The venue was a conference room in Graz. Seventy people, maybe eighty. The room was wider than it was deep — actually a good configuration for performance, as I had learned — but the ceiling was high, the walls were hard, and the sound bounced around in unpredictable ways.
There was supposed to be a sound system. There wasn’t. Something about a booking miscommunication, a missing cable, a technician who was on holiday. The organizer apologized profusely. “Can you do it without a microphone? The room isn’t that big.”
I said yes. Of course I said yes. I was not going to cancel a corporate event because of a missing microphone. I had a voice. I had a room. How hard could it be?
The answer, I discovered over the next thirty-five minutes, was very hard.
The Volume Trap
Here’s what I did, because it’s what anyone without training would do: I got louder.
Not gradually. Not strategically. I just pushed more air through my vocal cords and hoped for the best. In the first few minutes, this worked reasonably well. The front rows could hear me clearly. The middle rows seemed to be following along. The back rows — I could see them leaning slightly forward, which I interpreted as engagement but was probably them straining to catch my words.
By ten minutes in, I was running into problems. My throat was starting to feel tight. Not painful exactly, but constricted. The volume I was producing required constant muscular effort, and my throat muscles — which were not trained for this kind of sustained output — were protesting. I found myself clearing my throat between sentences, which I knew looked unprofessional but couldn’t stop doing.
By twenty minutes, my voice was cracking. Not dramatically — not the humiliating voice-break of a teenager. Just a subtle roughness, a catch in certain words, an inconsistency in tone that hadn’t been there at the start. I was pushing harder to compensate, which made it worse, which made me push harder, which made it even worse.
By the final fifteen minutes, I was barely hanging on. My voice sounded thin and strained even to me, and I knew it sounded worse to the audience. The effects were landing but the delivery was compromised. I finished the show, got reasonable applause, and went backstage to drink three glasses of water in succession while wondering what I had done to my vocal cords.
The next morning, my voice was a wreck. Hoarse, scratchy, limited in range. It took two full days to recover.
All because I had confused volume with projection.
The Difference Nobody Explains
Volume is how hard you push air through your vocal cords. Projection is how efficiently your voice carries through a space. They are related but they are not the same thing, and understanding the difference is one of those performance fundamentals that nobody teaches you until you’ve already learned the wrong way.
Dan Harlan, in his lecture on magic as theater, dedicates significant attention to sound and voice technique. He talks about the grandmother technique — visualizing your grandmother sitting in the back row center seat and performing the entire show just for her. That imagery stuck with me when I first read it, because it captures something essential about projection: it’s not about force. It’s about direction. It’s about sending your voice to a specific point in the room with the minimum force necessary to reach it.
Weber, similarly, talks about projecting to the back row as a fundamental performance requirement. And when you read what both of them are actually describing, it becomes clear that they’re not talking about being louder. They’re talking about using your voice differently.
What Projection Actually Is
Here’s the mechanical difference, as best I’ve come to understand it after that disaster in Graz and the vocal education that followed.
Volume is generated primarily by your throat. You tighten the muscles around your larynx and push more air through the constriction. This creates a louder sound at the source, but the sound quality is thin, tight, and strained. It’s the vocal equivalent of turning up the treble on a speaker — more output, but harsh and fatiguing to listen to.
Projection is generated primarily by your diaphragm and your resonating chambers — your chest, your throat (used as a resonating cavity rather than a constriction point), your sinuses, your mouth. You draw breath deeper, using your diaphragm to control the airflow, and you allow the sound to resonate through your body before it leaves your mouth. The result is a sound that is not necessarily louder at the source but that carries further and retains its quality over distance.
Think about the difference between a violin and a kazoo. A kazoo can be loud, but the sound doesn’t carry. It dies a few meters from the source. A violin produces sound through resonance — the strings vibrate, the bridge transfers the vibration to the body, the body amplifies and projects the sound through the f-holes. A violin can fill a concert hall without amplification because the sound is produced efficiently. The physics are working with the instrument, not against it.
Your voice works the same way. When you project, you’re using your body as a resonating chamber. The sound is richer, fuller, and more durable. It travels across a room without losing its character. When you merely increase volume, you’re doing the vocal equivalent of playing a kazoo really, really hard. More sound, but worse sound, and it exhausts you in the process.
The Diaphragm Discovery
After the Graz incident, I started reading about vocal projection. Most of what I found came from theater and singing pedagogy, and it all pointed to the same place: the diaphragm.
The diaphragm is the large, dome-shaped muscle at the base of your lungs. When it contracts, it pulls downward, creating negative pressure in your chest cavity that draws air into your lungs. When it relaxes, it pushes back up, expelling air. This is how you breathe all the time, unconsciously, without thinking about it.
The difference between breathing for speech and breathing for projection is how much you engage the diaphragm and how you control the exhale.
In normal speech, you use the upper portion of your lungs. Shallow breaths. The diaphragm barely moves. Your throat does most of the work of regulating airflow and sound production.
In projected speech, you engage the diaphragm fully. Deep breaths that you can feel in your abdomen — not your chest. The exhale is controlled by the diaphragm, not by throat tension. Your throat stays open and relaxed, serving as a resonating cavity rather than a valve. The sound originates deeper in your body and travels through more resonating space before it exits your mouth.
