Transcription
[Music] Me. [Music] Welcome, welcome to Thursday Night Live here on thevoicelessons.com Facebook page. Tonight, we're doing a live Q&A and answering singers' questions from around the world. Uh, Mike's not able to be here with us tonight. He's working ready on the newest release of the voicelessons.com app. I had a chance to, uh, test it out a couple days ago, and I got to tell you, there's some exciting stuff coming along that I can't wait for everybody to see.
So, uh, we've got plenty of questions to get through here tonight. Uh, if you're tuning in to watch, feel free to, feel free to throw any questions up. We'll try to capture any of those live as we go along. And, uh, let's get started right now with a question from Brooke. And Brooke writes in saying, "I want to know how to move my jaw the right way to sing well."
So, we get questions like this a lot. And it's my belief that when singers don't, uh, understand the biomechanics behind what they're trying to do, that a lot of times they're going to struggle to be able to make the sounds that they want to make, right? And once we have an accurate body map of our instrument, it's a lot easier to get the instrument to do what we want it to do.
So, to talk about the jaw, we'll use a model here tonight. So, I've got a nice skeletal model here, and we have the jaw that connects to the upper skull through what's called the TMJ joint, the temporomandibular joint. And so, this joint allows our jaw to open, uh, up and down. It allows it to wiggle side to side, and it actually will roll out of its joint and glide forward a little bit as well if we open our mouth past three-quarters of an inch.
Now, you can feel this joint in front of your ears. So, if you move in front of the tragus, which is this little flappy part of your ear, and you move your hand in front, you'll find a small indentation, and that's that TMJ. Now, open your mouth with your fingers there, and you will feel how it drops down and you get a slight opening where that joint is.
Now, if you open your jaw past three-quarters of an inch, you're going to notice that it not only drops, but starts to shift forward. All right? At that point, some people will experience a clicking. That clicking is movement of the disc that lays in between the joint and your skull. And that, uh, disc, if it gets displaced through an injury, which can sometimes people are born with, uh, injuries in that, uh, that's called the pterygoid, which helps hold that disc into place. But other times, someone has some sort of a dental surgery or braces, which does some damage to the ligament that runs inside of that muscle, and it can end up making one side of the muscle a little slack, and then the one other side of the muscle will start to over-tighten to compensate and will end up getting a pull on the disc that moves it out of place once the jaw opens up beyond three-quarters of an inch and starts to translate forward. So, we want to be careful to not open it up too far because that's one of the things that can cause a lot of jaw problems.
Now, to find an ideal jaw opening, one of the easiest things you can do is put your tongue on the roof of your mouth and then slowly open your jaw until you reach the point where your tongue is about to separate from the roof of your mouth. Then relax it back by maybe a millimeter or two, and you should have a comfortable jaw opening. So, tongue on the roof, drop the jaw, and bring it back a little and open your mouth, and that should be a fairly comfortable jaw opening.
Now, to make that jaw opening, you have muscles underneath of your jaw that are contracting to help pull the jaw down, along with gravity doing its job as well. But when these muscles underneath are trying to open the mouth, we have this muscle, which is called the masseter muscle, which is getting stretched. And that muscle has been programmed since birth that when it gets stretched open, then it needs to clamp down. When you're born, you're hungry, right? You get, you know, some food while you're in there, but you still, you come out and instinctually you want to eat. And so, the way that you get a baby to latch onto a bottle is you pull its bottom lip down and you open its mouth, and then once you put the bottle in its mouth and you let go of the jaw, it clamps down and it starts to suck, and that's how it eats. That's with us from that moment we're born, and it goes with us for the rest of our lives.
Then it comes time to sing, and when we want to go sing and we open up that mouth, uh, using the muscles underneath and gravity, this muscle gets stretched, and it wants to contract and go back to its resting state. And then what ends up happening is we get in a fight where this muscle is trying to close our mouth while the muscles underneath are trying to open our mouth, and we experience that as jaw tension.
Another thing that can sometimes contribute to jaw tension is actually tongue tension. In order to sing, we really need our tongue and jaw to move independently, but a lot of times the tongue tries to move with the jaw, and it will oftentimes start to retract or narrow in, creating tension that not only affects the tongue, but affects our ability to open our jaw as well as tensing muscles underneath our jaw.
So, the easiest baseline place, Brooke, that you can start is to get this masseter muscle to let go. So, you can try the tongue exercise of putting your tongue on your roof of your mouth, dropping the jaw to find that ideal opening. Then what you're going to want to do is trace along your cheekbones until you find a little soft pocket where the masseter muscle, which is this guy here, originates. And take it off. You can see there's that cheekbone, there's our joint, and the masseter muscle sits in between the cheekbone and the jaw down here. What we want to do is press our fingers lightly into this masseter muscle, and as we do that, that muscle will have a harder time contracting, so it's more likely to let go. So, you put your fingers here, glide down, press in, drop your jaw, and then vocalize. As you vocalize, you may notice that this muscle tries to twitch shut. Keep reminding your body that it's not time to bite, it's time to sing. And when we sing, we let this muscle go. It's only when we bite we're going to clamp it down.
