Unit 1 - Skills development in performing arts

Wednesday 14^th September

The development of the voice is a very important skill which we must improve throughout the performing arts course. The reasons why we have to improve the voice is because we don’t normally think in depth about the workings of the voice, it is very important and it may need improving.

We then discussed as a group in depth about the workings of the voice and how the voice is formed. The journey of the voice starts as a breath travelling into the lungs and out again. The breath travels out of the lungs and up the trachea into the larynx also known as the voice box or the vocal folds. The voice box is where the sound is formed. The two vocal folds that form the voice box determine whether the sound is going to have a high pitch or a low pitch. If the vocal folds are loose, this will mean that there is a low sound produced but if the vocal folds are tight, then this will create a high pitched sound. The sound then travels from the larynx up to the mouth. Once the sound has reached the mouth, it is met by an articulator. Some examples of an articulator include the tongue, teeth, lips, hard and soft pallet. The articulators shape the sound by stopping the sound in its path. The resonators carry the sound to make it longer. Some examples of these are the jaw, neck and cheeks. 

Once we had learnt about how sound is formed, we did a few activities to put this into practice and apply the knowledge that we had just learnt to the breathing exercises. We first started off with our intercostal breathing exercises. For this exercise we breathed in for 4 seconds, held for 6 seconds and breathed out for 8 seconds. As we begin to repeat this exercise more frequently it will become easier and our lung capacity will increase. We then moved on from the breathing exercise to an articulator exercise. This exercise consisted of saying aloud the vowels one by one but following the vowel would be a consonant. We continued the exercise with all of the consonants in the alphabet. For example we started with the consent B which would follow all of the vowels “ab, eb, ib, ob, ub”. We then repeated this saying the consonant twice after the vowel and then three times “abb, ebb, ibb, obb, ubb”. We carried out this exercise because it involves and uses all of the articulators. I found this exercise quite difficult as I have never done this before but the more practice I do, the easier the exercise will become.