The Path of the Voice 1 of 6 American English Pronunciation
In this American English pronunciation video,
we’re going to study the path of the voice
and placement.
One of the things I often talk about with
my students is placement. I sometimes feel
like their voice only comes from their head,
and is placed very much so here, whereas my
voice, when I speak English, rests more here.
And I feel the placement a little lower.
Let’s talk a little bit about what happens
when you’re speaking. So, the diaphragm, here,
an involuntary muscle, just like you’re heart,
tenses up, which pulls down a little bit.
That turns your lungs into a vacuum, and it
sucks the air in. When your diaphragm relaxes,
the air then comes out. Your vocal cords here
are what make the sound. Think of blowing
up a balloon, and taking the neck of it, pulling
it wide so it makes that annoying squeak sound.
That’s what your vocal cords are. So, your
lungs are the balloon, and your vocal cords
are the mouth of the balloon. And this pressure
here is the energy of the voice.
So this is the energy, the fuel of the voice,
and up here we have the articulators: the
tongue, the teeth, the jaw. That takes the
core sound made by the vocal cords, and shapes
them into the sounds of American English.
I feel like many of my students lack a connection
to this fuel, to the energy. And they speak
only from their face. Of course their body
works in the same way, they’re bringing in
the air, but they seem to have no attachment
to it. And their voice seems completely detached
from their bodies. But when I speak, I feel
my voice very attached to my body.
One exercise you can do to try to focus on
your body rather than your face when you’re
speaking, is just to exaggerate the movement
here, tss, tss, of your abdoment, tss, zz,
tss, zz, to connect more to a lower sensation
of the breath. Now you wouldn’t want to do
that when you’re speaking, but it could be a
good exercise for you, to get you into your body.
So here we have the fuel and here the articulation.
Now, we want our articulators to be very relaxed.
If there’s any tension, in the throat, for
example, it will bring the voice up, and the
placement up, and then we loose the connection
here to the fuel of the voice, to the body.
We’re currently working on a series of videos
dealing with relaxation to help you get the
voice out of your face and head and into your
body. In the mean time, just play around with
the idea of pulling the air all the way down,
ss, zz, and fueling your voice from here,
a lower spot in your body.
That’s it, and thanks so much for using
Rachel’s English.