The problem with my voice was not that I could not be heard. The problem was that I could be heard and nobody cared.
I discovered this about two years into my performing life, when I started watching recordings of my corporate keynotes with fresh eyes. The volume was fine. The microphone was working. The words were clear. But there was a flatness to my vocal delivery that made everything I said sound like a quarterly earnings report. Which, given my background as a strategy consultant, should not have been surprising.
In business, the voice serves a specific function: it transmits information. Clarity and credibility are the goals. You speak from the authority of data, not the authority of emotion. Your voice is a delivery mechanism for content. This is appropriate and effective in a boardroom.
On stage, the voice serves a different function entirely. It does not just transmit information. It transmits energy, emotion, intention, and character. A performer’s voice is an instrument, in the literal musical sense. And I was treating mine like a telephone.
The Voice Workshop
I signed up for a voice and presence workshop in Vienna after Adam Wilber made an observation that stung: “When you’re performing, I can hear you fine. But I can’t feel you.”
The workshop was taught by a vocal coach who had trained opera singers and theater actors. I was, predictably, the only person in the room who was there for magic performance. The other participants were actors, a corporate trainer, a lawyer preparing for trial advocacy, and a singer recovering from vocal strain.
On the first day, the coach asked each of us to deliver a short monologue — any text we had memorized — using our normal voice. I did the opening of my keynote routine: a sixty-second introduction that established context, built curiosity, and led into the first effect.
When I finished, the coach was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “You are speaking from your throat. Your voice is trapped in the upper third of your body. Nothing below the collarbone is participating.”
She was right, though I did not fully understand what she meant until the exercises began.
The Breath Foundation
The first principle the coach taught was that the voice is a byproduct of breath. Not the other way around. Most people think of breathing as the thing that happens between words. In vocal performance, the words are the thing that happens between breaths. The breath is primary. The voice rides on top of it.
This inversion changed how I thought about delivery. Instead of thinking about what I was going to say and letting the breath manage itself, I began thinking about when and how I was going to breathe, and letting the words arrive on that breath.
The exercise that made this concrete was what the coach called “singing on the inhale.” The concept is simple: instead of focusing on the exhalation — the part where sound is produced — you focus all your attention on the inhalation. The quality of the breath you take determines the quality of the sound you produce. A shallow, chest-level breath produces a thin, chest-level sound. A deep, diaphragm-level breath produces a full, resonant, room-filling sound.
The exercise itself: you stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, your shoulders relaxed, your jaw unclenched. You place one hand on your diaphragm — just below the ribcage, at the soft area where the abdominal muscles begin. You breathe in slowly, focusing on feeling your hand move outward as the diaphragm descends and the lungs fill from the bottom up. Not the chest. Not the shoulders. The belly.
Then, on the exhale, you speak. Or sing. Or hum. Whatever comes out. The point is not the sound. The point is the source of the sound.
What Changed
The first time I delivered my keynote opening from the diaphragm rather than the throat, the difference was so dramatic that I actually laughed mid-sentence. The sound was different. Not just louder — I was already loud enough. It was rounder, fuller, warmer. It had a physical presence that my throat-voice lacked. I could feel the vibration in my chest. The coach said my voice had “dropped” — not in pitch, necessarily, but in origin. It was coming from a deeper place in my body, and that depth translated into a different quality of sound.
More importantly, the voice felt different to produce. Speaking from the diaphragm required less effort. My throat was not straining. My vocal cords were not tight. The breath was doing the work, and the voice was simply riding the exhale. This meant I could speak for longer periods without fatigue, project more volume without shouting, and modulate my tone without losing support.
The “singing on the inhale” element of the exercise trained me to prepare each phrase with a deliberate breath. Not a gasping, visible breath — a calm, measured intake that filled the diaphragm and created a reservoir of air from which the next phrase would emerge. Over time, this preparation became automatic. I no longer had to think about it. But in the early stages, the conscious attention to breath before words was transformative.
The Posture Connection
The coach taught us something that I had never considered: posture directly determines vocal quality. Not in a vague, metaphorical sense. In a mechanical sense. The diaphragm can only descend fully if the spine is straight and the ribcage is open. If you are hunching forward — as I habitually do from decades of laptop use — the ribcage compresses, the diaphragm cannot descend, and the breath stays high in the chest.
This meant that my vocal quality was literally determined by my posture. Every hour I spent hunching over a laptop in a hotel room was training my body into a vocal cage. The voice coach gave me a simple posture check: imagine a string attached to the crown of your head, pulling you gently upward. Shoulders back and down. Ribcage open. Weight evenly distributed.
