Your Public Best - Lillian Brown [40]
Only three sounds in our alphabet produce nasal sounds and are allowed to go through your nose. They are m, n, and ng. So if you say, “many have money this morning,” you are going to hear nasal resonance. None of the other sounds should go through your nose. When you say, “Good day! How are you?” there are no nasal sounds, and, therefore, you should not feel any vibration in the nose.
Say “chug-a-lug” and open up the back of your throat for the guttural sound. You should feel no resonance in the nose, but you should be aware of it in both the throat and chest cavities.
Now take a deep breath and fill your lungs with air. Hold the air for an instant and then say, “There are buckets in the road.” You should be able to feel the chest resonance that is produced by saying such a sentence.
These simple exercises help you to understand your own speech habits as well as the sources of resonance in your own anatomy.
Another good exercise for checking on the resonance coming from your chest is to put the tips of your fingers on your breastbone and say, “mumm mumm mumm mumm.” You should be able to feel the vibration.
Resonance gives your voice a pleasant carrying power. When you enter a crowded room, your resonant voice can be heard above the room tone. In a crowded room with a high decibel level, speak lower, rather than higher. You will notice that the people around you easily hear what you are saying.
Placement
The natural placement of your voice depends on the size of the resonance chambers in your chest, throat, and facial structures. Since amplifying devices distort the upper ranges of the human voice, you should determine the lowest placement that is comfortable and natural for you. This means that the production process is placed as low as possible, but without forcing it artificially low.
Think for a minute about the various placements of the singing voice: The soprano has the highest adult female range, the alto is the lowest, and the mezzosoprano is halfway in between. The tenor has the highest natural adult male voice, while the bass singer has a lower placement, and the basso profundo has a deep, heavy voice with an exceptionally low natural range.
Your natural speaking voice corresponds to one of these placements. Everyone has a low, middle, and upper register. If middle C on the piano is in the middle of your range, then you can go above it and below it—always with the back of the throat open, and the nasal passage closed.
You can lower the placement of your voice by understanding what I mean if I ask you to “talk to me out of your socks.” This is an easy-to-remember, seemingly nonsensical sentence that I say to my voice pupils. What I mean is that if you press your heels into the floor, your back straightens, and the diaphragmatic muscle is flexed automatically, causing your voice to come from a placement lower down in the body than if you were talking from out of your nasal cavity.
Likewise, when you memorize the feeling of a chest filled with air, the back of the throat open, then you can safely move up and down in your range without losing that pleasing resonant quality.
A good exercise is to say “he he he,” then “ha ha ha,” then “ho ho ho,” to understand the high, middle, and low placement.
As a voice coach, I have had to help many people improve the placement of their voices. In the early 1960s when I was the voice coach for broadcasters on the “Voice of America” radio network, one of my students had a hard time figuring out exactly where her voice placement was, and how to move the placement lower in her body. In other words, she knew that this change would improve the sound of her voice, but really didn’t know how to do it.
I suggested that she listen to some other radio or TV broadcasters and decide for herself about the voice placement—good or bad—of each speaker. She was especially