Archive for category Voice
Head-Jaw Relationship
In my experience as a voice teacher, I've found that tension in the jaw is often related to tension in the nape of the neck, where the head and neck connect. When I teach people to shake their jaws, more often than not, I find that, if they can find length in the back of their necks, they immediately find greater freedom in the movement of the jaw. To explore this idea further, we'll do the exercise of lifting the head away from jaw, and then bringing the jaw up to the head. It's a challenging exercise, but really worthwhile.
It's important to breathe through all of this, not just doing it while holding your breath.
The first step is to stand aligned, with your feet hip-width apart, you knees not locked, your shoulders wide and with your head floating above your lengthened neck. Now grab onto your jaw with your index fingers and thumbs. Now, instead of dropping your jaw, hinge your head from your ears, and lift your skull away from your jaw. Next, use your fingers to lift your jaw up to meet your skull, bringing your lower teeth up to meet your upper teeth. Then repeat those steps again: head away from jaw, jaw up to meet head. Keep doing that until your your head is as far up as it goes, probably 4 repetitions or so. Once you're up at the top, drop your jaw, i.e. let gravity bring the jaw down, and then, bracing your jaw with your hands, tilt your head to meet your jaw. Then repeat those steps: let gravity drop your jaw, brace the jaw and tilt your head down to meet your jaw, until you get down to the bottom of your neck/jaw range. You should be looking at the floor when your done. Now, head back up to the top, head leading, jaw following; Once at the top, head back down again: jaw dropping, head following. Do each of those several times, and then end in the middle.
Now you can focus on the action of the skull and keeping the jaw relaxed, by holding your dropped jaw and bracing your arms, and then tilting your head to open/close your mouth over and over. Once you get a feel for this, try to do it with no hands, working on the feeling of your breath turning that corner, from your mouth and dropping down into your core.
Next Step: Tongue Flapping, In And Out
Exploring Upper Range
This step in the Advanced Warm-up Series works on taking your voice from the middle of your range and expanding upward. If you want a well-rounded voice warm-up, you might want to add Exploring Lower Range to your warm-up prep. Begin by being very relaxed, and stand tall with your shoulders wide, your weight spread evenly over the balls of your feet and your heels. Breathe to your core, and then explore…
I'd like you to play with your voice in this step, and use the upper (falsetto, for men) range, where the sound vibrates in your head. The sound you will make is similar to the sound of the coyote falling off a cliff in the old Road Runner cartoons, like this. [Note that this sound is only an example — it's not meant as a model for you to copy.] Start fairly high up, so that you're in your head voice/falsetto, and slowly start to slide down on an "EE" (IPA [i] ) vowel. I can't stress enough how important it is to go slowly through your voice, and that, if your voice is prone to "cracking" as you shift registers, you should slow down as you approach those areas of your range. When you run out of breath, stop the tone, breathe down into your core, and continue the slide downward from the pitch where you left off. If you can, try to stay in your head tone/falsetto; don't switch into chest resonance. You'll get into a place in your voice that is not very effective for speaking, one that sounds rather odd and breathy, and your voice will want to switch into chest tone. Don't let it!
After one downward slide, you'll want to do another one, starting one note higher up that the previous slide. Continue to slide down through your range, working up higher and higher, note by note. Always remember to breathe when you need to, to go very slowly, and never to lift your chin or head as you "reach" for the next note in the sequence.
Resonance-wise, you should be feeling buzziness in your head and in your face, and your goal is to enhance that feeling as best you can. Experiment with your tongue placement so that your head buzzes as much as possible.
Next Step: Head-Jaw Relationship
Voice in the Pelvic Bowl
This step follows hard on the the previous one, Breath in the Pelvic Bowl. If you haven't read that one yet, be sure to go back and do so now.
To quickly recap, in the last post, we were breathing down to the pelvis, imagining it to be like a ceramic bowl that was quite dirty, and we used breath to metaphorically clean it up. (That's not to say that there is anything wrong with a dirty pelvis, nudge nudge, wink wink…). By swirling the image of breath around in our pelvises, we've discovered that this terra cotta bowl is lined with tarnished silver, and so now we need to use our voices, as polish to bring the shine back.
So with some metaphorical vocal Brasso, we'll rub the inside of the boney bowl of the pelvis. First, let's dust off any residue that might be there, a little dust that might have collected overnight, with a clean cloth with a gentle /fffff/ sound. Let that sound sustain, and imagine that each incoming breath spreads your dusting cloth on the bowl and then, with the /f/ sound, you wipe the inside clean.
Now, let's add some brasso silver polish to that, bringing the damp cloth to the surface of your bowl with an inhalation, and then wiping the inside of the bowl, circling around and round on /vvvvvv/. Let the sound be deep and rich and resonant. You should feel a buzziness on your lower lip. You may find a certain pitch works well to do this, or you can experiment on different pitches. As the sound warms up, and the inside of your bowl begins to shine, you may feel a richer vibration in your lip, chest, throat and face.
There is a kind of bell used by Tibetan monks and many people who do meditation called a Da Qing bell, or bowl bell. This bowl bell is rung by a little stick wrapped in leather, and it resonates as you run the stick around the inside of the bell. Some bells are made of metal, and some are made of glass or crystal. Let's imagine that this bowl we've discovered in our pelvises is one of these bowl bells, and that by sounding our bells, we let our voices ring out. First, explore the idea of ringing your pelvic bowl on an open "uh" (IPA [ʌ] ) sound. Let each breath be a different note or pitch — unlike a real bowl bell, our pelvic bowl-bell can resonante on any pitch that we are inspired to make. Try a number of different pitches, changing with each breath.
