Intensity vs. Volume

It's time to reboot Painting The Corners. It's been a few years, but now I need a blog for a class, so it's time to open this long inactive blog, which I originally started to kill time after getting kicked out of Canada. The following post was taken from a Tumblr that I started for class before I realized I hated Tumblr. 

I took a vocal performance class last semester and it was mostly yoga and shouting. But if nothing else, our teacher left me with one concept, one thought that has shaped my approach to voice work (specifically play-by-play announcing): The idea of seeing volume and intensity as two separate, detached concepts.

You can be speaking with high intensity and low volume, and high volume with low intensity or you can crank up both metaphorical dials. This thought has become important to me for one key reason: I do play-by-play from time to time, mostly unwatched webcasts of junior hockey and high school basketball. The volume vs. intensity battle is at play every second of every game for a couple of reasons.

1. When I do play-by-play, I wear a headset, so the microphone is fixed relatively close to to my mouth. If I yell too much, I blow out my mic. 
2. Viewers watching the game rely on the tone of my voice convey the atmosphere in the arena and on the ice. If I’m just yelling the entire time, or if I’m super-intense the whole time, it will feel monotonous. I have to build to a climax at the end of the game.
3. There are intense moments in sports. Sometimes your natural reaction is to shout. But because of point 1, you can’t. So you have to convey the feeling of jumping out of your seat and shouting some other way. So you dial up the intensity and you leave the volume behind. 

As I continue to wrestle with this concept and try to incorporate it into my broadcaster’s toolkit, I am beginning to see/hear it in professionals. Canuck’s broadcaster John Shorthouse comes immediately to mind, with his signature “scores!” (sounds like “skewers!”) rarely jumping in volume but always turning up the excitement/intensity to 11. Marv Albert (NBA on TNT) does a very similar thing with his signature “YES!” as well as “And it was…a GORGEOUS move!”

CBC’s top hockey voice, Jim Hughson, does a great job in this regard, but in a different way. I feel he cranks up the intensity in tiny, almost unnoticeable increments over the course of a thought or a word, then dials it back, creating the constant feeling of anticipation that watching hockey elicits.

Those are a few of my favourites. Who is your favourite play-by-play voice?