice sits in the right place, with the right timbre”.

“He uses the centred neutral, but he also moves [his voice around],” she says. “Having the delivery skills to offer up that kind of variation, perhaps in pitch, or by the use of a pause, that’s something else that we can learn to do.”

Finding your centred neutral will likely require some support. We don’t like hearing ourselves speak at the best of times, but analysing our own voice patterns may be too much for some. Similarly, we are in the habit of adjusting our voice to fit certain social or professional environments, so finding out what feels natural can be tricky. Recording your voice in different settings, and listening to the differences between when you are relaxed and when you are under stress may be useful.

And as for that skilled variation from the vocal base point, it’s about listening back and finding what works for you and what works for your audience. But, again, you will probably benefit from some training.

That said, there’s a big caveat to this advice, according to Lyn Dawes, an associate of Oracy Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication, based at the University of Cambridge. She argues that the variations in speech you may employ will land differently for different students.

“There is going to be a range of perceptions of a teacher, because any group of students is a diverse group - and their perceptions depend on their individual lived experience,” she says, explaining that perception of some voices can be strongly influenced by one’s personal attitude towards the speaker.

“Those who admire [prime minister] Boris Johnson might describe his tone of voice as warm and endearing,” Dawes says. “Those who do not might describe his tone as bumbling and arrogant.”

Like an actor, therefore, teachers will need to play to their audience.

It seems, then, that tone does matter in teaching. How you use your voice will make a difference to how far your pupils behave and how much they are willing to learn. And much about what you thought was effective voice usage may be wrong.

But the positive conclusion is that your natural tone is best, and that the necessary embellishments to it are all easily learnable. If you get stuck, though, Sir David Attenborough has produced some lessons for BBC Bitesize, so you can learn the mysterious art of speech from the master.

Chris Parr is a freelance writer

This article originally appeared in the 15 May 2020 issue under the headline “Tes focus on…Finding your tone of voice”