Singing & The Actor Flashcards
Vocal Tract
Your voice, or vocal tract, is a kind of pipe. At the bottom end, inside the neck, it is relatively narrow. At the top end it opens out into the mouth and nasal cavity.
The whole vocal tract is a resonator. You can test this by holding your breath and flicking your finger against the side of your neck near the larynx. The sound will be hollow. If you then mouth vowel sounds you can hear how the vocal tract shapes itself differently for each one, even without you introducing any voicing.
A unique feature of the voice is that the shape of the vocal tract can be varied to produce different sound qualities. No other acoustic instrument can do this at will. Each vocalist is blessed with a personal graphic equalizer.
The Larynx
the hollow muscular organ forming an air passage to the lungs and holding the vocal cords in humans and other mammals; the voice box.
At the top of the windpipe. This is where sound is initiated.
The larynx is a vibrator. This is important because a resonator on its own cannot generate sound; it can only amplify and shape it.
The larynx’s primary function is to protect our airways, stopping saliva and food particles from getting into the lungs. Essentially the larynx is a sphincter mechanism.
The larynx also has a secondary function, which is to act as a pressure valve. By closing off the airway, the larynx enables us to strain, give birth and vomit. The pressure valve also enables us to clear the lungs when we need to cough.
Laryngeal constriction can be triggered by psychological factors, such as the fight or flight mechanism. Simplistic though it may sound, your larynx does not know the difference between an audition situation and one of actual physical threat. The chemical response in your body is the same.
Vocal Folds
When you sing middle C, the vocal folds are closing and opening approximately 262 times a second. Various complex forces enable this to happen: aerodynamic, muscular and elastic forces in the larynx.
Your vocal folds are not passive in the act of phonation (making sound). They are actively chopping up the breath stream to form little pulses of air. A train of these small puffs of air pressure makes up the sound source. The sound source is then picked up by the tube of the vocal tract and modified according to its size and shape.
Pitch
(the note that you sing) is determined by the number of times your vocal folds close and open per second. This is called the fundamental frequency.
Overtones (Harmonics)
When you sing a note, the vocal folds also produce a range of other frequencies above the fundamental frequency. These other frequencies are called overtones or harmonics.
You’ll hear other harmonics as part of the individual note that is being made. They contribute to sound quality. All acoustic instruments are recognizable by their individual sound quality, due to the groups of hamonics favoured by their shape (violin, flute, clarient, etc all playing the same note will sound different).
Knowing how the voice works as an acoustic instrument is a positive benefit to you as a singer.
Basics of Sound Production
- efficient vocal fold closure to produce a strong fundamental frequency. This contributes to the sense of ease in the sound.
- Balanced energy in the harmonics. This will give your voice depth of quality and contribute to projection.
- Breath pressure for the vocal folds to sustain vibrations.
Each voice has the same component parts - that’s why we can all sing but the sound will vary with different shapes and sizes of the vocal tract.
“Head” & “Chest” Voice: Myth or Fact?
These are terms that you shouldn’t use except in relation to a student’s previous training.
They are ancient terms relating to physical sensations, which can lead inexperienced singers into thinking that they have to somehow ‘join’ two separate voices. These physical sensations of the sound being made or placed in the head and chest arise from sympathetic vibrations, from bone conduction and sometimes from muscular effort. It is more accurate to refer to head and chest ‘registers’.
Rather, like the patches on an electronic keyboard, your voice has definable registers. These are usually different in sound quality and may be associated with different parts of your range. Hence we talk about register changes and register ‘breaks’.
Awareness Exercise 1: The Vibrating Mechanism
The aim of this exercise is to get your to feel where the sound began - in the larynx at the vocal folds.
- Blow breath gently through your lips; they should be almost closed. You will get an airy sound without pitch.
- Start to blow a little harder and regulate the pressure until you produce a ‘lip trill’. This is similar to the sound signal produced by the vocal folds at the level of the larynx before it is shaped by the resonator.
Notice what you needed for this task:
i. You needed breath to excite the vibration of the lips;
ii. You needed to regulate the breath pressure for efficient vibrations - in singing and speaking we call this sub-glottic pressure;
iii. You needed something that could vibrate: the lips or vocal folds.
Now explore what happens if we introduce vibrations at the larynx, using the vocal tract as a sound shaper.
