Posts Tagged warm-up
Vocal Qualities
Posted by Eric Armstrong in Speech, Warm-ups on April 22nd, 2009
Vocal Qualities are variations in the way you speak. These could be just about any modifier to your "regular" voice and speech pattern, but here we’re going to focus on changes to your voice "tone," done primarily at the breath and sound (respiration/phonation) level, rather than at the resonation and articulation level, which we played with in the Placement Playtime step of the Speech Warm-up Series.
Breath control has a lot of impact on the quality of your voice. As air passes through your larynx, between your vocal folds, the level of air pressure dictates what sounds are possible. If we have too little air, just the right amount or too much air pressure, the vocal quality changes dramatically. Also, how we adjust that air pressure through our speaking can affect the onset of making sound (phonation), and the end of the sound or phrase.
Fry
The first vocal quality we’ll explore comes from a limited amount of air pressure. Vocal or Glottal Fry is a sound quality that relies on the the way the vocal folds vibrate, different from their standard mode of vibrating. Most people know this sound when they hear it, though many people who use fry on a regular basis are unaware that they are doing so. Used sparingly, Glottal Fry is not bad for the voice, though excessive use can be fatiguing, and learning how to get out of the habit of using it constantly can be a challenge.
To make a fry sound you need to limit the air passing over your folds. Very gently sigh as you drop down in pitch. As you get to the bottom of your range, try to relax. Continue the sound as long as you can, barely exhaling at all. The sound will switch it a different quality, that sounds perhaps like a very quiet chainsaw idling, or perhaps the sound of popcorn being made (at the start when only a few kernals are popping.) Experiment with this sound by sustaining a sort of "ah" [ɑ] vowel. How loud can you go? Can you go up in pitch? How slow can you make the fry — the rate at which that popping occurs? As the fry slows down, it becomes even more irregular sounding. How fast can you make it go without it changing into regular vibration? As you speed up the fry, the pitch of it is likely to rise: that’s ok. With the limited use of breath energy to make this sound, you may need to take a breath, sigh and let go of the tension that creeps in to your body. (Try a Roll-Down, why doncha?)
Now try speaking on fry; you might try reading this paragraph out loud. Generally, I find that people who speak in fry tend to speak on a monotone, or very close to one. Try to speak on your fry now, and have as much melody as possible. This is quite tricky. As you go higher in pitch, more tension is required in the larynx to counteract the increased air pressure used to raise the pitch. Now, "how low can you go?" This vocal limbo dance may remind you of trying to do a Barry White impersonation; as most of us don’t have the ability to mimic Mr. White’s basso profundo, we switch to fry to notes lower.
It’s quite common today to hear people use glottal fry as part of their everyday speech pattern. Not all the time, but as part of most sentences. The speaker will start out on regular voice and then switch as they get near the end of the phrase or sentence. Try reading along here and when I switch to italics, let your voice switch to glottal fry. You’ll probably find that it works best if you don’t have much air. So don’t breathe in too much to start, so you run out of air early and have to finish with very little support. For longer thoughts, you might run out of air at the end of each phrase, (breathe) so you would have several bits going to fry, each starting on voice and running out of steam.
Falsetto
Falsetto, like glottal fry, is another "different" mode of vocal fold vibration. It’s another vocal quality mode, and it sounds rather strange when applied to the regular speaking voice. For women, the closest to this is head voice, which seems to be part of some women’s natural speaking voices, though not generally in North America. Often used as part of a man’s upper range, especially in certain styles of singing, falsetto in speaking tends to be reserved for character voice, and in animation. Mickey Mouse is a famous example of just such a characterization. In real life, people occasionally pop up into falsetto when they are very emotionally distressed. On falsetto, the vocal folds are only vibrating along the front edge of the folds, and there’s typically a gap or "chink" at the back of the folds, which tends to make the tone somewhat breathy.
To get to that place, start by sirening down on pitch from head tone/falsetto to find the place where your voice breaks and switches into chest voice (regular tone). Then try again, going even slower trying to find the lowest pitch you can make, without flipping into chest. You might try counting and you move down to that lowest pitch, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5…" so you’re speaking in falsetto, into that range. Once there, try speaking a sentence or two (you can read this paragraph again, if you’d like). It’s certainly an odd sound.
