Posts Tagged easy
Articulator Basics
- This post is available for download as an audio file, so you can do the work along with the recording.
To see the phonetic symbols in this post, please make sure that you have installed a Unicode font that includes all the IPA symbols, for example Charis SIL.
Browsers: Some older versions of Internet Explorer and Safari have bugs that prevent the proper display of certain phonetic symbols. If you’re experiencing problems, I recommend you try the free browsers Firefox or Opera.
Warming up your articulators is often what people, even the most uninformed, know about voice work. Good Diction, as many people will tell you, means being able to speak clearly, to articulate, using "the jaw, the lips, the tip of the tongue." In this brief articulator warm-up, we'll focus on energizing the tongue for plosive consonants, namely /p, t, k/ and /b, d, g/.
Pop Your P's!
Plosives are consonants that stop the airflow of the voice and may or may not release it with a puff of air or voice. Put the palm of your hand in front of your mouth and say "pop!" You should feel the puff of air that both begins and ends that word, though it is possible that you might make that word with only one explosion, and merely stop the air for the final /p/. If that was the case on your first attempt, try again, but this time make a point of popping both p's with a puff of air.
You might notice that /p, t, k/ are voiceless consonants, that is they are ones that are made without vibration of your vocal folds. Each of those consonants has a corresponding voiced consonant, /b, d, g/ respectively. Try whispering the consoant sounds of /b, d, g/ as in "bad, dad, gad." You'll notice that they aren't exactly the same as the sounds in a whispered "pad, tad, cad"—that's because initial /p, t, k/ in English have a very strong puff of air, or aspiration, associated with them, while /b, d, g/ do not. Those three pairs, /p, b/, /t, d/, and /k, g/ are known as "cognate pairs," because each pair is made in the same place in the mouth, and they're both plosive sounds, and all that is different between them is their voicing. The three places in the mouth are the lips, aka bilabial, the tongue tip on the gum ridge, aka alveolar, and the back of the tongue and the soft palate, aka velar.
To warm-up your articulators, one of the primary tricks we use is to drill quick alternations between consonant or vowel and another in rapid succession. That's what well do here. We'll start with the lips and the front of the tongue, using voiceless consonants. The vowel we’ll use is the neutral “huh” vowel, which the IPA represents with the symbol [ʌ], which I call “hut” (because that word has the sound “uh” in it, and I imagine the symbol like the peaked roof of a small hut!) Try repeating the following phrase (an mp3 of me doing this exercise can be heard here):
|: pʌ — tʌ, pʌ — tʌ, pʌ — tʌ :|
Now try the voiced version:
|: bʌ — dʌ, bʌ — dʌ, bʌ — dʌ :|
Now, we’ll alternate the gum ridge sounds with the soft palate sounds—first with voiceless sounds /t, k/:
|: tʌ — kʌ, tʌ — kʌ, tʌ — kʌ, :|
And now, with the voiced sound /d, g/:
|: dʌ — ɡʌ, dʌ — ɡʌ, dʌ — ɡʌ, :|
Now, we’ll put all three sounds together in a single drill:
|: pʌ–tʌ–kʌ–tʌ, pʌ–tʌ–kʌ–tʌ, pʌ–tʌ–kʌ–tʌ, :|
|: bʌ–dʌ–ɡʌ–dʌ, bʌ–dʌ–ɡʌ–dʌ, bʌ–dʌ–ɡʌ–dʌ, :|
Finally, to combine these exercises into a single drill, try these:
|: pʌ–tʌ–kʌ–tʌ, kʌ–tʌ–pʌ–tʌ pʌ–tʌ–kʌ–tʌ, kʌ–tʌ–pʌ–tʌ pʌ–tʌ–kʌ–tʌ, kʌ–tʌ–pʌ–tʌ :|
|: bʌ–dʌ–ɡʌ–dʌ, ɡʌ–dʌ–bʌ–dʌ bʌ–dʌ–ɡʌ–dʌ, ɡʌ–dʌ–bʌ–dʌ bʌ–dʌ–ɡʌ–dʌ, ɡʌ–dʌ–bʌ–dʌ :|
You should be able to do this quickly, and with great ease. Try not to belabour it, or work to hard; let your jaw relax, and make sure to energize your lips so that the /p/ and /b/ really make your lips MOVE, while your jaw stays still.