This isn't going to be an immediate fix, but over the course of several weeks, if you work on massaging this masseter muscle and pressing in on it as you lower the jaw, your body will start to learn that that muscle is not supposed to be activated during singing. And when that happens, you should start to see some of that jaw tension release and start being able to get the sounds you're wanting to achieve and be able to sing some of the songs that are giving you trouble when your jaw gets involved. So, great question, Brooke. Thanks for writing in.
Jump on to the next. Next up, we have Mallory. Mallory says, "I wish I knew how to properly relax my neck, jaw, and shoulders in order to produce better sound."
This is another question that we get variations of quite a bit. I want to recommend a book to you, which is called "What Every Singer Should Know About the Body." And this is a great book that talks about a discipline called body mapping. Body mapping helps singers gain a better understanding of how their body is shaped, uh, how big the parts of it actually are, and how they function so that singers can, uh, be better performers through the knowledge of the function of their entire instrument.
The important thing that they talk about in this instance about the body is the structure, which is our skeleton. The skeleton is designed well from the time we're born. It's designed to help hold our own body weight. But over time, we end up either getting injuries or sitting in sub-optimal positions, or having a job that draws our body into a sub-optimal position, and we start to contract muscles that shouldn't be contracted. And as we contract those muscles, it starts to pull our skeleton out of place, and we start getting aches and pains. You might tilt your pelvis a little bit forward as you walk, and the next thing you know, you have lower back pain. You may spend all day at a computer, leaning into your computer like this, and the next thing you know, you have neck pain.
And what the authors of the book talk about is realigning your body so that the skeleton does the work of support, and not your muscles. They use the term alignment instead of posture. Posture is the way that you position your body, and it's more like a pose. You strike a pose, and your posture is fixed in that position. Alignment is about weight distribution throughout your skeletal system.
If you start at the top of the body, the skull rests on what are called the cervical vertebrae. So, if we turn our model around over here, we can look in the back and we can see the cervical vertebrae that run behind the neck, and they connect into the skull. And the top bone up here, it comes into what we call the AO joint. You can see the little hole right there. Your head is able to move up and down and side to side from that joint. The problem is, though, a lot of singers try to move it from this joint, the joint where the cervical vertebrae, the vertebrae behind your neck, connects to the thoracic vertebrae, which are the vertebrae that connect to your rib cage. If you try to move your neck from that place, you end up moving the weight of your head forward, which then puts a lot of pressure, a lot like a lever, on the rest of the cervical vertebrae. And your body is going to try to compensate. And the way that it's going to compensate is by trying to contract those muscles in the back of your neck to, uh, bring your neck backwards, and some of the muscles in the front of your neck to tilt your head down and try to reposition it. And when we do that, we end up with tension because we have muscles that are doing things they shouldn't have to do.
So, instead, what we want to do is try to get our head to balance on the cervical vertebrae and allow the cervical vertebrae weight to go down into the thoracic vertebrae. Because then, as the weight of the head comes down into the bones and then into this thoracic vertebrae, the thoracic vertebrae are going to connect down here to the lumbar vertebrae, and these are built as our natural shock absorber. And as you go through the book, you're going to learn that the lumbar vertebrae, the front of them centers inside of our torso, right? So, if we could draw a line from front to middle to back, side to side, find the middle point, that's where our lumbar vertebrae sit, and they help balance all the weight of everything that rests above them.
Now, if you get your head all knocked out, that can change the way the rest of your body moves to try to compensate to hold up the, uh, the weight of your head. And as you do that, you're going to move your rib cage into a sub-optimal position, which then is going to make breathing more difficult. So, then if you don't get enough air to sing, you might compensate by moving things in here in your neck that shouldn't be involved when you are trying to make sound. So, we want to make sure that the weight comes straight down into the shock absorber in its natural curved position.
Now, some singers will talk about, uh, the plumb line posture. And plumb line posture works for some. Some people's bodies are lined up where if we put a line right down the side of them, we could get their ears to be over their shoulders, their shoulders over their hips, hips over their knees and ankles. But there's also a lot of people who that doesn't work for because our spine has natural curves. And a lot of times, if you tell somebody to try to find a plumb line or imagine there's a stick going up and down their back, what they end up doing is trying to straighten out curves, the natural curvature of the spine, in a way that's artificial, and that will also cause problems.
Instead, we want there to be the slight cervical vertebrae curve. We want the thoracic vertebrae to be able to have this backward curve. Then we have the inward curve of the lumbar vertebrae. And then all of that comes down here into the sacral vertebrae. And the sacral vertebrae are where the upper part of the skeleton, the spine and the ribs and then the arms, all connect down to the pelvis. And the pelvis then works as an arch that distributes weight down into the legs, which then allows us to distribute our body weight evenly and keep our balance when we're walking and moving.