Pressed & Breathy Phonation
Pressing on your voice, which happens when you push a lot of air through very tightly held vocal folds, is very hard on the voice. It probably is the opposite of fry, in that fry takes very little air pressure, while press takes a lot. We won’t be practising this, but it’s good to know what it is. Many people press vocally in order to be loud, but it’s very harmful in the long run. You often hear it when power lifters grunt as they do the effort lifting a very heavy weight. Think of holding your breath and then pushing sound out—that’s the action.
Perhaps slightly less harmful is breathiness. Caused by only partially bring the vocal folds together, breathiness is very drying, and can make an injured voice worse. When you whisper, you’re doing breathy sound, and even if you don’t partially phonate, your folds are still closed tight. But in small doses, when your in good vocal health, a little quiet whispering is ok, especially if you only do it for a short time.
Estill Voice and Quality
One style of voice training stands out in terms of vocal quality: Estill. No other contemporary voice technique specializes in exploring the ways of making a large range of vocal qualities as Estill. Unfortunately, Estill training is something that I’ve only been introduced to in a very fleeting way, and so I wouldn’t presume to try to explain it. I’m hoping to take a workshop in Estill in the coming year, but until then I can only point you toward resources where you might be find out about a workshop for you to explore. When I’ve had more training, you can be sure that I’ll be keen to explain what I’ve learned here!
Next: Beginnings
Placement Playtime
Posted by Eric Armstrong in Speech, Warm-ups on April 22nd, 2009
"Placement" is a term we use to describe the sensation of the voice through sympathetic vibration. In this step of our warm-up, we’ll explore making changes to the vocal tract to make our voices sound different. If we feel the resonance of the voice through that vibration, we can sense our voices in a way other than just hearing it. In a way, placement is an antenna for perceiving the quality of our voices. What changes the quality of the resonance of our voices is the shape of the vocal tract, all the anatomical structures above the vocal folds. (See this website for more on the idea of placement vs. vocal tract shaping.)
One fairly easy "placement" to make is a nasal one. For this, we change the vocal tract by dropping the soft palate on the vowel sound, so that the sound of our voices comes out both the mouth and the nose. 
The sympathetic vibrations travel very strongly into the nasal cavities and bones of the face. The character of "Janice" from the t.v. show "Friends" has an extremely nasal voice—perhaps you could use that as a model. Try saying "mee mee mee" [miː miː miː] with a very nasal voice, and feel the vibrations in your nose and cheeks. You might put your fingers on the sides of your nose to really feel those vibrations. Can you feel how your soft palate is dropped? Few people can, so let’s try doing the opposite, and then try to feel the difference.
The opposite of nasal sound is denasal, which is when the soft palate is up accutely, even on sounds when you would normally drop it. It’s the sound you get when your nose is completely blocked with an upper respiratory infection (a cold in your nose). When that happens, the nasal consonants begin to sound like stop consonants: [m] becomes [b], [n] becomes [d], and [ŋ] becomes [ɡ]. So "my" sounds like "buy," "not" sounds like "dot," and "bring" sounds like "brig." Can you make that sound? Try saying "I have a cold in my nose," which sounds like "I have a cold in by doze."
Now, let’s try going back and forth between these two qualities: let’s count up to 10 with a nasal voice, and then back to 1 with a denasal voice. "nasal!:One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten; denasal!: Ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one." You should notice the vowels especially on the way up to 10, and the nasal consonants in particular on the way back down (on 10—"ted", 9—"died", 7—"seved" and 1—"wud".) For something more challenging, try counting backwards from 10, start with a nasal sound, and then switch for the odd numbers: "Ten, died, eight, seved, six, five, four, three, two, wud."