NEXT STEP: Taking it to Text Basics
Resonance Basics
- This post is available for download as an audio file, so you can do the work along with the recording.
Waking up the feeling of vibration that we commonly call “resonance” in voice work could begin in any number of places. Typically, a Linklater voice warm-up would start with warming up the “channel resonantors,” which refers to energizing the breath “channel”, and focusing the vibrations in the chest, mouth, teeth in order to develop and enhance a sensation of resonance in that area. We’ll get to that eventually (at which point I’ll add a link to this post), but for today, we’re going to focus on the sensation of vibration in the mouth and face.
Humming into EEE
The musical sound pattern we’ll use for this exercise is the descending triad, , sol-mi-do.
You can hear this pattern here: http://voiceguy.ca/files/descending_triads.mp3.
Begin by humming along with the pattern, on a sustained /m/ sound. Your lips should be together, with your jaw relaxed. Follow along with the recording, and if the notes get a little too high, feel free to switch into headtone, or falsetto for men. Can you feel the vibrations in your face? You’re trying to notice the tingling buzz on your lips and in the bones of your face. What can you do to enhance that buzziness? Explore moving your lips very gently, to see if that makes any difference. Now make small, delicate movements of the top of your tongue, narrowing the space between the top of your tongue and the roof of your mouth as you hum. Does that change the feeling of buzziness in your face, the roof of your mouth, your teeth or your lips?
It’s important to engage in this with enough breath energy to get a significant vibration feeling on your lips. If you’re too delicate, you won’t make enough sound to get the kind of sensation we’re after. Once you have a good sense of the vibrations gathering on your lips, you want to allow your lips to come open into the “EE” sound on the last note of the triad, so you say “mmmm-mmmm-Meeee” on each one. Once you’ve done that through the recording, try doing “me, me, me” on the pattern, saying “me” on each note of the triad.
Finally, you want to try to say this “EE” sound all the way through the pattern, with “ME-EE-EE.” With each time through, see if you can find more vibrations, and more awareness of the buzziness of your voice.
Once you’ve done each of these steps, try speaking some text you know, maybe a poem, a song lyric, or a bit of a monologue. See if you can get the same feeling of vibration on your face while you’re speaking. It’s ok for the exercise to let the words feel different from the way you normally speak. Take time to allow yourself to feel buzzy through the words.
NEXT STEP: Articulator Basics
Face Awakening
- This post is available for download as an audio file, so you can do the work along with the recording.
Though the Basic Warm-up is focused on Voice, this step could be used for a warm-up that's geared more specifically toward speech as well. Now that you have relaxed the jaw and tongue,and have sensitized the soft palate, it's now time to awaken your face, and your facial muscles. (Wikipedia lists 23 muscles of the face.) The face is covered with skin, and very sensitive it is. As actors, the face is sometimes called 'the money maker,' so naturally we want to take good care of our skin. First thing in the morning, your face can feel rather "dead," so we want to wake it up by massaging your face, and then activate the muscles of the face with a few isolation exercises. For more on facial muscles, visit my teaching website, The Voice + Speech Source.
FACIAL MASSAGE
With gently rounded fingers, tap your scalp all over with the tips of your fingers. This should envigorate the scalp and encourage blood flow. Then with gentle, circular movements of the pads of the fingertips on the skin of your face, begin at the forehead and slowly move downward toward the eyebrows. At the brow, you'll want to move outwards to the temples, where you could change directions with your fingers a few times. From here, press firmly with the fingertips and slide the hands down the sides of your face to the bottom corners of your jaw, dragging your fingers over the jaw (or masseter) muscles located here. Once you're pretty clear on where those jaw muscles are (you could find them very easily by biting in order to flex those muscles), go back to circling the fingertips on top of those muscles now that they're relaxed.
From here, move the fingers up to the cheekbones and gently press your fingertips or thumbs into the boney edges of your eye sockets, working all the way around. When you get to the bridge of your nose, use the tips of your fingers to massage down your nose, making little circles as you go. When you get to bottom of your nose, put the flat of your fingers on your cheeks and move your whole cheek around in a circle.