As that weight goes down into our legs, sometimes we do something that's a little bit funky with our knees. We'll lock our knees back, which then puts us a little bit out of balance, and then we try to compensate. If we don't mess anything up at the knees and we just, even if we do put something into a weird position, the weight then goes down into the ankles. And many people think that the connection point between their leg and their ankle is actually that heel that's all the way in the back. But it's not. The heel extends backwards from the point where the leg bones come down and join the foot. So, it's actually a few inches forward of where most people think. So, people end up trying to balance their weight on the back side of their heels, but in all reality, they should be balancing the weight a couple of inches forward.
So, what I would suggest, Mallory, is to look into the discipline of body mapping and to examine a skeleton if you can get your hands on one, or, you know, access one at a school or a library, or get online. And you can go to Zygote Body. It's Z-Y-G-O-T-E, and they have a 3D model that you can move around on your, uh, computer screen and be able to see where all the bones are connected. And then, as you are standing and positioning yourself to sing, think about how your head balances on the cervical vertebrae. Move it up and down, side to side, left to right, and pay attention what moves. And then try, as you move it, to find a place where it feels like the weight of your head is being carried by your spine and not your neck muscles.
Then you want to find that your arms are able to relax. You don't want to shove them forward, you don't want to pull them back, but rather just kind of move side to side until you find that gravity allows them to rest into the rest of your skeleton. Then take nice deep, low breaths and feel how your rib cage interacts with your thoracic vertebrae, and feel how your abdominal cavity might interact with your lumbar vertebrae, because the muscles in the front affect the curvature of the lumbar spine. If we have really relaxed muscles in the front, we might find that things are pulled forward and it puts a lot of pressure on our back. And if you're somebody who tries to tuck your belly in too tight, you might find that you're putting too much pressure on the inside and you're trying to straighten out your spine when it should have some natural curvature.
Then you want to kind of wiggle your hips back and forth and make sure that you're not cocking one hip out to the side. Remove them front to back and make sure you're not doing anything weird there, and allow the weight as you're moving your hips to distribute itself down into your legs. We want to find a knee position where your knees aren't too far forward, but they're also not locked back, where they feel balanced and like the weight is distributed evenly. And then, as we get down to your feet, also allow the weight to distribute evenly, thinking that you have a triangle between the ball of your foot behind your big toe, the other side of your foot behind your smallest toe, and then behind that heel joint. There's a triangle. You want to think of the weight being distributed equally amongst those three points of the triangle.
If this sounds of interest to you and you think that you may have some issues that you're not able to resolve by yourself by getting a more accurate map of your spinal column and the rest of your skeleton, I would suggest looking for a body mapping practitioner. There are also other disciplines like Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais that are used by a lot of singers and instrumentalists to improve their alignment and to get better results when performing. And you may also find that other complementary disciplines like yoga and Pilates can be helpful as well. So, thanks for the question, Mallory. Hope that helps.
Next, we have a question from Bryce. And Bryce says, "What can I do to better my breathing?"
So, there are lots of things that we can do to improve your control of the respiratory system. It really depends on what style of music you are singing, what you need to do with your respiratory system. Um, if you are, I see a couple questions. I'll jump on mine in a second, sorry, I just saw him pop up. But, um, if you're a belter, you might need to do, uh, one thing with your, uh, respiratory system, whereas if you are a classical singer, you might have to do something a little bit different. So, there is some variability amongst the way that you're going to use the respiratory system. But let's cover what's happening at a basic level, because many singers have some misconceptions that get in the way.
So, we're going to go back to our torso model. And right here, we have the rib cage, and behind the rib cage is where you're going to find the lungs. We have three lobes of our lungs on the right-hand side, and we have two lobes on the left-hand side. And the reason we only have two lobes on the left-hand side is because behind this part of the rib cage, you're going to find the heart. And so, we have two lobes to make room for the heart.
Now, the lungs are a real sponge-like, porous material organ of our body. There are about 300 million tiny balloons inside of our lungs that we call alveoli. And the alveoli stretch when we inhale, and then because they've been stretched out, they want to return to the resting position and they collapse to help expel air from our body. We call that stretching and then recoiling back to its natural position, elastic recoil. And elastic recoil produces what we call passive force. Passive force means we're not trying to force the air out, but no matter what we do, the air is going to flow out because of the elastic recoil of those alveoli.
Now, the lungs attach to the ribs, as you can see here. They attach right directly up to the rib cage on this side. You can see the cutaway right inside there, and they attach via what's called the pleura sac. And the pleura sac is a liquid membrane that helps attach the lung to the inside of the ribs. Now, this is very similar to, uh, the way that a wet plastic bag functions. If you put it up to a piece of glass, like a glass window, if you wet the bag and put it on the window, it's going to stick. But you can also grab part of the bag and you can pull on it, and you can slide that bag around the window, but it's still going to stick. That is how the pleura sac functions within the lungs. It allows the lungs to stick to the rib cage so that when we engage the muscles between the ribs, which we're going to get to in a minute, and the rib cage expands, the lungs go with it. And when the lungs move with the rib cage, that helps create a vacuum that draws air into the lungs. And then, as I mentioned, those alveoli are stretched, they want to collapse back. The rib cage will start to return to its resting position, and we expel the rest of the air from our lungs.