I find that the most effective exploration of this bowl-bell is to imagine dropping thoughts, feelings or images into the bowl, and letting the bowl resonate through me, radiating the vibrations of the bell through my body and out into space. It's as if I'm sharing my image, thoughts or feelings with the world. You might even let your imagination go wild, moment to moment, following your own lead, to randomly pick images that occur to you. They might be people from your past, loved ones, places you know and miss, or images from nature. (Really, they can be anything at all. Just give yourself permission to conjure up the image as vividly as possible, and let it affect you, and put that emotional energy onto sound.) For each thought, find the right vowel sound to go along with it. Perhaps you'll use the vowel that is found in the word that inspires you: Leaf could either be conveyed on the "ee" (IPA [i] ) vowel, or any other vowel that conveys its essence to you. And then your next image, say of a Lake, could be conveyed by the "ey" vowel [eɪ]. Keep exploring, and keep anchoring the images into the core of your body, breathing down into the bowl of your pevlis, and watch the images swirl into life in you.
Next Step: Exploring Upper Range
Breath in the Pelvic Bowl
In this step, we'll use imagery to focus on the breath in the abdomen, right down into the pelvis. We want to encourage the sensations in the lower part of the body, so we'll use imagery, connected with the feeling of breath action pushing into the pelvis to anchor breath as low in the torso as we can go.
Please note that the air we breathe cannot go any lower in the body than the bottom of the lungs. However, the sensation of downward pressure caused by the breath displacing your guts in a downward action can go as low as the bottom of the pelvis, and press into the muscles of the pelvic floor.
For this exercise, I'd like you to imagine that your pelvis, which is, in many ways, shaped like a bowl, has been replaced with an actual bowl, like the one in the image at the beginning of this post. Imagine a terra cotta bowl, rough on the outside, and dark and encrusted with years of dirt on the inside.
[Though you can do this warm-up step either standing or lying down, it's important to visualize the "bowl" oriented correctly regardless of how you are positioned. I've doctored a photo to show you an image of a skeleton with the pelvis replaced with a bowl, so you see what I mean. You'll use this image in this exercise and the next step in the warm-up, so it's really important to get this image clear and strong in your mind's eye.]
Once you have an idea what I mean for this bowl image, close your eyes and try to imagine that your boney bowl of your pelvis is a ceramic bowl. Touch your actual hip crests, and feel the way around to the back, imagining that you’re feeling around the rim of a big bowl. With each breath, allow your breath to press down into the bowl, so that you can connect the image with the sensation of breath action in your lower body.
Imagine that the inside of your bowl is encrusted with loose dirt that you can begin to brush out of your bowl with the action of your breath. With each breath inward, swirl the brush-like action of the breath around the inside of your bowl, and then with each exhalation, breathe the dirt out along with the air. Draw in clear air to brush the inside of the bowl, and blow out dirty air to clean the rough, flaky dry dirt off the inside of your bowl.
As you clear the bowl, let the air begin to act like a little tornado or whirlwind inside you, curling its way around the bowl, getting all of the inside surfaces of the bowl, pressing into all the nooks and crannies of your pelvis. As you exhale the dirt, experiment with letting the swirling air go in the opposite direction. As you get full of air, the swirling will slow down and eventually stop, let the air change direction, speed up and pour out of you.
At this point, imagine that you can now see the surface of the inside of your bowl. Though it is a rough, terra cotta bowl on the outside, the inside of this bowl, of your special bowl, is lined with tarnished silver. Imagine that the inside of the bowl is black with tarnish, but that you can see glimpses of the potential for this bowl to shine coming through the blackness.
Our next step, "Voice in the Pelvic Bowl," will take you further with this image, as we polish the tarnish away and then let the bowl ring out with open sound. For now, brushing the inside of the bowl, and getting that image very strong, is enough.
Next Step: Voice in the Pelvic Bowl
Conclusion to the Intermediate Warm-Up Series
Posted by earmstro in Voice, Warm-ups, intermediate on April 21st, 2009
So we've worked our way through another series of warm-up steps. What have we gained? Perhaps a little better understanding of breath, sound, and the body parts (anatomy) that shape your voice, in particular the tongue, jaw and soft palate. For these steps to work, you need to practice this stuff regularly and with care.
The next series will tackle an "Advanced" Warm-up, which will probably be the last series of this kind for some time. I mean it to be the next step beyond this intermediate warm-up, and the three series, basic, intermediate and advanced, should serve as a starting place to working on your voice on a regular, daily basis. These warm-ups are meant to be mix-n-match, so you can play around with any of the exercises as you see fit, as long as you cover all the food groups in your warm-up.
Once I've worked my way through the Advanced series, I plan to do a series on speech, and then I expect the blog to take on a rather different schedule, working each day of the week on a different topic, including speech, text, dialect, accents, presentation, and related skills (like practising or memorization). There's a lot ahead for the voiceguy and for you, so I hope you'll keep coming back to visit.
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Eric Armstrong is an Associate Professor of Voice and Speech at the Dept. of Theatre, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University.
Eric Armstrong is a Full Member of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists, the national organization of professional performers and coaches working in the English-language recorded media.
The VoiceGuy is a proud member of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association.
The VoiceGuy is an Associate Editor of the International Dialects of English Archive.