- Make the lip-tril again. This time, introduce voiceing as you do it. You can do this by thinking of humming behind the lip trill. If you place your fingers on your larynx you will feel vibration there as you start to ‘hum’.
Notice that for this task, both lips and vocal folds are vibrating and the vocal tract is shaping the sound.
Awareness Exercise 2: Closing the Vocal Folds
- Make a sound of friendly caution: ‘uh oh’. The sound should be crisp and clear and the feeling unforced. A small glottal stop precedes each of the vowel sounds. You might like to visualize the stop by bringing your hands together and giving two short claps in time with the sound.
- Repeat the sound several times in spoken voice. Keep it simple; this is an everyday sound used in many languages.
- Now go to make the sound again, but stop just before you do it. Notice that the breath is stopped when you do this. (If you are using your hands you might like to hold them closed.)
Focus on any sensations that you have in your larynx. Can you feel the stop there? Listen to any noise that comes out when you release the stop. You will probably hear a little pop of air when you release the stop. That is the sound of the glottis (the space between the two vocal folds) opening and letting the breath out.
Vocal Folds & Breath
Even without making sound, you are able to control the breath by holding it back with your vocal folds.
Breath is needed for the vocal folds to close against. This relationship between vocal folds and breath is an essential pard of good vocalising.
You could blow air through the larynx and not bring the vocal folds together; this would just produce a noise of air in your vocal tract.
Vocal fold closure is needed to produce sound.
Soft Palate’s Function
The soft palate can filter the sound, sending it out through the nose, or through the mouth, or both together. It plays an important role in resonating quality.
Awareness Exercise 3: Locating the Soft Palate
- Breathe gently in and out through your nose. Open your lips and continue to breathe through the nose. Focus attention on your tongue and where you can feel it in your mouth.
- Now say the word ‘sing’, making the ‘ng’ at the end last longer than the vowel. You may become aware that your tongue is touching something at the back of your mouth in making this sound, just as when you were breathing in and out through your nose. This is your soft palate or velum.
- Now say ‘ing-ing-ing-ing-ing’ keeping your mouth still and hardly moving your tongue. You may find it helpful to look in a mirror to make sure your movements are minimal. Do you feel something moving as you make the sound? If you are not sure what is moving, try out the following:
- Make the consonant ‘k’ with medium hard pressure. This is a stopped consonant, so your breath will be first held and then released. Focus on the movement you feel when the breath is released with the sound ‘k’. Your palate stays up against the back wall of your vocal tract and the tongue drops away from it.
- Now repeat stages 1-3 focusing on the location of your soft palate.
Awareness exercise 4: The Siren
This exercise has been described as ‘listening with your muscles’ and will give you awareness of how physical effort levels change as you move through your vocal range.
- Start by making the ‘ng’ sound as in the pervious exercise (think of the words ‘sing’). Your tongue should be raised at the back, and spread at the sides so that it is touching the upper back molars.
- Imagine the sound of a small puppy whining and whimpering. Imitate these sounds using the ‘ng’. Do this as quietly as you can, using very little breath.
- Now begin to make a larger excursion with your siren, doing the pitch-glide in larger and larger loops
- Finally, make the siren from the bottom to the top of your vocal range. pay attention to any changes you feel and hear.
i. The siren may not feel equally easy all the way up and down. This is what we call a change in effort level.
ii. Your voice may ‘crack’ or disappear at certain points in your range. Many people refer to this as a register ‘break’. Both of these experiences are common and are, in fact, normal.
Your vocal folds are tensed in order to vibrate faster for the high notes. They may also be lengthened. Both factors mean increased work in the larynx. On the lower notes, the vocal fold muscles will relax again and will be vibrating more slowly. Some people have difficulty managing these changes, leading to unevenness in the sound. This crack or break in the voice can easily be remedied. Constriction in the larynx can also occur as a panic reaction to these changes in the vocal folds, causing the voice to cut out completely.
Monitoring Devices for the Siren:
1. Breath Use
How much breath do you need to make the whimpering noises? Aim to match this when you are doing the full siren. Note that I am talking about how much breath you used to make the sound, rather than how much you took in. Find out if you can tailor your breath intake to the sound.