Now, let's talk about a couple of muscles that are really important for respiration. In between each of our ribs are muscles that we call the intercostal muscles. We have the external intercostal muscles and the internal intercostal muscles. The external intercostal muscles start on the bottom edge of each rib, they insert into the upper edge of the rib below, and when they contract, they draw the bottom rib up towards the upper rib. And when that happens, our rib cage swings up and out to help draw air into the lungs. If you put your hands on your rib cage and stick your fingers and palpate in there a little bit, you'll eventually find those openings in between those ribs, and you're going to want to inhale, and you'll feel that expansion happen. You are feeling the contraction of your external intercostal muscles.
Now, after we've inhaled and that elastic recoil starts to take over, we have another muscle group in our ribs that's going to help the recoil happen. Those muscles are called the internal intercostal muscles. Those muscles originate on the upper edge of the rib and they insert into the lower edge of the rib above. When they contract, they pull the upper rib towards the lower rib. So, these muscles work in an agonist-antagonist relationship, meaning that there's one muscle that tries to counteract the action of another muscle. So, there's always a give and take happening as we're breathing in with one muscle taking the lead as the other lets go, and then as we exhale, we have another muscle taking over as the other lets go. And that is how our rib cage moves during respiration.
Now, connected to our rib cage is a muscle called the diaphragm. And this is what lots of singers hear. They hear that they have to breathe from the diaphragm. I'm going to tell you now, you already know how to do it, because if you were not breathing from the diaphragm, you wouldn't be breathing at all. The diaphragm is part of our automatic nervous system, and it automatically kicks in, and it functions as long as you're alive and breathing on your own. The diaphragm is actually a relatively thin muscle. People talk about it like it's some big, massive, uh, chunk of meat, but it's not. It's actually rather thin. It does happen to be the second largest body, uh, muscle by mass, but that's because of how wide it is, and, you know, front to back and side to side, but it's not the thickest. This muscle also connects to the lungs through the pleura sac. And when this muscle contracts, it flattens. And as it flattens down, it draws the lungs with it because of the suction that's happening where the diaphragm connects via the pleura sac to the lungs. So, we have the rib cage swinging up and out as that diaphragm is contracting and pulling down, and that helps draw air into the lungs. Then, as we begin to sing, and that elastic recoil takes over, the diaphragm will begin to release.
Now, we can slow the return of the diaphragm to its resting position by doing what's called resisting the collapse. Resisting the collapse is when we engage those external intercostal muscles so that our ribs don't just suddenly collapse inwards. Because if you know, if you've ever been running or doing athletic activity and you're trying to catch your breath, you breathe in, and the ribs automatically come back in. They're designed to pump oxygen in and out of your body, right? It's only for specific activities like swimming or deep water diving or singing where you teach your body how to hold air in its lungs and release it slowly.
So, to resist the collapse, you're going to start training those external intercostal muscles to take the lead. And as they take the lead, it's going to prevent the diaphragm from just popping back up to its resting position. Because the diaphragm connects to the bottom of the ribs, it connects all the way along this area. So, if the ribs aren't moving in, the diaphragm can't move up. And this is one of the best ways to make sure that you don't run out of breath when singing a phrase.
So, a good way to practice this is to take a big breath, and you're going to put your hands on those bottom ribs, and then you're going to hiss out and try to keep your rib cage elevated while you're hissing. Now, you're going to notice as you are hissing, or if you want to try singing a sustained note, that the rib cage is going to come back in. The key is not to keep it from coming in at all, but rather to make sure that it comes in slowly. Because if it collapses in quickly, you're going to get a little burst of air that can cause tension inside of your larynx, and it could even make your voice sound shouty. It can make you go sharp as well.
Then, as you continue to work on developing your respiratory system, you will eventually learn how to use your abdominal muscles and how to contract your abdominal muscles, if necessary, to help bring that rib cage down. The abdominal muscles connect to the ribs, so when we contract them, it can help bring those ribs down to help expel the final little bit of air out of our lungs. And it also helps compress what's called the viscera, which is all of this, the, the stomach contents, right? All of your intestines, uh, your liver, your stomach, kidneys, all of that. It helps compress it towards muscles in the back called the quadratus lumborum, which then ends up creating a little bit of a cage around your viscera. And as you compress it, it pushes upwards into the diaphragm, which then helps also expel that last little bit of remaining air in your lungs that sometimes is necessary to get through a really long phrase.
Now, don't worry, you will always have some air remaining in your lungs. As long as we're alive, there's always some air that's in there. We're never going to get all of it out in an exhalation, but we want to get as much of it out as possible in some instances.
The last thing I want to mention is that it's important to breathe for the length of the phrase. If you're singing a small phrase that only lasts two to three seconds, you don't need to take a huge breath. But if you're singing a phrase that's going to take five to ten seconds, you might need a little bit more air in your respiratory system to get through that phrase.