I learned this in the most basic way possible: I stood in my apartment in Vienna, put my hand on my stomach, and practiced speaking while pushing my hand outward with each breath. If my hand moved, I was engaging my diaphragm. If my chest rose instead, I was breathing shallow.
It felt absurd. Like something from a singing lesson for beginners. But within a few sessions, I could feel the difference. When I spoke from my diaphragm, my voice sounded different to me. Fuller. Rounder. Less strained. And when I asked my business partner to stand at the far end of the apartment and tell me which version was easier to hear, the answer was immediate: the diaphragmatic version carried better, even though it wasn’t louder.
The Practice Routine
I developed a simple practice routine for projection, and I ran it alongside my regular rehearsal sessions for about a month until the technique started to feel natural.
Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart. One hand on your stomach. Breathe in through your nose, filling from the bottom of your lungs up. Your stomach should push outward. Your shoulders should not rise. Hold for a beat.
Now speak. Start with a single vowel sound — “ahhh” — and sustain it. Feel the vibration in your chest. Not in your throat. If you feel the vibration primarily in your throat, you’re constricting. Relax your throat. Let the sound come from lower.
Once you can sustain a vowel sound with chest resonance for ten seconds without strain, move to words. Then sentences. Then paragraphs of your script. The goal is to maintain that chest resonance throughout, keeping your throat open and relaxed while your diaphragm does the heavy lifting.
What I noticed during this process was revealing. When I spoke from my throat — my default, the way I had been performing — I could produce about twenty minutes of sustained loud speech before fatigue set in. When I spoke from my diaphragm, that number went up dramatically. Forty-five minutes, an hour, sometimes longer, with no strain. Because the diaphragm is a much stronger and more enduring muscle than the tiny muscles in your throat. It’s designed for sustained, repetitive effort. Your throat muscles are not.
The Room Is Your Partner
There’s another dimension to projection that goes beyond vocal technique: working with the room.
A projected voice interacts with the acoustic properties of a space. It bounces off walls. It reflects off ceilings. It fills corners. A loud but thin voice fights against the room — the sound waves scatter and lose energy quickly, which is why the back rows can’t hear you even when you’re shouting.
When you project properly, the room works with you. Your richer, more resonant sound waves bounce more effectively off surfaces, filling the space in a way that thin, forced sound simply can’t. This is why trained theater actors can fill a thousand-seat house without microphones. They’re not louder than you. They’re more resonant. Their voices cooperate with the physics of the room rather than fighting against them.
For performers, this means that arriving early and understanding the room is not just about sight lines and staging. It’s about acoustics. Where do the hard surfaces send sound? Where are the dead spots? If there’s carpet and curtains, the room will absorb more sound and you’ll need to project more carefully. If there are hard walls and a high ceiling, sound will carry and reflect, and you may need to slow down to prevent your words from colliding with their own echoes.
Dan Harlan makes this point beautifully. For venues with echo, he says, slow way down between phrases. Let the sound clear before adding more. This is not about volume at all. It’s about timing your speech to the acoustic behavior of the room. It’s treating the room as a partner in communication rather than an obstacle to overcome with brute force.
The Microphone Paradox
An unexpected benefit of learning to project properly: I’m better with a microphone now too.
This seems paradoxical. If you have a microphone, why does projection matter? The microphone handles the carrying.
But here’s what happens when you speak into a microphone with throat-voice: the microphone amplifies the thinness, the strain, the constriction. Every imperfection in your vocal production gets magnified. Plosives pop. Sibilants hiss. The tightness in your throat creates a harsh, fatiguing quality in the amplified sound.
When you speak into a microphone with projected, diaphragmatic voice, the microphone amplifies the richness. The warmth. The resonance. The sound is fuller and easier to listen to. The pops and hisses are reduced because your airflow is more controlled. The microphone stops being a crutch and starts being a complement.
I noticed this immediately after I started practicing projection. My amplified voice sounded different. Not dramatically different — I’m not claiming some overnight transformation — but noticeably warmer and more pleasant. Sound technicians stopped asking me to stand further from the microphone. Audience members in the back stopped squinting. The overall quality of my amplified sound improved, not because of any change in equipment, but because the source material — my voice — was being produced more effectively.
What I Would Tell My Graz Self
If I could go back to that conference room in Graz, here’s what I would do differently.
I would take five minutes before the show to feel the room. Not check sight lines — feel the acoustics. Clap my hands. Listen to where the sound goes. Identify the dead spots and the live spots.
I would warm up my voice with diaphragmatic breathing. Two minutes of sustained vowel sounds, feeling the resonance in my chest.
I would position myself so that the hard wall behind me acted as a natural reflector, bouncing my voice back toward the audience instead of letting it dissipate into the room.
I would slow down. Not because the audience can’t handle speed, but because a slightly slower pace allows each word to fill the space more completely before the next one arrives.
And I would not — absolutely would not — simply try to be louder.
Volume is a sledgehammer. Projection is a tuning fork. One batters the air into submission. The other works with it. And after thirty-five minutes with a sledgehammer in Graz, my throat learned the difference in the most painful way possible.
Your voice is an instrument. Learn to play it as one. The back row will hear you, and your throat will thank you.