Voice class from BCAE
Apr. 9th, 2005 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonLast weekend's BCAE class was an interesting complement to my book studies on voice (see the entry about that book). It covered articulation and pronunciation as well as the proper use of the mechanism, so it wasn't aimed entirely at my interests, but that's all right. It was interesting anyway.
Here are some of the things we covered. Though this is long, I'm actually skipping a lot.
* Breathing, breath control and projection: there's diaphragmatic, thoracic and clavicular breathing, and diaphragmatic is obviously the one you want for speaking. What I didn't know is that, when speaking, you want to breathe when your lungs are about half empty, not 90% empty, so that you always have plenty of air and plenty of control. Having more air lets you keep more pressure on your vocal folds, which is how this ties in with projecting, and you don't sounds stupid and strained as you do when speaking on your last little bit of air.
* Also, you do not want to use (much) more air than you have to while speaking. A small stream of air is enough to make vocal sounds, even loud vocal sounds. I questioned immediately whether one could use a small amount of air and still project, and the teacher told me that's exactly how you do project. Apparently how well a sound carries over distance has an inverse relationship with air flow. He was able to demonstrate pretty convincingly that a loud, breathy voice doesn't carry, while a quieter but more tightly controlled voice does. The physics of this confuse me, since once a sound wave is released it's kind of out of the speaker's control... does the extra air allow for more turbulence at the place the sound waves are formed, thus dissipating some of the wave form immediately? Or is it just that the high frequency (hiss of air) imposed over the lower frequency (speech) makes it easier for other wave forms to mess it up? Whatever it is, it seems to be true. In fact, I think this is a major piece of information I need to put together with the stuff from Cooper's book, because when doing those book exercises I definitely have felt myself using up all my air really fast.
* Resonance: the 3 resonating cavities are in the head (can be broken down into the nasal passages, mouth and sinus cavities, the throat and the chest. Head resonance gives you overtones. There are 3 types of flat sounds... a tight throat leads to a piercing harsh sound, which if not projected gets raspy and sounds like a really old person's voice. A nasal flat sound is a component of twanginess (think Ross Perot), and a de-nasal flat sound is what you get when you have a cold and can't pronounce m and n sounds.
* To resonate, you need an open throat so the rear wall of the throat, which bounces sound forward and out your mouth, is relaxed. You want your throat to be cool and moist, so take sips of room-temperature spring water often if you're speaking a lot. Milk is bad because it sticks to the vocal cords. He gave us an exercise to open the throat that I may not be able to describe very well... you take a breath, pitch your voice really low and make it breathy, and use up all your air in one sentence. The sentence is Hiiii theeeeerrre, how aaaaaaaaaahhhhrrrre yoooouuuuu? You should sound incredibly pretentious and condescending, and have no air left when you are done.
I forgot to ask whether you are indeed supposed to have both head and chest resonance, but at least two things the teacher said implied that yes, you are (and that it's possible).
* Volume: I already posted about the volume exercise we did. The tricks to being loud are apparently 1) to not let one's voice rise in pitch and 2) to use as little air as possible. I also learned there's something called a VU meter that measures decibels, which would be fun to play with. For social interaction you want to be between 40 and 60 dB.
* Pitch: finally we got around to pitch. I learned two more ways of finding a 'natural' pitch. The first is to hum down a scale until the lowest comfortable note is reached (doesn't work well for me because I'm quite comfortable in a zone that gives me no head resonance at all). The other is to open up, patient-style, and say ahhhh. Seems similar to the method of sincerely saying 'mmmm-hmmm', but harder because it's hard to feel for the telltale facial vibrations that say you've got it right. The teacher also said that lower tones are easier to listen to, and are less tiring for the vocal cords as long as you aren't speaking too low. I think that doesn't have to be true... shrug.
He also said that most people have 2 to 3 octaves total range, and natural pitch is usually 1/3 of the way up from the bottom. I think that is true. I have 3 octaves, not that I've actually sung those high notes in a while, and my natural pitch is just over one octave up from the bottom.
* Rate: you want to be about 150 words per minute for conversation, and ~175 for a business presentation. We were given a paragraph of the appropriate length for timing ourselves but I haven't tried it yet. Boston is home to some fast talkers, slower only than New Yorkers, so in this area it's obviously acceptable to be a bit faster.
