Photo by Aidas Ciziunas on Unsplash
Being a strongly visual person, I like to sit near the front of any event, whether that’s a church service, a motivational talk, or other presentation. Sitting close to the speaker doesn’t necessarily enable me to hear better, especially if the speaker is using a microphone. But it creates a sensation of feeling as though I can hear better.
Watching a speaker’s face helps me understand the message more easily, assuming of course, that the speaker uses his face expressively.
I once knew someone who used just his lips to communicate. There was no smiling, no eyebrow raises, no facial animation whatsoever. He fascinated me. When I asked about it, he had no idea what I was talking about. Watching his face in a mirror as he delivered a couple of lines, then watching me speak the same lines with an animated face, brought home the message. It turned out his dad spoke like that, uncles spoke with the same flat effect, and so did Grandpa. It was just a learned behavior.
Listening to a speaker like that is hard for an audience. Without realizing it, we depend on a speaker’s facial animation to help us receive the correct message.
I found a fascinating article on ALR: Automated Lip Reading, developed by a deaf and mute German speech recognition expert named Frank Hubner. ALR tracks lip movement of a specific speaker frame by frame. All the tiny mouth movements and shapes are associated with particular sounds of over 30,000 words. This ultimately produces recognizable speech.
Mr. Hubner used ALR to decode home movies taken of Adolf Hitler, his mistress, and visitors to their Bavarian-Alp retreat Berghof. It’s eerie to see Hitler with women and children in informal circumstances; a glimpse of the man outside of the typical Nazi war machine profile. Mr. Huber’s material was used in the 2006 documentary Hitler’s Private World: Revealed. My reaction to the material was unsettling. Clearly, he was shielding his inner thoughts and feelings. I would have been frightened to have been in his actual presence.
Our non-verbal language tells the world what we’re really saying, regardless of our words. Be certain to use not just your lips, but your whole face to share your story with the world.
