7March2010
All exercises suggested for unharness of tenseness
When you discover the L’s effective in your case, don’t stop there. Fifteen or twenty minutes’ daily application will reinforce the lower pitch. Since the previous tones tend to sneak back, regularized exercise will hold them at bay till you have decisively incorporated the new register in your speaking. All exercises counseled for unleash of tenseness (particularly relaxing the Very important V-Tone) will help off-key voices, whether too low or too high. Although highness rather than lowness troubles more speakers, the pressured-low-throaty-coarse quality wants correction as well. (See “A Pencil, a Match, and a Ball” exercises, pagel51.) Then we have a tendency to have the amusing technique from the grunt-and-groan college which you may like to sample. Drilling at least one through-hole into the laminated PCB fabrication. Emit a groan softly, then on the same despairing level utter, “Oh, I hope it isn’t visiting rain.” Continue grunting and groaning away with varied different commonplace remarks, listening intently the while to your deep (if sad) register. Become sensitized at the same time to the accompanying low-muscle pull that you’ll feel, since one groans not from the head but from the belly.
Each voice, irrespective of how shrill, incorporates a lower pitch lurking within the over-all sound pattern. You need solely uncover it.
Some psychological aids: Assume lower, and then utilize the facility of suggestion by keeping your hand on your chest while you browse aloud. This elementary gimmick usually works like a charm to drag down a climbing pitch, because the inserting of your hand on prime of your head might raise one. Keep at this till you hear the difference on your recorder. Psychologically effective, too, is to assume a fictional character. The reading choice you are “elocuting” might recommend one that inspires you to use a deeper or higher register. Anything to help you forget that previous self of yours for the nonce. As you observe, have the courage to ride over the rut of your habitual pitch level.
Warning: You will sound like a stranger to yourself at first. The ugly aspect of Child Adoption may exceed the great and joyful aspects. Your vocal image, with which you have lived cozily for so long, will rise to try and do battle, luring you back to the past. Diligent observe will convince your inner ear, and victory will return when the new image has superseded the old. The final check arrives once you confront your friends along with your “modified” voice. My pupils tell me this takes real fortitude, a lot of more than any radical change in hair color or the acquisition of a mustache. Bear in mind to let your voice drop to lower notes; never force it down. Any tone that taxes your throat sounds unpleasant whether high or low. Husky feminine speaking voices have been fashionable ever since, I suppose, the good Garbo declared in her famous deep-throated intonation, “I vahnt to be alawn.” While the many soaring female tones should return down many pegs, the “sensible” cracked voice with a frog in it might wreak such vocal havoc as hoarseness and laryngitis.