I started using this posture check before every performance. Standing backstage, waiting for my introduction, I would run through the check: string from the crown, shoulders down, ribcage open, diaphragm free. Then I would take one deep, diaphragm breath and walk on.
The difference in my opening line was noticeable from the very first performance. Not because I was doing anything theatrical with my voice. Simply because the voice was being produced from the right place, with the right support, and it filled the room in a way that my compressed, laptop-posture voice never could.
Hotel Room Vocal Practice
I incorporated vocal exercises into my hotel room practice sessions, alongside the card work and routine rehearsals. This felt absurd at first. Sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in Innsbruck, doing breathing exercises and humming scales before running through a mentalism routine. But the absurdity faded quickly as the results became apparent.
My vocal practice routine takes about ten minutes and consists of three exercises.
The first is the breathing exercise: slow, diaphragmatic breaths, focusing on the expansion of the belly and the descent of the diaphragm. Ten breaths, each held for a count of four.
The second is a humming exercise: humming at different pitches, feeling the vibration move through different parts of the body. Low hums vibrate in the chest. Medium hums vibrate in the throat and face. High hums vibrate in the nasal cavity and forehead. The goal is to find the pitch at which the vibration is strongest in the chest, because that is where the richest vocal production occurs.
The third is a delivery exercise: speaking a section of my performance script at different volumes, different speeds, and different emotional registers, all while maintaining diaphragmatic support. This is the bridge between technical vocal production and actual performance. It trains me to maintain breath support regardless of what I am saying or how I am saying it.
The Volume Curve
One of the most practical applications of improved vocal technique has been the ability to use volume strategically rather than uniformly. Before the vocal training, my volume during a performance was essentially flat — loud enough to be heard, consistent throughout. After the training, I developed what I think of as a volume curve: the deliberate raising and lowering of volume to create emphasis, intimacy, and drama.
A whisper that the microphone catches and amplifies creates a moment of intimacy in a large room. The audience leans in. They feel like they are being told a secret. This is a tool I now use before major revelations in my mentalism pieces — I drop to nearly a whisper, the room goes quiet, and the revelation arrives in that pocket of silence.
A sudden increase in volume after a quiet passage creates emphasis and energy. The contrast makes the louder words feel more significant, more important, more charged.
These are tools I did not have when my voice was trapped in my throat. Throat-level voice production does not have enough dynamic range to whisper without losing the audience or to project without straining. Diaphragmatic production gives you the full range, from intimate whisper to room-filling projection, and the ability to move between them smoothly.
The Connection to Magic
Here is why vocal quality matters specifically for magic performance, beyond the general principle that any performer should sound good.
In magic, the voice is a misdirection tool. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which you direct the audience’s attention. When your voice is strong, warm, and engaged, the audience listens. Their attention follows your words. When your voice drops or changes quality, their attention shifts. These shifts are the invisible architecture of misdirection — not the obvious “look over here” kind, but the subtle, continuous management of what the audience is paying attention to at any given moment.
A voice that is flat and monotone provides no guidance. The audience’s attention wanders. They look where they want to look, which is often where you do not want them to look.
A voice with range and dynamics is a steering wheel. It guides attention. It creates emphasis where emphasis is needed and relaxation where relaxation is needed. It is the continuous, invisible conductor of the audience’s experience.
I would not have understood this connection without the vocal training. I thought voice quality was an aesthetic concern — nice to have, not essential. It is not an aesthetic concern. It is a structural concern. Your voice is not decoration on top of the performance. It is the foundation on which the performance is built.
The Ongoing Practice
I still do the breathing exercises before every performance. Standing backstage in some conference venue in Vienna or Graz, breathing deeply, feeling my diaphragm descend, humming quietly to warm up the resonance in my chest. The event staff probably think I am meditating. I am not meditating. I am tuning an instrument.
The voice is an instrument. Like any instrument, it needs to be tuned before performance. It needs to be maintained between performances. And it needs to be played with intention, not habit.
Singing on the inhale — the simple act of focusing on the breath rather than the words — was the starting point. Everything else followed from there. The posture correction. The dynamic range. The strategic use of volume. The connection between breath and presence.
It is the most practical performing skill I have acquired outside of the magic itself. And it came not from a magic book or a magic lecture, but from a vocal coach in Vienna who listened to me speak for sixty seconds and identified the exact problem: “Nothing below the collarbone is participating.”
Now the whole body participates. And the audience can feel the difference, even if they cannot name it.