What other "placement" qualities can we explore? There is a hallow, chesty sound you can make by opening up your pharynx (the part of your throat just behind your mouth). To me, this sounds quite a lot like the sound that Felicity Huffman used as "Bree" in the film Transamerica. Start by saying "hah, hah" with a mildly breathy tone. Then widen your soft palate, as if you were about to yawn. This should spread backward toward the throat. Keep saying "hah hah", and make sure that you stay on a low pitch. Now, with this placement (probably feeling some buzz in your collarbones and throat), speak the alphabet on a fairly monotonous pitch. "A, B, C, D, E, F, G — H, I, J, K, L-M-N-O-P — Q, R, S — T, U, V — W, X — Y and Z." Now try speaking freely: tell a story starting with "Once Upon a Time, there was a…"
Our last placement for today is what many might call the "Kermit" placment or the "Dudley Do-Right" sound, depending on your age/generation. This sound is immediately recognizable to most people, and has been used by animation voice over actors for years. (It’s also the sound of "Marvin the Martian" as well as an ingredient in the unusual voice of Bob "Bobcat" Goldthwait, especially in his early films like "Police Academy 2".) To manipulate your vocal tract to make this sound, you’ll need to tense your soft palate and keep the back of your tongue very close to your uvula, close to, but not touching the place where one makes the "ng" sound [ŋ], and tensing the tongue root, and pushing it down and out. This makes any sense of "double chin" that one already has look even large (very attractive)! Try saying that "ng" sound going into an "oh" sound [ŋoʊ ŋoʊ ŋoʊ], which is a sort of modified "No, no, no!" Now try Marvin the Martian’s classic line: "It makes me very angry!" or with Kermy’s "Hi-ho, Kermit the Frooog, here!"
Next: Vocal Qualities
Non-English Sound Exploration Part 4
Posted by Eric Armstrong in Speech, Warm-ups on April 22nd, 2009
In this step, we’ll experiment with variations on Central vowel sounds. So far, we’ve been working our way through the various non-English vowel sounds, starting with Gliding back and forth through the Close Vowels, then Sliding downward with the Front Vowels, and then with the Back Vowels. Then we took a day to explore the difference between "schwa" and "uh" as in comma or strut. These last two are, in many ways, "Central" vowels in English, though the strut vowel is classified as a Back vowel by the International Phonetic Association, or IPA. In some languages, the sound closest to [ʌ] is a back vowel, whereas in English, there is a range of pronunciations for the vowel in strut. In some accents this is very far back (as in parts of Texas), while in others (e.g. in London working class accents, aka "Cockney") it is quite far forward, in the range of where the IPA puts the rarely used [ɐ] symbol.
For this experiment, we’ll play with the sounds we establish in our contrast of the "schwa" and "uh" vowels. To begin, let’s start with a more closed version of "schwa", represented by a "reversed "e" in the IPA, [ɘ]. This vowel is, essentially a more closed version of "schwa". That’s easy! Simply say that "schwa" sound with your mouth almost shut. Next we’ll do rounded version of this new sound, represented in the IPA by [ɵ], a barred "o" symbol. If you think of this sound as a centralized [o], it might be easier to say! Start with a "pure /o/" sound, as if you were saying goat with a Scots accent. Then move the centre arch of your tongue forward, as we did when we played with gliding between [i] and [u], only with the mouth more open. In other words, the [ɵ] is like a more open [ʉ] vowel, which we covered here.
Now, let’s look at the Central vowel that is more open than "Schwa," namely the vowel used in "r-less" accents (a.k.a. "non-rhotic" accents), such as Received Pronunciation, and many other regional accents of England. This is the r-less version of the vowel found in nurse words; many rhotic speakers, if you ask them to say words like word, heard, nurse, first, they will instinctively make the correct sound for this vowel. The IPA’s symbol for this sound is [ɜ]. ̆(For those with a rhotic accent, who have r-colouring on this vowel, the symbol for that is the same, plus an added diacritic that looks like a little "hook" or "wing" on the upper right hand corner of the symbol: [ɝ].) The rounded version of the non-rhotic vowel is represented by the IPA symbol [ɞ]. To make this sound, think of the non-rhotic sound found in words like nurse, and round your lips forward strongly. You may find that this makes you sound a little like a poor impersonation of Arnold Schwartzenegger, or perhaps like "Hans and Franz" saying "Girly Man".
So, to review, the vowels in the Central area of the mouth are as follows (from top to bottom, in pair where possible):
Close:[ɨ ʉ]
Close-mid: [ɘ ɵ]
Mid: [ə]
Open-mid: [ɜ ɞ]
Fairly Open: [ɐ]
If you’ve really gotten these vowels under your belt you should be able Slide through the unrounded vowels in one continuous go: [ɨ ɘ ə ɜ ɐ]. Then, to do it with rounded sounds, you’ll have to make sounds that the IPA doesn’t have symbols for! (For those, we’ll use the unrounded symbols with ’rounded’ diacritics.) [ʉ ɵ ə̹ ɞ ɐ̹]
If you’ve been following along from when we started, you’ve probably gotten a handle on all the vowels of the IPA by this point. That’s amazing. Our next trick is to begin to play with these new sounds in fun, improvizational ways, so that we begin to "own" the sounds. It’s great that you’ve made these sounds a few times, but now you need to engage with them in ways that get you out of your head and into an expressive communication process, through the sound.