* Articulation: we spent a LONG time on articulation and pronunciation, which is fair enough since most of the people there needed to work on those things and the teacher's specialty is accent reduction. I won't bore you with the details. I did learn that there are eight plosives (sounds you let go explosively, like the "t" sound)... they divide into the four voiced ones B, D, G, J, and their unvoiced counterparts P, T, K, CH. It's damned easy for one to turn into another (say 'little'), or for them to get swallowed (say 'certain' or 'maintenance') or skipped entirely ('twenty' becoming 'twenny').
As a neat little aside, the past tense of verbs treat the final consonant as voiced (D) or unvoiced (T) depending on the sound before it. So missed is pronounced as mist because S is unvoiced, but buzzed is pronouced as it is spelled because Z is voiced. As a native speaker I would never have noticed that one, but it's interesting to know.
All this ties in well with rate because you can usually slow yourself down 20% or so just by being careful to pronounce all plosives, especially ending sounds.
* I did ask my one really aggravating articulation question: I have trouble with clearly saying my name, which starts with an R. Amazingly, the teacher instantly asked which of the two tongue positions I was using. Two positions? I said. Yep, apparently the tongue can either just form an arch to make an R, or it can arch but also curl up at the tip. I use the first for my name, but use the second one when I have an R in the middle of a word, like giraffe. Girrrrrrrrraffe. Feel it? And that's the one he recommended trying for my name, putting a tiny 'er' syllable on the beginning as a practice tool.
You can't start as strongly with an R as you can with a plosive, so I'll never do as well as if my name started with, say, a T, but that was pretty cool to learn regardless. I'm really glad I asked. :)
* Cutting down on vocalized pauses like like, um, I mean, you know: those things really can make a bad impression if repeated too much. It's better to just pause for a second. The page in our handout about exterminating um and uh is mercifully online, here.
I took Nala to the vet earlier this morning. As usual, she embarrassed me by proclaiming to all we passed that I was torturing her in the cruelest possible fashion, but she remains in good health. What a good kitty. She also acted much smarter about the carrier than she ever has before--this is the first time she didn't want to come out of it in the vet's office, and willingly went back in when it was time to go home. She was quieter on the way home too. I guess she finally has the routine figured out.
Here are some of the things we covered. Though this is long, I'm actually skipping a lot.
* Breathing, breath control and projection: there's diaphragmatic, thoracic and clavicular breathing, and diaphragmatic is obviously the one you want for speaking. What I didn't know is that, when speaking, you want to breathe when your lungs are about half empty, not 90% empty, so that you always have plenty of air and plenty of control. Having more air lets you keep more pressure on your vocal folds, which is how this ties in with projecting, and you don't sounds stupid and strained as you do when speaking on your last little bit of air.
* Also, you do not want to use (much) more air than you have to while speaking. A small stream of air is enough to make vocal sounds, even loud vocal sounds. I questioned immediately whether one could use a small amount of air and still project, and the teacher told me that's exactly how you do project. Apparently how well a sound carries over distance has an inverse relationship with air flow. He was able to demonstrate pretty convincingly that a loud, breathy voice doesn't carry, while a quieter but more tightly controlled voice does. The physics of this confuse me, since once a sound wave is released it's kind of out of the speaker's control... does the extra air allow for more turbulence at the place the sound waves are formed, thus dissipating some of the wave form immediately? Or is it just that the high frequency (hiss of air) imposed over the lower frequency (speech) makes it easier for other wave forms to mess it up? Whatever it is, it seems to be true. In fact, I think this is a major piece of information I need to put together with the stuff from Cooper's book, because when doing those book exercises I definitely have felt myself using up all my air really fast.
* Resonance: the 3 resonating cavities are in the head (can be broken down into the nasal passages, mouth and sinus cavities, the throat and the chest. Head resonance gives you overtones. There are 3 types of flat sounds... a tight throat leads to a piercing harsh sound, which if not projected gets raspy and sounds like a really old person's voice. A nasal flat sound is a component of twanginess (think Ross Perot), and a de-nasal flat sound is what you get when you have a cold and can't pronounce m and n sounds.
