Posts Tagged advanced
Facial Resonance and Twang
Posted by Eric Armstrong in advanced, Voice, Warm-ups on April 22nd, 2009
One of the most important skills an actor, or any public speaker, can learn is to enhance the sensation of vibration in their face. When you feel vibrations in the bones of your face, then you're using your voice in an effective way that creates loud sound with little effort, and less risk of damage to your vocal folds. We want to turn the energy of your breath into sound energy with as little muscle effort as possible, which should turn your head into a sound box that amplifies the sound of your folds so you can be heard by lots of people in a large space.
Singers have called this "resonating the mask" for centuries, and if you have some classical singing experience, what we do here today will help you cross that singing experience over to speaking. Probably the most important elements of getting effective resonance in your voice are in getting your breath to help you, and to "listen" to the sensations of your body to make subtle adjustments in order to tune how your articulators, that's your tongue, jaw, lips and soft palate, shape the sound coming from your larynx.
We've done a little exploration of resonance on The VoiceGuy, in particular in the posts Resonance Basics and Chest Resonance. This step in the Advanced Warm-up Series could be considered the second part of what began in Chest Resonance, again, modeled after the Linklater exercise "Freeing the Channel." We'll do this one in several parts, spread over several days. Today we'll begin with feeling the buzz.
Step One: Enhancing the Sensation through your Nose
We'll begin by trying to get as much sensation in the face as possible. Nasal sounds are probably the easiest sounds to make that generate a lot of sensation in the bones and tissues of the face. Start by making an "ng" sound (IPA [ŋ]) and see what you can feel. You will probably feel vibrations where the back of your tongue meets your soft palate. Perhaps you will also feel vibration in the bones of your face and in your hard palate. Now try the other two nasal consonants, "m" and "n." Do you feel the vibration in different places? By comparing the three sounds, you should notice that the contact places for each sound is different (back of tongue, tongue tip and your two lips), so you'll feel more in those contact places. But also, the bones of your face will respond differently. Which one is buzziest for you?
Now try using your fingertips to feel the vibrations. Keep the note or pitch the same all the way through and alternate slowly between the three nasal consonants: [ŋ n m n ŋ n m n ŋ n m n ŋ n m n...] Can you feel the vibrations in your nose? In the bones of your face? Next, try opening up your mouth and make a nasal vowel sound. I would recommend the sound in "cat"(IPA [æ̃]). Try combining it with an [ n ] or [ ŋ]. Some people find the "ee" vowel, as in "feet" (IPA [i]) to be even more open to feeling vibration, especially when it is a nasal sound.
In our next post, we'll move out of the nasal sounds and into oral sounds.
Next Step: Facial Resonance and Twang Part 2
Lip Advancing, Rounding, Spreading
Posted by Eric Armstrong in advanced, Voice, Warm-ups on April 22nd, 2009
There was an ad on tv when I was a kid for Adam's Sour Chewing Gum, whose slogan was "Sour Power!" and "Pucker Power!" Well that should be the slogan for at least part of our step today. We'll be rounding our lips forward into a tight kiss, and then spreading our lips horizontally in a (somewhat psychotic) smile.
Lip rounding is an important part of articulation, and having great control over the action of the lips is vital to the kind of subtlety and control you want in order to do dialects and accents, or character voices that are different from your own, with ease. The muscles we'll be focusing on primarily today are the orbicularis oris muscle, which encircles your mouth, and the buccinator muscle (aka "the bugler's muscle") that spreads the corners of the lips wide, out toward your earlobes.
To do this exercise, you start by rounding your lips forward as if you were going to do a tight kiss, or you were drinking from a tiny cocktail straw. Hold that position for a few seconds, and then relax back to 'neutral'. From here, slowly spread the corners of your lips outward making sure not to turn the corners of you lips upward as you're doing it. The purpose isn't to look happy here, but to spread your lips wide into a very narrow slit. Go as wide as you can and hold that position for a few seconds. Then relax back to neutral.
So now you know the two extremes of the exercise, we slowly speed the action up. Round your lips into a tiny kiss, then spread your lips wide into a psychotic smile, back and forth getting faster and faster and faster.
That's it! The important part is being sure to isolate those two muscles, and trying not to use anything else while you're doing it. Relax your hands, be sure to keep blinking and keep your eyes and forehead relaxed as well!
Next Step: Facial Resonance and Twang
Soft Palate Floating
Posted by Eric Armstrong in advanced, Voice, Warm-ups on April 21st, 2009
We've done a number of soft palate exercises now with the Basic and Intermediate Warm-up Series now, so it's now time to work on seeing whether you can independently lift your soft palate without doing other exercises to get it going. If you want to review those exercises first, you can check them out here.
It's really important to remember to relax your jaw and tongue first, so that you are starting from a fairly neutral starting place. So let your jaw drop, and take a moment to just let your tongue rest, still and quiet on the bottom of your mouth. The top surface of your tongue should be level with the top of your lower teeth if you have a mirror handy.