So, Bryce, what I'd say is to go through this information. You can jump onto YouTube and look up 3D diaphragm, and you will find some great animations of the diaphragm in action. You can also look around on YouTube and you'll find respiratory tutorials that will also show you how the rest of the system works in the ways I've described, but with animations that will help bring it to life. Thanks for the question, Bryce.
And I want to jump over real quick to Jill. Jill, uh, asks, "Do you teach your belter students to add twang by engaging their aryepiglottic sphincter?"
This is a great question, Jill. Uh, I do not. And what my thought is on this is that that, uh, narrowing of the aryepiglottic sphincter is happening because of vowel choices that we make. And in most singers, if they are free of constriction, it will happen on its own as they go for a brighter, twangier vowel quality. Whereas if they try to directly manipulate and narrow that epiglottis on their own, they could end up causing tension.
So, now, just to clarify what we're talking about here. This is the larynx. This is the trachea that comes up. The cricoid cartilage sits on the bottom, the thyroid cartilage sits on the top, and this is the hyoid bone. And right behind the hyoid bone in the front is this guy, which is called the epiglottis. The aryepiglottic sphincter is, you can't see it here on, uh, the epiglottis, but there's usually tissue that comes down around the sides. And the belief is that when the epiglottis pulls back, it narrows this space, the space between the epiglottis and the arytenoids. And as it narrows that space, we do have plenty of models that show us that it adds certain frequencies to the voice that we perceive as twang. And I do believe that's what happens.
What I question, and I'm not 100% sure that, uh, I'm on board with, is the idea that we can force this to happen. There is a method of teaching out there that, uh, teaches that you can narrow that aryepiglottic sphincter. And I see some people for whom it does work, and they say they can control it. You hear them make changes in their voices, and if it works for them, fine. But I meet many other singers who try to narrow their aryepiglottic sphincter, and all they do is end up adding a ton of tension in what are called the constrictor muscles. The constrictor muscles are muscles that surround the pharynx that are involved in swallowing, and they help narrow it, but they're narrowing it in a way that should only happen when we swallow, not necessarily when we sing.
Now, the pharynx will sometimes narrow on its own, but that should be happening by us thinking about the vowels. And Ken Bozeman has written a couple of great books about, uh, voice acoustics, and in those books, he talks about the back room and the front room. He says that the back room is everything that happens behind the hump of the tongue, and the front room is everything that happens in front of the hump. At the time, that front room is primarily responsible for vowel clarity, and the back room is primarily responsible for timbre.
Now, anytime we enlarge a space, it's going to produce more bass-like frequencies. And any time we narrow a space, it's going to create more treble-like frequencies. So, if I have a really bright, smiley "ah" vowel, I might get some of that twang effect by the vowel positioning in front of the hump of the tongue. But at the same token, when my brain is thinking to make a bright sound, instinctually things are going to happen in the back room, as long as I don't manipulate things too much, or if I don't have too much tension back there that's stopping things from being able to move on their own. And I believe it's at that point when the pharynx is freeing, and we go for that bright frontal vowel, that things may narrow in in the back, and we are likely to see the AES narrow as well.
It often coincides with belting. And another thing that's happening when we belt is the larynx is raising up a little bit. All right? So, this is the larynx. It sits right in front of the cervical vertebrae. And when we go to belt, we get a lot of breath pressure underneath the vocal folds and going up against the folds because they're in a thick configuration. And when they're thick, they limit the amount of air they can get through. And anytime we have a lot of pressure underneath the vocal folds and we're eliminating how much air can get through, the larynx tends to rise. This is especially important for swallowing. When we swallow, we push those vocal folds firmly together, but we have to have air in our lungs to swallow. And that air pressure helps lift that larynx up, which enables that epiglottis to go backwards and helps guide food down into our esophagus. So, it's a pretty essential function of our daily lives.
So, when, um, we go to belt and we get that air pressure built up underneath the thick vocal folds, the larynx will raise up a little bit. And as it raises, that epiglottis is going to tilt back, and we are going to narrow that aryepiglottic sphincter. So, I think there are, you know, lots. I think it's helpful to be open-minded, and I think there's a lot of research that we still need to do. It would be great to get some of the people who say they can control their aryepiglottic sphincter opening in an MRI machine where they can go and measure what they're actually doing and look for other interactions in their vocal tract that may be contributing to that, as for instance, an elevated laryngeal position, which naturally tends to bring that together.
But when I'm teaching, I will use the term "twang" because I find that a lot of people prefer that over saying, "put a little nasality in the sound." Nasality has bad, negative connotations with it, whereas twang has more positive connotations. Um, one argument against the term twang is that it's often associated with country music. I can understand why people would feel that way, but it's also a term that a lot of other people find helpful. So, I think what's best is that we use whatever helps our students, and we guide them along with language that makes sense to them to help them get the results they're looking for and to achieve their goals.