Next: Placement Playtime
Non-English Sound Exploration Part 3
Posted by Eric Armstrong in Speech, Warm-ups on April 22nd, 2009
In the second part of this step, we took Front vowel sounds that we knew (’cause they are used in English) and modified them (by adding lip-rounding) and created non-English vowel sounds. In this post we’ll do a similar process with English Back vowel sounds. It will be similar because these vowels also come in pairs, though the English back vowels we’ll be looking at are rounded, and we’ll make the non-English vowels by UNrounding them.
It’s worth noting, I think, that some speaker of English have far more back vowels than others, as they might not merge Lexical Sets in their dialect in the same way that you or I might (that’s assuming that you and I share the same dialect). So, for instance, in my dialect the lexical sets palm, lot, cloth, thought are all pretty much the same, with a few exceptions, like words that end in "-ong". So if I say "I thought you wore a thong, those words don’t sound alike. For me, thought is unrounded and fully open, while thong is slightly rounded and mostly open. For the sake of this exercise, we’re going to work from versions of vowels that might be familiar to those who can speak a "Standardized Accent", like General American or Standard British, aka Received Pronuniciation.
So far we have looked at the Close Back vowels [ɯ u] (when we first worked with non-English sounds here.) To remind you, [u] is the vowel in the lexical set goose. [ɯ] isn’t used in English, though it is a vowel in Vietnamese, and it’s used as a contrast with [u].
We’re now going to focus on the Remaining Back Vowels:
[ʊ]
[ɤ o]
[ʌ ɔ]
[ɑ ɒ]
Here are the lexical sets associated with the second vowel of each pair:
[ʊ] footˑ(this mostly back, mostly open vowel doesn’t have a non-English pair)
[ɤ o] goat (the beginning of this diphthong)
[ʌ ɔ] strut thought
[ɑ ɒ] palm lot
Some notes on these English vowels, and their lexical set words
- foot [ʊ]: In North America, this vowel is frequently said with very little lip rounding and more centrally.
- goat [o]: Again, in North America, we often don’t round our lips much. Use Scots dialect as an example, round your lips aggressively, and make a "pure /o/" sound, not letting if slide off into a diphthong.
- strut [ʌ]: The IPA has this symbol representing a very far back sound, though in English we typically use the symbol to represent a fairly central sound, quite close to the sound represented by [ɐ]. To get the "Cardinal Vowel" sound for [ʌ], we’ll have to make a much more "back" sound, close the way a Texan might say "luck, love, mother."
- thought [ɔ]: This sound is perhaps more easily done for people with British accents, as the well rounded, very back sound of /ɔ/ is more familiar. In RP, this vowel is heard in north/force sets as well as in the thought lexical set. In some accents, cloth is merged with thought on this vowel.
- palm [ɑ]: I tend to avoid using the word "Palm" for this lexical set, as so many North Americans either say the /l/ sound in the word, or they let the "idea" of the /l/ sound affect the vowel, making it into more of a /ɔ/ sound. Instead, I tend to use the word "father" in its place.
- lot [ɒ]: This slightly rounded open vowel appears in some accents, and the lexical set lot is fairly easy to identify, as so many of the words in the set are spelled with the "short o". In many accents cloth is merged with lot on this sound.
So what’s left that’s non-English? We have really only got one new vowel here: [ɤ]. This is the unrounded equivalent of [o]. To make it, you need to start with a well-rounded "pure" /o/ vowel. From there, spread your lips wide, so you hear the most drastic difference between [o] and [ɤ]. Now try applying the unrounded close-mid back vowel (that’s the name for [ɤ]) to some words: "home, toe, rope, globe" all the while keeping your lips slightly spread.
Let’s compare the other cardinal back vowels in a similar manner, going back and forth between the two sounds, locking into the rounded version and then unrounding to make the other vowel. You want to feel like your tongue is motionless in the position you choose for the first vowel, and merely let the lips shaping dictate where the vowel sound goes. Try not to adjust to where you think the unrounded vowel is "supposed" to go. We’ll also add the "close" pair back into the mix, so we can contrast them all. Go back on forth on each pair, to really feel the sound/position of the sounds in relationship, and stick to one pitch so that that doesn’t distract.