Next, move your fingers onto your upper lip, and then work your fingers down and around to your lower lip. Now grab your lower lip, pinching it between your thumb and index finger. You should be able to feel a small pea-sized structure in the centre, under the body of your lower lip where it attaches to your gums. Now, grab onto your upper lip and find a similar structure where that lip attaches to your upper gums. Finally, pinch the corners of your mouth between the thumb and index finger of both hands, making "duck lips." You should be able to feel a thickness in the corner of your lip, where the muscles of the upper lip criss-cross with the muscles of the lower lip.
The final stage of our facial massage is to move into the chin area with circular movements of the fingertips. From here, slide the fingertips over the edge of the jaw and press gently but firmly into the underside of your jaw line, moving from the centre of your chin outward to the corners of your jaw. Now you can drag your fingertips down your neck to your larynx (where the adam's apple is on guys), and holding the larynx with your fingertips, gently press from side to side, causing your larynx to move from side to side.
FACE MUSCLE ISOLATIONS
Move the following parts of your face up and down, trying to move only that part. If other parts want to "join in," you can use a finger to gently remind those "helpers" that they're not needed. Repeat each isolation 5 times:
- forehead
- bridge of nose
- right corner of your upper lip (sneer)
- left corner of your upper lip (sneer)
- lower lip
- pull the right corner of your mouth to the right side
- pull the left corner of your mouth to the left side
Now purse your lips into a tight kiss, projecting your lips forward. From there, stretch the corners of your lips wide toward a broad, flat smile. (Think of drawing the corners of your lips straight sideways toward your earlobes rather than bringing the corner of your lips up toward your cheekbones.) Now go back and forth between pursing and spreading, each time getting a little quicker in your movements.
The last step in this sequence is to contract your face into a tiny knot, and then stretch it wide like a silent scream. Go back and forth between the tight, completely contracted version, and the open, completely stretched version. (Be careful not to overstretch your jaw, especially those of you with TMJ Disorder issues.)
NEXT STEP: Resonance Basics
Soft Palate Basics
- This post is available for download as an audio file, so you can do the work along with the recording.
The roof of your mouth is divided into two parts: the hard palate, which extends from the back of your upper teeth to the middle of your mouth, and the soft palate, which is the back part of the roof of your mouth. If you have a mirror handy, try looking at your soft palate now. You'll probably notice first the 'little-hangy-downy-thingy' in the middle at the back, called the uvula, which is Latin for "small grape." Sometimes called the velum, the soft palate is moved around by a complex series of muscles that can lift it up, pull it down, contract it, or stretch it wide. When speaking, the soft palate lifts or drops, depending on what sound you're making. On sounds like a hum, (mmmmm), your soft palate drops to allow air to flow out your nose. When you make a /t/ or /d/ sound, your soft palate lifts to stop air from leaking out your nose.
Try this experiment: say "hit" and don't release the final /t/ sound. Make the /t/, but don't let your tongue release the air. You may feel the air pressure pushing on the top of your tongue, and you may feel a gentle pressure at the back of the roof of your mouth as the air pushes against your closed velum or soft palate.
Another way to feel your soft palate is to simulate snoring. When you snore, your soft palate relaxes down and "flaps in the wind." I find that a little snoring helps to wake up sensation in your soft palate before we begin to work it. Have a go now.
The soft palate is also used as part of the swallowing mechanism. Try swallowing, and feel the muscles of the tongue and the soft palate contract and push saliva down your throat. The action of making sound is the opposite of swallowing; we want the soft palate to lift and open to allow the sound of your voice out.
One involuntary action that lifts the soft palate is the yawn. See if you can consciously create a yawn to feel the soft palate lift. Do you feel how the tongue tends to contract back and downward and the soft palate lifts? Yawns are a great way to begin waking up the soft palate, but that downward contraction of the tongue is, again, contrary to the goals of voice work.
The Inhaled Kah
[Though this is my version of this soft palate exercise, it is fundamentally a classic Warren-Linklater exercise, and full instructions can be found in Kristin Linklater's Freeing the Natural Voice: Imagery and Art in the Practice of Voice and Language.