And, uh, I noticed that Audry Meikle has chimed in. If you don't know Audry, she's a world-famous musical theater pedagogue. It's great to have you here tonight, Audry. We're going to have her on the show soon. Can't wait for that to happen. But, uh, I know Audry feels the same way and is also aware of this idea of the aryepiglottic sphincter. So, if anybody else has anything to add, please feel free to put it in the comments, either now or on the replay. Um, I know lots of people who teach the method that teaches this, and I have great respect for them. They're wonderful people who are totally student-focused, you know, and it's okay for some of us to look at things a little bit differently. But I'm happy to let anybody else chime in and share their thoughts as well.
Yeah, I like what Audry says. A sphincter is a ring of muscles that closes or guards an opening. So, once we narrow that in too much, if we can overly guard that, uh, the vocal folds, and what the other thing can happen is, we can have the air pressure trying to leave and get out of those vocal folds. It hits resistance from a narrowed opening, and some of that pressure can go back down on our vocal folds, and it can give us a little bit more pressure than we might want when singing.
Um, good. So, since we have some questions coming in live, we'll go ahead and grab onto Jen's question here. She says, "Tips for helping a 42-year-old female student loosen throat, tongue tension that has developed over the years and now has caused her to lose her upper range."
This is a good question. So, there's multiple things that can happen with aging that can affect our voice. First of all, since we've talked about the respiratory system, some, we reach our full respiratory capacity around the age of 20 for females and around the age of 25 for males. But then, as we get into our later 20s, we start losing not only some of our lung capacity, but some of the elasticity of those alveoli. By the time we're in our mid-50s, we've lost about 50% of the elasticity of those alveoli. And by the time we get into our 70s, we're starting to have about 75% of the lung capacity that we had when we were at our full maturity, around the age of 20 to 25. So, it could be, Jen, that you're attempting to use some respiratory strategies that worked well when you were younger, but are not necessarily working the same for you now. A lot of times, younger singers will find that they can resist the collapse, and that's more than enough power to drive their vocal folds and give them the sound they're looking for. But as they age, those vocal folds tend to thicken, especially in, uh, biological females, because of the hormone changes that happen, uh, with our regular daily life, and of course, childbearing. So, if you have had children, you've had some hormonal impact on your vocal folds. Some women, it's just a temporary change. Other women say that they feel that it's a more permanent change. But as these changes take place, those vocal folds get a little thicker, and you may need to use a little bit of abdominal contraction to help propel a little bit more air through the vocal folds to give them some power.
Now, working up from the respiratory system, the next thing we want to consider is what is happening at that vocal fold level. As I mentioned, hormone fluctuations throughout life can affect those vocal folds because there are hormone receptors on the surface of the vocal folds and what are called the epithelial cells. And research that's been, uh, discussed in Karen Brunson's book about the evolving singing voice, suggests that during a woman's menstruation cycle, that the cells of the uterus are shedding, and so are the cells of the vocal folds. They've actually done tests and found that the cells are the same, and they both have hormone receptors in it that lead both of them to shed during that time of the cycle. So, if you're a singer who notices at a certain time in the month your voice feels dry or heavy to move, you're not imagining things. That is an actual change that is happening in your body. And as people age and they get older and older, they may be feeling that that's a little bit more drastic. And as they get closer to the age of menopause, they may find that it becomes really drastic, and those vocal folds feel really thick and really heavy, and high notes, uh, can start to go away.
Now, uh, with Jen saying 42-year-old female, it's probably not that most, uh, females, biological females, do not go through menopause in their early 40s, although there are a decent percentage that do. But most of the time, what's happening is that the aging and possibly not practicing in the upper part of your range as regularly as you once did leads to a little bit of stiffening and maybe a little bit of atrophy in the muscles that control, uh, the larynx and the move of trying to stretch those vocal folds. And she says this is for a student. That's great. Um, she overthinks. Okay. So, this is another thing we can talk about. It's a good point.
But so, the first thing to do is to make sure that we are, in any voice, from, uh, the time you first start singing, always exercising the head voice. What's the head voice? It's that light, breathy mechanism in our voice. Now, in the classical world, head voice means one thing. It's a certain quality. But in the functional world of evidence-based voice pedagogy, we're talking about more of a breathy tone quality. And that breathy tone quality keeps the vocal folds from closing too firmly together, which can make it so you have a hard time with your high notes. And you're also in the uppermost part of the range, and that elongates the muscles of the vocal folds and the ligament that runs through there.
So, for this exercise, we're doing really slow, hooty, breathy "ahs" or "oohs," whatever feels the most comfortable. And the whole time, since Jen is a teacher, about working with a student, you're trying to get them to relax, getting them to close their eyes, move their body, allow their skeleton to handle the weight of their head, make sure they're not jutting anything forward, and making sure that they are just relaxing and allowing the voice to happen instead of trying to force it to happen. Because a lot of times, when people are worried about their high notes, we get into this mental game where they're so concerned about it, they end up locking their larynx up.
