The vocal habit is monotone.
A dull quality of voice causes us to sleep and it is due to the shallow fundamental frequencies underlying the voice. Modulation of the acoustic energy within the frequencies of the human voice that characterizes music, similar to vocal prosody, will recruit and modify the neural regulation of the middle ear muscles, functionally calm the behavioral and physiological state by increasing vagal regulation of the heart and promote. S.Porges wrote a piece about 2011.
In order to create prosody in the voice, you have to have great dexterity in the muscles that control the vocal tract. When you are in a relaxed state, the myelinated vagus nerve only fires when you are innervated by the vocal muscles. The parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for regeneration and lowering the heart rate, and this nerve is governed by it. When you are stressed, the sympathetic nervous system is dominant, and nerve efferents like the myelinated vagus nerve become less prominent, and must battle to exert its influence over these vocal muscles.
As children, we can cry and speak indefinitely, with a break or touch of exhaustion. We enjoy all manners of sounds, find joy in their impermanence, and wail on sirens that take our voice to the bottom of its range, and swing it to its highest peaks. A child’s voice is a symphony. The range of the voice gets smaller along the line. An exciting speaker that innervates the inner ear muscles of the audience swoops and swirls his voice through the frequencies available to him, like a painting dancing with colour. The colour of our voice is restricted.
Your body learns to use your voice in a different way if you find yourself in a constant state of stress or anxiety. Neural resources are no longer required for empathetic human speech as they are used for movement or freezing. Prosody is effectively switched off because speech is stripped to its bare minimum. The body does the opposite of what is needed for cohesion; it either wants to fight, freeze, or run away, so newer neocortex activities like speaking with prosody, or active listening are not required. If the vocal folds are not stretched, the mind-body learns to acquire this new muscle memory, and the range of the voice in normal conversation can remain lacking. The field of psychoneuroimmunology is related to the voice. We find it difficult to speak when we are nervous.
Improving your voice is dependent on understanding your emotional life. If you don’t know what’s triggering your stress, you’ll find it hard to adapt to it, especially if you’re in a situation where your voice changes and you find yourself stressed. The study of interactions between behavior, neural and endocrine function, and immune processes can be defined as psychoneuroimmunology.
Voice work is not easy, there is no quick fix, and you will have to develop a strong discipline to post-pone gratification; but like anything in life, anything worth doing is difficult. Poor breathing or posture can be used to maintain a monotoned voice that has its root in your emotional life. The vocal folds have to maintain a thickness that limits the range of frequencies at their disposal if you underpower your voice. A voice is usually quite deep. An underpowered voice means there is a lack of breath to support the voice, you may get the words out phonetically, but the ideas and emotional life of what you are saying, which live in the variations of the voice, are non-existent. Get aware of what you’re doing.
If your voice lacks dynamism, singing is a must. There is a lot of research on the benefits of singing on your physical health, such as governing the release of a newly discovered chemical called endocannabinoids, which does exactly what you think it does, but it also helps stretch your vocal folds and activate articulators that may have become inactive. You learn how to give enough air to your voice so the tone and quality are not underpowered because it forces you to kickstart your respiratory muscles. It needs to be practiced so I might suggest the shower. This leads us to our next rule.
To get back to the potential for dynamic range in your voice, focus on the vowels in the word. The vowels in your voice have a different set of frequencies, this means that there is some kind of modulation in them. It is possible to get a sense of their potential in your common tongue by enunciating the vowels as a practice in your free time. Having completed the exercise, the sensation will linger.
It’s a self-destructive habit that pulls your legs out from under you. This occurs when you have something important to say, and it carries more weight, and if you don’t step up to bear it upon your shoulders, the words can explode before they’ve even left your mouth. It takes courage to speak your worth because once it’s passed your lips, you cannot take it back; however, underpowering tries to do just that, “one foot out of the door and one foot in”. The second vocal habit is under power.
Underpowering means that not enough breath is being capitalised to give enough tone, amplitude, and resonance to the voice so that it can either sound muffled or thin. The first way it can happen is that the tongue stiffens up a bit and then comes back into the throat to stop the sound from escaping. It may sound crazy, but you are trying to do two things at the same time, and this is a specimen of cognitive dissonance. When your voice fails to make it to the end of your sentence is a key example of underpowering. If you consistently fall off the end of your sentence where the crux of the idea lives, this should worry you because it detracts from the power of your idea. You have to be committed to it. When you have to speak on matters that are important to you, there is no sitting on the fence.
The fight-flight response to stress is one of the ancient neural vestiges that can be transformed into something that you can use. A locking of the respiratory muscles is the second. This is done when we are anxious to protect the body. Without going into the heritage of our nervous system, our response to stress developed to protect us from predator, so the tensing or priming of muscles was key to our survival. The most common is the constriction of the core muscles. Your core muscles are an important part of sustaining phonation, and a locked belly will not allow you to increase your intake capacity to efficiently enough air for what you want to say. The body is protected from an ancient enemy by the energy that should be directed to controlling airflow.
Be patient, your body is trying to protect you from the tiger behind the reeds. The concept of no effort is the key to it. The use of your voice is affected by the restriction of primary muscles used for respiration. The sternocleidomastoid is not meant for the fine control of vocalisation and can cause tension within the vocal tract due to their proximity. If you want to learn more about the effects of breathing on the voice, you should start with What Crocodiles and Humans Have in Common. If you find that a locked belly is common for you, you may have to begin a process of exercises that enhance your proprioception, so that you can begin to let go of unnecessary tension, in response to stress. Relaxing and releasing specific muscles can teach you the essence of “no effort” because it teaches you to understand, via proprioception, what muscles are required, and muscles that aren’t. If it means learning how to breathe effectively again, like an infant, then so be it, there is no shame in learning.
It’s practice. Record yourself and listen to yourself, without judgement. Try incorporating your body into the language if you find your voice lacks pitch. If you jump up or down, sit and stand up, or run on the spot, you will help to ignite your voice and give you the gift of colour. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain if you become aware of the vowels in your speech. What should happen now?
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