Posts Tagged soft palate
Stretching the Soft Palate
So far, in the three Voice Warm-up Series (basic, intermediate, advanced), we have looked at the soft palate 3 times, once in each series. Hopefully you can use those warm-up steps (basic, intermediate, advanced) to learn about the soft palate. Here, we want to quickly get the soft palate energized, and articulating.
In English, there are 3 consonant sounds made with the soft palate: two stop-plosives (see the lips step for more on this kind of sound), /k/ and /g/, and a "nasal" consonant, /ŋ/. In other languages, there are many other consonant sounds made with the soft palate, or "velum" (from whence they get their name, velar consonants). For example, there is the sound in German words like "ach", represented in the IPA as [x]. This voiceless fricative sound is made with the back of the tongue against the soft palate, and is also heard in many Yiddish load words to English, such as "chutzpah."
To begin, let's sensitize the soft palate with a series of /x/ sounds. Try a bunch of triplet rhythms: [xxx-xxx-xxx-x], and repeat. Swallow after you've done this, as it often releases mucous from the back of the soft palate.
Swallowing contracts some of the soft palate muscles, and stretches others. Yawning is its opposite. To wake up the soft palate, we're going to alternate the two actions. Start with a modified yawn by relaxing your jaw, and leaving your tongue tip behind your lower front teeth, and engage in a voiceless yawn. Then, close your mouth and swallow. Repeat this 3 or 4 times.
Our last step is to wake up the soft palate with a little drill of those English sounds. The pattern of sounds is [kʌɡʌ ŋʌɡʌ], or "kuh-guh nguh-guh". Repeat that in clusters of 4, slowly trying to go faster. (If you find the sequence "nguh-guh" difficult, you could try this reversal: "kung-uh gung-uh" [kʌŋʌ ɡʌŋʌ].
Soft Palate Floating
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
Soft Palate Lifting
Posted by earmstro in Voice, Warm-ups, intermediate on April 21st, 2009
- This post is available for download as an audio file, so you can do the work along with the recording.
Nasal consonants are speech sounds made with the soft palate dropped, which allows the sound of your voice to flow out through your nose. By exploring the nasal consonants that are made on the soft palate, we can exercise the action of the muscles that lift and drop the soft palate, and thereby increase awareness of the actions of the palate.
This exercise assumes that you've already read and done the Soft Palate Basics exercise; if you haven't done that yet, you might want to go and read that first.
Feel the Drop
One issue with the soft palate is that there are fewer nerve endings in the back of the mouth, and so there is less awareness of that area. This is good, in that it can reduce your gag reflex, but when it comes to finding more clear articulation of the soft palate, it can make matters challenging. Some people have both a strong gag reflex and limited awareness of their palate, so it's hard to feel, and what they do feel makes them feel sick. For those people, I advise working in short bursts, and taking care to only do as much as you need.
The nasal consonant sound that's made at the back of your mouth is heard in the "ng" sound heard at the ends of words like "thing" or "song." That consonant is made with your soft palate dropped to meet the back of your tongue, closing off the air going to your mouth, and redirecting it to your nose. If you say a word like "song" and sustain the "ng" sound (IPA [ŋ]), you should be able to feel the air, and the vibrations of the sound you're making, passing through your nose, and not out your mouth (put a hand over your mouth and block your nose if you don't believe me.) When you shift from the "ah" vowel of "so-ng" to the [ŋ] sound,the air, sound & vibrations should move from mouth to nose. Hopefully you can at least feel the action of the back of the tongue rising to meet the dropped soft palate. Now try to increase your awareness by saying "ah" and going back and forth between an "oral" sound and a "nasal" one, where the sound of the vowel vibrates in your nose. (For those who care about IPA, the sound here is the vowel [ɑ], and to denoted nasality we add a little tilde diacritic over the symbol, to make it [ɑ̃]. )
NG-K
As you remember from the Soft Palate Basics exercise, [k] is a handy sound for exploring the soft palate, as that consonant sound is made with the back of tongue up against a raised soft palate. Now, let's combine it with the [ŋ] sound, to make [ŋk]. Sustain the "ng" sound, and then raise your soft palate to clip off the nasal sound with a [k]. Don't bother to release the "k," just stop the airflow by lifting your soft palate. (In IPA this is called "No Audible Release" and we notate it [ŋk̚].)
Down to Go Up
Now try making that sound pairing again, but after you've made the [ŋ] sound, pull your tongue down in your mouth. This is a fairly odd thing to do, and it may take a few tries to get it. It also feels quite weird, as pulling your tongue root down (which is stuck to your soft palate) will cause your soft palate to stretch. Most people will agree that that feels kinda gross, to put it bluntly. If you put the "k" stop with no audible release on the end, you'll get a very weird feeling in deed.
The final exploration for this step is to drop the soft palate to make the [ŋ] sound, and then merely lift the soft palate to make an open [ɑ]. The tongue should stay static, or as close to it as possible, and the action will live in the soft palate. It has been well documented that lifting your cheek muscles helps to lift your soft palate, so if you think of a pseudo-smile as you do this, it will often help to establish the connection.
- This post is available for download in a condensed format, so you practice lifting your soft palate, and once you know how, you can work along with the recording.
Next Step: Lip Isolations
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
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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.
