The Singer’s Voice Series; Vocal Tract – Free Video

The Singer’s Voice Vocal Tractdeparts from BreathandVocal Folds: its animation is derived from 87 MRIs taken of a singer as she sang different vowels and consonants – a rare set of materials.

video sample from Vocal Tract

These MRIs were then processed with special graphics tools and recorded in different sequences, which then were overlaid with additional animations, to produce vivid animations of how the articulators shape the air column in the vocal tract. This video allows you to quickly and effectively give your students a clear understanding of the impact of pronunciation based on the shapes formed within their mouths.

Like BreathandVocal Folds, it is part of the integrated vocal pedagogy multimedia platform, which frees you to intelligently manage your class time.

The film walks your students through each articulator: the tongue, jaw, lips, soft palate, larynx, and head. They can see vividly what is going on because the different parts are colored.

For example, in the image from the film in the left column, your students can see the tongue – the large magenta area – standing out from the rest. After the shock of seeing how large the tongue is, your students then see in the sequence of different vowels just how astonishing the tongue's range of motions are – a mental concept that greatly eases your teaching flexibility.

With Vocal Tract, you deliver a rich understanding of the IPA, the lingua franca of teaching voice, while supporting the underlying premises in teaching diction. You further help your students with a deep understanding underlying all exercises that involve modifying vowels, aligning formants along vowel tracks, and making consonants musical to enliven a vocal line.

Understanding the articulators and their impact on resonance from Vocal Tract sets up the next two films: Resonance and The Human Voice.

Run time: 23 minutes

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For the accompanying text, see Beginning the Process, the section "The body: The vocal instrument," and the subsection, "Resonance" beginning on page 189.

For further essays and pragmatic applications of the ideas in this film, see Mastering the Fundamentals and the section "Teaching and Learning Flexible Resonance" beginning on page 198.

For further expansion of how the ideas in this film lead to differences in the voice's registers (timbre), see the sample clip of “formants” from the film The Human Voice.

These units represent a small example of the integrated "mix 'n match" materials you can draw from the platform to enrich your teaching.

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