The consonant in English that connects most directly to the soft palate is the /k/ sound. Try making a few exploratory "kuh" sounds. See if you can feel your tongue tip behind your lower front teeth, and the body of it rising up to touch your soft palate. Now try saying "kee" and see if you can feel that the body of your tongue touches a little bit further forward on the roof of your mouth. Now try making a very far back "kaaaah", with the same vowel as father.
The next step is to inhale a whispered "kaaah" sound, allowing your jaw to relax down and open, letting your tongue tip rest behind your lower front teeth. Alternate inhaling and exhaling on whispered "kaah", feeling how the soft palate instinctively lifts as you inhale.
Can you feel how the soft palate tends to relax on the exhalation while it is energized upwards on the inhalation? Try to preserve the feeling of lift as you exhale on the whispered "kaah", continuing with the alternation of inhale and exhale. It's helpful to think "LIFT!" as you inhale and then "LIFT!" again as you exhale.
Now that you can do this with a whisper, let's add another dimension: continue to whisper the inhaled "kaah", and then voice the exhaled version. Keep trying to find the feeling of LIFT! as you sound on "kaah," transferring the feeling from the inhaled whisper to the exhaled voiced sound.
Finally, sigh out some gentle "huh" sounds, and see if you can visualize your soft palate floating up and back, getting out of the way for the sound to pour out of you. It's important that your tongue relax inside your mouth and your jaw drop, in order to create a very open, relaxed feeling below the energized soft palate.
Next Step: Face Awakening
Tongue Stretch Basics
- This post is available for download as an audio file, so you can do the work along with the recording.
After working to release the jaw, the next step in any Linklater-based voice warm-up or workout is to focus on the tongue. Our goal in this step is to relax the tongue by visualizing it, and then to stretch it out. These should lead to increased tongue awareness, so that when combined with sound, the tongue will “get out of the way” so that the sound, and ultimately the thought and emotion, will have an open channel to spill out of.
VISUALIZING THE TONGUE INTO STILLNESS
The first thing to do is to get a small hand mirror or pocket mirror. Of course, any mirror will do for this, but it’s always handy to have a small mirror nearby when you’re practising. Take a look at your tongue in the mirror. The goal is for your tongue to lie still in your mouth and not wiggle around. Things to notice:
- the front edge of your tongue should rest behind your lower front teeth, gently touching the back of the teeth, not pressing into them
- the body of your tongue, is really quite large, and goes all the way into the back of your mouth
- there is probably a central groove down the middle of your tongue, where the muscles in your tongue that narrow it attach to a fibrous wall that runs down the length of the inside of your tongue
- the root of your tongue cannot be seen—it connects to your larynx at the hyoid bone, just above the adam’s apple
- the blade of your tongue is the portion that extends from the tip of your tongue and that, if you stick your tongue out gently, is the part that isn’tattached to the bottom of your mouth. For speech purposes, it’s the part that’s immediately below the gum ridge, behind your upper front teeth
If you feel your tongue wanting to wriggle around, just breathe and relax it as best you can. Relax your jaw, and let it drop with gravity. Let your tongue rest inside the basin formed by your lower teeth, and try to let it rest just at the level of the tops of your teeth.
STRETCHING OUT THE TONGUE
To stretch your tongue, you need to press your tongue tip down, behind your lower front teeth, and let the top surface of the blade of your tongue touch the back of your lower front teeth as you roll the middle and back of your tongue forward. Let your jaw drop and think a gentle smile to make room for the movement of your tongue. Try to make space in the back of your mouth and in your throat, so that your tongue can move easily, rolling slowly out and relaxing slowly back in. How fast should it be? If you think of a waltz tempo (1–2–3, 1–2–3, ) that’s probably about the right speed. The root of the tongue is very strong and because we swallow so many times per day, our tongues are conditioned to pull down and back very rapidly. Try to counter this action by letting the inward action of the tongue be slow.
This video will allow you to watch me doing the action of the tongue roll.
http://voiceguy.ca/sites/voiceguy.ca/files/tongue_basics.mov
Next Step: Soft Palate Basics
-
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.
