How to Sound Good on Video Calls
By Mira Lindqvist · Voice & Pace
How do you sound better on video calls? Fix the sound first: use a headset or an external microphone close to your mouth, in a room with soft furnishings, and away from background noise. Then raise the camera to eye level, look at the lens for key points, and hide your self-view. Speak a little slower, and pause before answering to allow for lag.
On a video call, people notice the picture but they listen to the sound. A slightly dim image is easy to forgive; a voice that echoes, cuts out or sounds as if it is coming from the end of a corridor is tiring to listen to for an hour. Most of what makes someone come across well on a call is fixable in an afternoon, and most of it costs little or nothing.
Sound first
Get the microphone close to your mouth. The built-in microphone on a laptop is usually an arm's length away and picks up the room as much as your voice. A wired headset, a simple USB microphone, or even the microphone on a pair of earphones is a large improvement, because it is close to you and far from everything else.
Choose a room that does not echo. Hard, empty rooms with bare walls make speech sound hollow. Soft furnishings help: a sofa, curtains, a rug, shelves of books. If you have a choice, a small furnished room beats a large empty one.
Remove background noise. Close the window, move away from the fan, mute when you are not speaking in a large meeting. Most platforms have noise suppression; turn it on, but do not rely on it to fix a bad room.
Check how you sound. Record a short test call and listen back. It is the only way to hear what everyone else hears.
Then the picture
Camera at eye level. A laptop on a desk films you from below. Raise it on a stand or a pile of books so the camera is level with your eyes.
Light in front of you, not behind. A window behind you turns you into a silhouette. Face the window, or put a lamp behind the camera.
Look at the lens for the important moments. On a call, looking at the other person's face on the screen means looking slightly away from the camera, so to them you appear to be looking down. A review of eye contact in video communication by Bohannon and colleagues traces this to the offset between the camera and the image of the other person's eyes.1 You do not need to stare at the lens all the time, but looking into it when you make your key point gives the other person the sense of being spoken to directly.
Why video calls are tiring, and what to do about it
Jeremy Bailenson proposed four reasons why a day of video calls can be more draining than the same hours in a room: close, sustained eye contact from faces that appear very near; extra effort to send and read nonverbal cues; seeing your own face all day; and sitting still to stay in frame.2 He was clear that these were arguments from existing research rather than tested findings, and some testing has followed.
Fauville and colleagues developed a scale to measure video-call fatigue and found that people whose meetings were more frequent, longer and more closely bunched together reported more of it.3 In a four-week field experiment by Shockley and colleagues, days with cameras on were more fatiguing than days with cameras off, the effect was stronger for women and newer employees, and fatigue was linked to people speaking up less in their meetings.4
Practical steps that follow from this:
- Hide your self-view once you have checked your framing. Watching your own face pulls attention inward.
- Make the window smaller or sit a little further back, so faces are not looming.
- Turn the camera off in meetings where it adds nothing, if your workplace allows it.
- Leave gaps between calls. Back-to-back meetings add up.
How to speak on a call
Lag and compression change the rhythm of conversation. A few habits help:
- Speak a little slower than you would in person, and pause between points.
- Pause before answering, so you do not talk over someone whose sound has not reached you yet.
- Say who you are addressing in a group call: "Priya, can I ask you about the numbers?"
- Summarise decisions out loud at the end. Without the shared physical moment of a meeting ending, it is easy for people to leave with different ideas of what was agreed.
Zoom fatigue and what it does to a speaking voice covers the research in more detail, and eye contact and the room, not the lens goes further into where to look.
References
- Bohannon, L. S., Herbert, A. M., Pelz, J. B., & Rantanen, E. M. (2013). Eye contact and video-mediated communication: A review. Displays, 34(2), 177–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.displa.2012.10.009
- Bailenson, J. N. (2021). Nonverbal overload: a theoretical argument for the causes of Zoom fatigue. Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000030
- Fauville, G., Luo, M., Queiroz, A., Bailenson, J., & Hancock, J. (2021). Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 4, 100119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chbr.2021.100119
- Shockley, K. M., Gabriel, A. S., Robertson, D., Rosen, C. C., Chawla, N., Ganster, M. L., & Ezerins, M. E. (2021). The fatiguing effects of camera use in virtual meetings: A within-person field experiment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 106(8), 1137–1155. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000948