There is actually a medical condition called muscular tension dysphonia, which can occur either from technical issues surrounding overuse or misuse of the larynx, or can come from mental health issues as well. So, people who have gone through traumatic experiences can get muscular tension dysphonia so bad that they can actually lose their ability to talk. I had a student that was this way one time. She was diagnosed with cancer when she was 13, and she lost her voice completely, couldn't talk, because of the shock of being told that she had childhood leukemia. As she got older, she was able to get her speaking voice back, and she started to sing in her high school choir, and she was singing in her head voice, and that seemed to work. But later in life, she wanted to start writing songs and performing more contemporary music, more pop music, and she started trying to access her chest voice and found it impossible. And every time she would try to engage her chest voice, she would burst into uncontrollable sobbing. And what we found out through working with a speech-language pathologist colleague of mine, and with her working with her therapist, is that any time she brought her vocal folds together in the chest voice mechanism, that her body recalled those same sensations of being told that she had cancer, and her body freaked out. She had a certain association with the vocal fold closure and sensations of that with that traumatic past memory.
Now, anything can cause us to have mild forms of this depression. We have a world that is full of depressed, homebound people right now because of COVID-19. And in my own students, I'm finding a lot of them saying, "Everything just feels tight, and that it's kind of hard to access certain parts of their voice." And I believe them. I think some of it is, I have a lot of students that I don't think practiced over the summer. They're admitting it. So, um, and that makes sense. I mean, it's been a really rough summer for a lot of us. But it also could be that their depression or anxiety about returning to school is actually manifesting itself in contraction of those muscles that surround the larynx.
So, it may be that doing some meditative breathing could help. In fact, low diaphragmatic breathing, therapists say, stimulates, excuse me, stimulates the vagus nerve. And that the vagus nerve runs all through the lower part of our body. It comes up through the diaphragm and connects, connections to the stomach and to the vocal folds itself. And a therapist that's helping my son right now, uh, says that this deep breathing helps us settle our nervous system, and it helps fight the fight or flight, uh, sensations that we sometimes get in high anxiety, high stress moments. So, doing either box breathing, which is breathing in for four, holding for four, breathing out for four, and then holding the feeling of being suspended with no breath for four, and then repeating the cycle, or trying the 5-7-8 method, which is breathing in for five counts, holding for seven counts, and then hissing out or blowing out, he suggests blowing out for eight counts. This can help get oxygen flowing through the body, and therapists say that it can help calm us down and move us out of that fight or flight mechanism, out of the emotional core of our brain, and into the more logical core of our brain that can understand some of these things and actually be able to start overcoming them by working through them.
Something else to look into is cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are some of the lies that we tell ourselves. And it's not uncommon for someone who feels like they've lost their high notes to start catastrophizing the situation, where because the notes aren't coming out, they feel like it's the end of the world, and they start magnifying everything, and it gets to be very hard for them to deal with. And so, by talking through it and letting them know, "You're not alone. This happens to lots of people with aging, and it will come back if we're diligent and strategic about the work," helping ease the student's mind and letting them know that there's nothing wrong with them, that they're completely normal, and that as we age, things stiffen up a bit, things don't necessarily move the same way. If any of you who are in your 40s have tried to get on the ground and play with kids, you should be well aware of this. Trying to get down and play trains with my three-year-old is not as easy as it was eight years ago, and I can only imagine how it's going to get as I move into the future. So, most people don't understand that, and then they can relate that to their voice and go, "Okay, I get it," and they can work with it.
Another thing that could be really helpful if you've already looked at the tongue and breathing, if they're getting tight and closing up, is to try straw phonation. Straw phonation helps build up a pressure inside of our vocal tract that can move back and
down onto the vocal folds, and the research shows they use cameras through a singer's noses and then see what happens with straw phonation. What we see is that that epilary that we were just talking about actually opens up, and the vocal folds go into a more optimal phonation position where we have a better balance of flow and vibration. So look up Dr. Ingo Titze, last name is T-I-T-Z-E, and straw phonation, and you can find tutorials from him explaining it. He's the person that made it famous, so it's best to go to the source and go hear what he has to say on YouTube. He's the director of the National Center of Voice and Speech in Salt Lake City and, uh, is one of the most brilliant people you will ever find.
The other thing I would say to try as well is to actually try using less breath. Sometimes if we have a weakness and, uh, any of the the vocal mechanism, we try to compensate by blowing more air at it. And sometimes blowing more air at it can cause either problems of bringing the folds too tightly together or blowing them too loosely apart. It can go both ways, depending on how trained the singer is. So what I would do is start off having them blow out their air, blow out like up to 50 percent of their air, try to sing through that high note and see if that improves anything. If it does, then that tells you they might actually be using too much breath pressure.
Then, if you've been working, I'm assuming that you've tried both resisting the collapse and contracting the abs to try to send some sound through it, that can be useful as well. If you've already tried straws, another variation that you could try is to find a drinking straw, or maybe milkshake straws or bubble tea straws, and a bottle of water. And what you're going to do is stick the straw into the water and have them sing through the straw and into the water. And what that's going to do is it's going to give them a visualization of how steady or irregular their airflow is. So they're either going to see a nice steady stream of bubbles happening in the cup, or they're going to see it's all over the place. And if it's all over the place, you can use that visualization to help them smooth things out. The water is also going to provide a little bit of resistance that may help them elevate that soft palate and open up the pharynx, which should reduce some of that tension and allow, uh, be more likely to allow the head voice to come in.