- Head, neck and jaw posture
i. Notice what is happening with the back of your neck when you make the full siren. You might be ‘reaching’ for the high notes by raising the chin and pushin downwards with the chin as you go down again. Aim to straighten and lengthen the back of your neck as difficult points of the siren.
ii. Look in a mirror to see what you are doing with your jaw. Notice if you are opening the jaw very widely for the extreme ends of your range. Explore sirening with a smaller jaw position. - The Vocal Tract
Focus attention on the tongue and soft palate inside your mouth. Where is your tongue positioned? Can you feel your soft palate and upper back molars with your tongue? Does the tongue want to move away from the soft palate as you go up in pitch? Aim to keep the tongue and palate together throughout the siren, using the same position as in whimpering and whining.
False Vocal Folds
The false vocal folds can cause problems in singing and speaking by closing up the airspace about the true folds. This disturbance upsets vocal fold vibration and can either contaminate the sound or stop it from coming out altogether. This is what we mean by ‘constriction’.
Awareness Exercise: Constriction
The false vocal folds are naturally constricted when we are straining or grunting.
- From a sitting position, lift your feet off the ground so that they are not supporting your weight.
- Place both hands under the chair and try to lift you and the chair off the ground. Notice what is happening in the larynx: the false folds will constrict as you work harder to pull yourself up.
What’s the sensation? Do you feel something pushing down and in, inside your throat, and the air pushing up from your abdomen? This is the feeling of constriction.
Awareness Exercise: Retraction
- Think of a funny situation that makes you want to smile inside. Hold the feeling of that inner smile.
- Allow the sensation of the inner smile to develop further down in your vocal tract. Let it move from the inside of the mouth down to the inside of your neck where the larynx is.
- Add sound to the feel of inner smile, allowing yourself to giggle or chuckle.
- Let the sensation grow into laughing. Laughing out loud on ‘hee-hee’ ‘hah-hah’ or ‘ho-ho’, whatever works for you.
- Now visualize being in a silent movie. Laugh silently, working just as hard as you did before.
- As you continue to laugh silently, notice the physical work involved. Where do you feel it? To help you monitor these sensations of effort, give them an effort number - a score between one and ten. What is your effort number when you laugh silently?
Holding the feeling of silent laughing may be effortful. Use the following checklist to release extraneous tensions in the body while maintaining your effort number in the silent laugh:
i. Breathe in and out gently and freely, with no bouncing of the abdominal wall!
ii. Chew lazily with your jaw and roll your tongue around inside your mouth.
iii. Massage your face until the laugh is no longer visible on the outside.
iv. Check your general posture as you walk around the room freely and easily.
Remembering the effort number of your silent laugh will help you to embed the muscle memory of retraction. Keep holding this effort number while releasing other tensions above.
Do you feel a new sense of space in your larynx? That is the feeling of retraction. Notice how hard you were working in the exercise. Retracted is not the same as relaxed. Notice that it is more difficult to remain retracted when other usicles come into play. If you like, repeat stages 4-6 and then gently sing a note on the vowel ‘EE’. Notice how it feels and sounds.
A well-trained vocalist will normally be retracted in the larynx already adn recognize the sensation. Those who have sung very little often need to work at maintaining the retracted position because they are not used to sustaining pitch.
Not everyone gets the idea of the silent laugh at first. There are so many different sensations associated with laughter that it is easy to confuse them and not achieve false fold retraction.
Awareness Exercise: Auditory Monitoring Using Silent Breathing
- Sitting in a relaxed position, breathe in and out through your mouth as if asleep.
- Put your fingers in your ears and listen to the sound inside your head. (Some people hear more on the out-breath, others more on the in-breath.)
- Keeping your fingers in the ears, continue to breathe in and out, allowing the sound of the breath to decrease gradually. You can use one hand to check that you are still breathing (place one hand on the abdomen or close up against the mouth to feel the out-breath).
- Continue until there is no sound at all inside your head. Make sure you are gently breathing throughout. This is the retracted position.
- What is your number now on the scale effort?
Repeat stages 1-4 and then sing a note.
Do you need to use retraction all the time?
Mostly, yes. In everyday speech and for relaxed voice qualities, you do not need to be retracted; you simply need to avoid constriction. For projected singing and high energy voice qualities such as opera and belting, retraction is a must. It enables a wide and free movement of the vocal folds during vibration.
