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.
Wednesday 4th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 11th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 18th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 25th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 1st April 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Wednesday 8th April 2026
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
(London Time)
Learn to Coach RP and SSBE – a Certificate in Accent Coaching
Louisa Morgan
This six-week course is an opportunity to learn about both Received Pronunciation and Standard Southern British English. Rather than a course in learning how to speak RP/SSBE (there are many brilliant available courses for this already), this course is about learning how to coach it.
Thursday 5th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Thursday 12th March 2026
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
(London Time)
Acting Emotion: Perspectives from the Masters
Louisa Morgan
Stanislavski said, “our artistic emotions are, at first, as shy as wild animals and they hide in the depths of our souls.” Michael Chekhov said, our bodies should be like a “sensitive membrane, a kind of receiver and conveyor of the subtlest images, feelings, emotions and will impulses.” And Meisner said we should be “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Join Louisa Morgan in this 2-part course as she explores a range of well-known acting practitioners to investigate what they believed (or believe) about emotion and how they approached it in their work. She'll compare their work to see where they align and where they diverge.
Tuesday 17th March 2026
5:00 PM - 7:00 PM
(London Time)
The Use of Vibrato in Belt and Legit Styles of Singing in Professional Female Musical Theatre Performers
Dr. Alyssa Becker
Shaped by the popular music of its time, musical theatre blends storytelling with an ever-evolving range of vocal styles—from classical legit singing to jazz, hip-hop, and powerhouse belting. Despite its importance, much of what we understand about vibrato comes from laboratory-based studies that strip singing of its musical, stylistic, and performance context. Join Dr Alyssa Becker as she connects current research with real-world pedagogy, revealing how elite musical theatre performers strategically use vibrato to shape style and storytelling, and showing how these insights can be applied in the voice studio to train stylistic flexibility and control!