And the final thing, uh, oh, okay. So I think you actually just may have kicked on to the main thing here, uh, Jen. The other thing to act also look at is make sure the soft palate's lifting. And so I grab it. Well, it's going to be hard to do in person right now. I wouldn't do this in person, but if you're online, you can have them grab a flashlight, open their mouth, look in there, and see if their uvula, that little dangly thing in the back of the throat, if it's hanging down or if it's lifted up. If it's collapsed, it's going to make the voice breathy. If you can then get it up, it's going to allow the acoustic interactions necessary to produce a full head voice to occur. So I would check that. Audrey mentioned the blowpipe, that's another good thing.
Um, Jen, back to your comment about losing 130 pounds, that actually could be a big factor in this. We're starting to find out that fat cells can actually hang on to estrogen in the body, and when you shed that weight, you're going to have a shift of the hormones. And so if she's just lost 130 pounds, she's went from having a vocal folds that were used to one amount of estrogen, uh, running through the system, and we have estrogen receptors, hormone receptors in the vocal folds. And you lose all that weight and those levels change. Now your vocal folds are going to react. And we see this pretty commonly across even genders, um, that we see the voice will change with this extreme weight loss. Had the issue before that, but it's still there after. It's interesting. So yeah, so maybe it's not that.
What I would say is, if you've tried all of these things that we're talking about, is to have, uh, then refer them to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, a laryngologist, if you have one in your area. Ear, nose, and throat doctors are generalists. They work with all three of those things: hearing disorders, uh, deviated septums, some of them do allergies as well, and a lot of them make great money removing tonsils and adenoids. But a laryngologist went through that same program and then spent another two to three years in a laryngology fellowship specializing in voice disorders for professional voice users. And they would be able to go in with the scope and look at what's happening at the vocal fold level. They may be able to use some EMG, which can measure vocal fold closure. They can do some respiratory measurements as well to see how the respiratory system is working. And of course, they can do a physical exam and see if they feel anything in here that might be holding on. There could be some thyroid issues underlying all of this, and if the thyroid is enlarged, it sits right around that notch of where the thyroid cartilage and the cricoid cartilage meet, and if it's putting some pressure down there on the larynx, some people do experience pitch issues and voice issues with that as well.
So it sounds like you're doing a lot of the right things, Jen. I would, you know, maybe play around with any new ideas that we threw out there. And then, like I said, if you still feel like you're not getting anywhere, I would just suggest, hey, you've lost a bunch of weight, things are changing, let's see if we can't get you into an ear, nose, and throat doctor to make sure that we don't have anything going on in there that might be easier solved with massage therapy because laryngeal massage is a thing and it can make a world of difference, but it should only be done by a licensed practitioner. You know, make sure that if she's had any medicine changes, that the medications aren't trying her voice out. And of course, to make sure there's no acid reflux because if you have somebody that's lost a lot of weight and they may have been doing different diets to lose that weight, it's possible that they have silent reflux that they're unaware of while they're sleeping at night that's actually spilling over into the vocal folds and could have caused some damage in those arytenoids in the back, which may be impacting their ability to bring those vocal folds together efficiently to produce the sounds that they're looking for.
All right, well, hey, great questions tonight. We're already at 7:54. But this was, uh, hopefully some useful conversations. Uh, Jen, thanks for stopping in and bringing that up. It's always great to have viewer questions and to answer them live and to have this interaction. Uh, you can tune into the show every Thursday night at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on thevoicelessons.com Facebook page. We're also restreaming out to, uh, Instagram, I believe, and also I know it's on YouTube, and we're looking at other platforms as well.
Interesting. Edgar says, Dr. Sadoff, who's one of the most famous laryngologists in the world, says there are voice changes with every 10 pounds you lose. That's interesting. I believe it, definitely. But, um, be sure to check out the show. I'm gonna have Adrian soon. Once her schedule opens up, we can get her on here. Uh, we have a special guest next week, Kat Reinert, who's gonna be on here talking about popular music degree programs, songwriting degree programs in the United States. We're gonna approach it from both the side of singers and what singers should be looking for, and it's going to be packed full of information for educators as well. What an educator should be looking for is they're guiding students into this field, and anybody who's teaching at a university, things they may want to consider as they are trying to develop one of these programs. And then in the coming weeks, we're going to have some special guests talking about books. There's a lot of great new books out on the market. I want to get some of the authors on. We're going to be having conversations about their writings and about some of their discoveries to help continue to expand everybody's mind about all the possibilities of the human voice. And of course, we'll continue to have our live Q&As, taking questions from singers and teachers. So if you have any questions you'd like to hear us answer on a future show, you can either send them to us through the Facebook page and send us a message, or you can drop them in on the comments. We'll check them out and we'll add them to our list. Thanks a lot for tuning in, and I look forward to seeing you next week.