- Start with the goose vowel [u], and spread into [ɯ].
- Next, make the foot vowel [ʊ],and spread into an unrounded version of it (there is no IPA symbol for this, appart from using an "unrounded" diacritic like this: [ʊ̜].)
- Now review the new symbol by going back and forth between goat‘s [o] and its unrounded pair [ɤ], whose symbol’s name is called "ram’s horns." (Remember that: goat‘s pair is "ram’s horns"!)
- On to the contrast between thought and strut: round strongly, so you have a "hollow cheek" feeling as you say [ɔ] and then keep you tongue where it is while you spread your lips into a very far back [ʌ].
- Finally, start with the rounded open back vowel of the lot set, [ɒ], and relax the lips into the unrounded open back vowel of father/palm [ɑ].
The only Vowel sounds left to explore are the "Central" vowels. I recently read in John Wells’s Phonetic Blog that the non-English "Central" vowels are, according to him and his colleagues at University College London, vowels that they don’t really teach or test as part of the IPA Stream of the Summer Course in English Phonetics. Regardless of whether they are worth knowing or not, we’ll explore them in the 4th part of non-English Sound Exploration.
Next: Non-English Sound Exploration Part 4
Non-English Sound Exploration Part 2
Posted by Eric Armstrong in Speech, Warm-ups on April 22nd, 2009
In the first part of this step, we made central vowel sounds that were between places familiar to the mouths of GenAm speakers. Today, we’re going to work on a lot of sounds that can be thought of as variations on vowel sounds that English speakers may (or may not) have in their own repertoire of vowels. This should be a playful exploration, so let’s try to have fun as we whizz through these new sounds! This post will feature lots of vowel charts from the IPA, so it may be a bit longer post than usual, because of all the images.
So far we’ve done the Close vowels: [i y] [ɨ ʉ] [ɯ u].
We’re now going to focus on the Remaining Front Vowels:
[ɪ ʏ]
[e ø]
[ɛ œ]
[æ]
[a ɶ]
Each of these pairs of sounds begins with a sound that should be familiar to most native English speakers. By referring to a Lexical Set, we should be able to get at least in the ball park of the standard sound for these vowels.
(Note that, should your personal accent be dramatically different from mine, your mileage may vary quite significantly. You may have to imagine yourself speaking with a Standardized accent in order to get the concept of this experience for yourself.)
Here are the lexical sets associated with the first vowel of each pair:
[ɪ ʏ] kit
[e ø] face (the beginning of this diphthong)
[ɛ œ] dress
[æ] trap (this front vowel doesn’t have a non-English pair)
[a ɶ] price (the beginning of this diphthong, as if you’re saying it with a Southern accent)
Here’s how to experiment with each of these sounds. Start by making the first vowel in the pair, for example kit‘s [ɪ] vowel. Keeping your tongue shaped as it is for that vowel, round your lips forward into the sound pair, [ʏ]. Now try saying some kit words with the new vowel: "ship, rid, dim." This should sound like your saying those words with your lips stuck in a "kiss-like" position. Next, try saying those words without their final consonants, trying to focus on the non-English vowel at the end. Finally, drop the initial consonant off the front, and say the new non-English vowel on your own.
You’ll notice that the [æ] vowel doesn’t have a non-English pair. That’s because the International Phonetic Association says that there is no language in the world that uses a rounded equivalent. (That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to make a rounded version of it, though!) Apparently, the [æ] vowel itself is quite rare in the world’s languages, too.
On another note, I found the rounded open front vowel [ɶ] to be quite hard to make — and perhaps so do others: it’s a very rare sound in the world’s languages, appearing in some obscure dialects of Swiss German.
To wrap up the rounded front vowels, try going through all 5 of them (including the [y] sound we’ve already worked on, by anchoring your lips in a rounded position with the first sound and then gradually opening your mouth. It can help to "think" the English vowels you know as you’re making them: [y ʏ ø œ ɶ] while thinking fleece, kit, face, dress, price. I always find that this kind of exploration is much easier if you can keep the pitch the same through the exploration, so that you can hear the vowel change distinctly and not be distracted by the change in "note."
Because this post is longer than I imagined, I am going to stop here for today. If we did all three areas (Front, Central, Back) of the vowel space, this would be a mamoth post. More on this in the next part!
Next: Non-English Sound Exploration Part 3
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