Voice and Emotion in Speech and Song!
Monday 19th January 2026, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM (London Time)
Emotion is performance. Did you know that ancient Romans didn’t smile when they were happy, and that smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages? Broad, toothy-mouthed smiles, known as the Duchenne smile, became popular as recent as the eighteenth century as dentistry became more accessible and affordable (Feldman Barrett, 2017, p51). Emotion is an exchange between a performer and an audience, even when we are not on a stage.
Discover how we use our voices to communicate emotion, both through verbal content and nonverbal vocal cues like tone of voice, volume, and prosody.
While there has been a significant amount of research conducted into how speakers use emotion in the voice and how listeners perceive it, how this relates to performance is a relatively new field of research (even if we have been talking about it as practitioners for centuries!).
Join us for an exploratory session where we reflect on how speakers and singers encode their voices with emotion to communicate expressively. We'll delve into how emotion occurs in social contexts in the ‘real world’ and address emotional performance in both spoken and sung voice
🏷️ Price £30 (UK VAT inclusive)
🎥 Recording automatically sent to all who book (even if you cannot attend live)
▶️ Rewatch as many times as you like
📜 Certificate of attendance available
Louisa Morgan
Louisa Morgan is a lecturer, voice teacher and researcher, with a special focus on spoken and sung emotion. Louisa lectures with Voice Study Centre (spoken voice lead) and teaches Musical Theatre students on the MA/MFA course at the Guildford School of Acting (GSA).
Attend this course for as little as £22 as part of the Voice Professional Training CPD Award Scheme.
Learn MoreSorry, this is an archived short course...
We have plenty of upcoming short courses coming soon. See details of some of them below or look at the full list of short courses.
Tuesday 17th February 2026
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
(London Time)
Simultaneous Singing and Dancing in Musical Theatre: A Cross-Disciplinary Evidence Review
Debbie Winter
Dr Claire Thomas
This short course invites participants to critically examine the latest cross-disciplinary evidence on the physical and vocal demands of musical theatre performance. Drawing on a comprehensive literature review conducted by Debbie Winter and Claire Thomas (Voice Study Centre, University of Essex), the course explores research from voice science, dance medicine, sports science, and performance pedagogy.
Thursday 19th February 2026
8:30 AM - 10:30 AM
(London Time)
It’s not a virus! Reconceptualizing and De-pathologizing Music Performance Anxiety
Rebecca Herman
Performance Anxiety is one of the most widespread and debilitating challenges facing musicians across all ages, nationalities and musical genres. Despite decades of research and the development of numerous interventions, we do not yet have an established way of supporting performers experiencing performance anxiety. Aimed at performers, teachers, researchers and students, this presentation will first summarise the current state of play in performance anxiety research, before exploring alternative ways to think about performance anxiety, drawing on new research outside of performance psychology...
Thursday 19th February 2026
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Thursday 26th February 2026
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
(London Time)
Performing Pain: Vocal Health in Emotional Roles!
Louisa Morgan
How connected are acted emotions to our real-life emotions? Are they expressed differently? Do they feel different in the body? This 2-part course with Louisa Morgan looks at the potential impact of acted emotion on vocal health, why we should consider it as voice practitioners, and how to care for our performers needing to work with it.