* To resonate, you need an open throat so the rear wall of the throat, which bounces sound forward and out your mouth, is relaxed. You want your throat to be cool and moist, so take sips of room-temperature spring water often if you're speaking a lot. Milk is bad because it sticks to the vocal cords. He gave us an exercise to open the throat that I may not be able to describe very well... you take a breath, pitch your voice really low and make it breathy, and use up all your air in one sentence. The sentence is Hiiii theeeeerrre, how aaaaaaaaaahhhhrrrre yoooouuuuu? You should sound incredibly pretentious and condescending, and have no air left when you are done.
I forgot to ask whether you are indeed supposed to have both head and chest resonance, but at least two things the teacher said implied that yes, you are (and that it's possible).
* Volume: I already posted about the volume exercise we did. The tricks to being loud are apparently 1) to not let one's voice rise in pitch and 2) to use as little air as possible. I also learned there's something called a VU meter that measures decibels, which would be fun to play with. For social interaction you want to be between 40 and 60 dB.
* Pitch: finally we got around to pitch. I learned two more ways of finding a 'natural' pitch. The first is to hum down a scale until the lowest comfortable note is reached (doesn't work well for me because I'm quite comfortable in a zone that gives me no head resonance at all). The other is to open up, patient-style, and say ahhhh. Seems similar to the method of sincerely saying 'mmmm-hmmm', but harder because it's hard to feel for the telltale facial vibrations that say you've got it right. The teacher also said that lower tones are easier to listen to, and are less tiring for the vocal cords as long as you aren't speaking too low. I think that doesn't have to be true... shrug.
He also said that most people have 2 to 3 octaves total range, and natural pitch is usually 1/3 of the way up from the bottom. I think that is true. I have 3 octaves, not that I've actually sung those high notes in a while, and my natural pitch is just over one octave up from the bottom.
* Rate: you want to be about 150 words per minute for conversation, and ~175 for a business presentation. We were given a paragraph of the appropriate length for timing ourselves but I haven't tried it yet. Boston is home to some fast talkers, slower only than New Yorkers, so in this area it's obviously acceptable to be a bit faster.
* Articulation: we spent a LONG time on articulation and pronunciation, which is fair enough since most of the people there needed to work on those things and the teacher's specialty is accent reduction. I won't bore you with the details. I did learn that there are eight plosives (sounds you let go explosively, like the "t" sound)... they divide into the four voiced ones B, D, G, J, and their unvoiced counterparts P, T, K, CH. It's damned easy for one to turn into another (say 'little'), or for them to get swallowed (say 'certain' or 'maintenance') or skipped entirely ('twenty' becoming 'twenny').
As a neat little aside, the past tense of verbs treat the final consonant as voiced (D) or unvoiced (T) depending on the sound before it. So missed is pronounced as mist because S is unvoiced, but buzzed is pronouced as it is spelled because Z is voiced. As a native speaker I would never have noticed that one, but it's interesting to know.
All this ties in well with rate because you can usually slow yourself down 20% or so just by being careful to pronounce all plosives, especially ending sounds.
* I did ask my one really aggravating articulation question: I have trouble with clearly saying my name, which starts with an R. Amazingly, the teacher instantly asked which of the two tongue positions I was using. Two positions? I said. Yep, apparently the tongue can either just form an arch to make an R, or it can arch but also curl up at the tip. I use the first for my name, but use the second one when I have an R in the middle of a word, like giraffe. Girrrrrrrrraffe. Feel it? And that's the one he recommended trying for my name, putting a tiny 'er' syllable on the beginning as a practice tool.
You can't start as strongly with an R as you can with a plosive, so I'll never do as well as if my name started with, say, a T, but that was pretty cool to learn regardless. I'm really glad I asked. :)
* Cutting down on vocalized pauses like like, um, I mean, you know: those things really can make a bad impression if repeated too much. It's better to just pause for a second. The page in our handout about exterminating um and uh is mercifully online, here.
I took Nala to the vet earlier this morning. As usual, she embarrassed me by proclaiming to all we passed that I was torturing her in the cruelest possible fashion, but she remains in good health. What a good kitty. She also acted much smarter about the carrier than she ever has before--this is the first time she didn't want to come out of it in the vet's office, and willingly went back in when it was time to go home. She was quieter on the way home too. I guess she finally has the routine figured out.