Turn your attention to your soft palate. If you can't immediately feel it, take a second to make the shape of the "ng" sound at the end of a word like "song" (IPA [ŋ]). The back of your tongue should touch the soft palate. Touch and release that part of your mouth with the back of your tongue a few times to get the feeling. If you're in a private place where you can make a gross sound without feeling too self-conscious, trying a snoring in-breath. Snoring will put the back of your tongue on the soft palate, and you will make noise through the part where your soft palate meets the back of your nasal passages (aka the naso-pharynx or the velar port). Now that you have a sensory awareness of that part of your anatomy, we can move on to trying to lift the soft palate.
By this point in the work we've done, you should have a pretty good idea where your soft palate is. Lifting the palate without too much effort in other areas is the real challenge. We want to lift the soft palate to close off the nasal passages and breath in through the mouth exclusively. To do this, we're going to sip the air through a narrowed lip closure, as if you are sipping on a fat slurpee straw, or one of those bubble-tea straws that allow you to slurp up the tapioca bubbles. Sipping in this way forces you to lift your soft palate in order to NOT breathe through your nose. Experiment by doing the following:
- Close your mouth and breath through your nose
- Close one nostril to increase the sensation of nose breathing
- see if you can feel the air at the back of your nose, going over the top of your soft palate and down your throat (a very delicate sensation).
- Now, open your lips as if you were going to breathe through your lips, but keep your one nostril closed to check that no air is going through your nose
- alternate mouth and nose breathing, trying to notice the lift of your soft palate.
Some people find that sipping the air creates too much sensation at the lip area, so they are distracted from the delicate action of the soft palate. Remember the image of feeling "coolness" on the back of your throat, and now open your lips a bit wider so that there is less resistance to drawing in the air. Finally, relax your lips altogether and see if you can sense your soft palate floating at the top, rather than collapsing down.
With this awareness, try now to relax your jaw and tongue and to lift your soft palate up. Visualize it like the roof of a big tent rising up, as if the circus has come to town and they're raising the big top! Another great image is to remember those parachute games most young people played as children. Imagine your soft palate like a parachute, floating way up and back. It should feel like there is a lot of space in the back of your mouth for sound to resonate in.
The last part of this step is to add sound to the action. Breathe in and visualize the soft palate floating up, and then sigh out on any vowel. Usually we start on "ah" or "uh" (IPA [ɑ] or [ʌ]̃). More closed vowel sounds, like "ee" or "oo" (IPA [i] or [u]̃) are more challenging. Try some glissing up on pitch, thinking LIFT! with your soft palate, and once that becomes comfortable, explore sliding back down on pitch. The problem is that often people relax their soft palate as they slide down, collapsing it along with the pitch and their vocal energy.
Next Step: Lip Advancing, Rounding, Spreading
Tongue Flapping In and Out
Posted by Eric Armstrong in advanced, Voice, Warm-ups on April 21st, 2009
Learning to isolate your tongue from your jaw and soft palate takes time and practice. There is no quick fix for this one, I'm afraid. You just have to work, or play, at it until your tongue and jaw learn how to play independently. Of course, this takes time. But an effective exercise is one that targets the process involved effectively, and sometimes doing a familiar thing in an unfamiliar way can make enough of a difference that what you learn from doing it crosses over to doing the familiar thing back in its familiar place.
The movement of the tongue is very varied. You can bunch your tongue up like a ball, fold it, flip it, cup it or arch it. The action we're looking at today can be described as "flapping." You want the front edge of your tongue to go up the the area behind your upper front teeth, as if it we a flap, hinged at the centre of your tongue. The front edge goes up, the front edge comes down. Now, to do this, your tongue actually is "curling" back on itself slightly, but the image of a flap valve (like you'd see in the bottom of a toilet tank) could be helpful. For people with very short frenums on the underside of the front of the tongue (aka ankyloglossia) this may be very hard to do.
To exaggerate this action, we're going to move the tongue "out of the mouth," that is, do the flap action with tongue stretched forward, out of the mouth. Begin by sliding your tongue forward onto your lower lip. Fro there, bring the front edge of your tongue up to cover your upper lip. Finally, relax your tongue back down over the lower lip, and then let it slide S L O W L Y into your mouth. Do the combined action slowly, maybe as much as ten times in a row. As you can see from the animated .gif file that accompanies this step, your jaw is likely to close as your bring your tongue up to the upper lip. This is partly due to the length of your tongue. When we move the action back inside the mouth, we'll try to keep that jaw relaxed. The next step is to add sound: sigh out on "ah" on the tongue sliping out portion, make an "n" sound as your touch your upper lip with the front edge of your tongue, and then open back up to "ah". After a few of those, narrow your tongue slightly, so that your make a "L" sound when your lift the tongue up to your upper lip.
You now want to do the whole thing with your tongue inside your mouth. Start by dropping your jaw, and then bring your tongue up to behind your upper front teeth. It's not very far, compared to what you were doing with your tongue out! Start with a very simple /n/ sound, and then go to the narrower tongue action of /l/.
You can see a video of the tongue action here.
Next Step: Soft Palate Floating
Head-Jaw Relationship
Posted by Eric Armstrong in advanced, Voice, Warm-ups on April 21st, 2009
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
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