ok, the basics behind the voice are quite simple, almost as simple as breathing in and out. breathing in is just that – filling your lungs with air. breathing out and singing (or talking for that matter) are very similar but not exactly the same. well, actually singing is just a noisy way of breathing out :-)
alright, now i have to use some terms i looked up in an english-dictionary – hopefully they’re the correct ones and you can understand this…
after the air comes up through the windpipe or trachea it passes through the larynx aka voice box (notice something?), the throat, the mouth and out it goes. it would be good if you’d have a look at the windpipe-link above which leads to an article on wikipedia. you’ll see some pictures of the lungs and the larynx, especially this one here is important
if you would chop someone’s head off (hypothetically speaking…) – right through the larynx – and look in his throat from above, this is what you’d see. the windpipe is in the middle and on it’s left and right sides you can see the vocal cords or vocal folds (the somewhat brighter stripes). when breathing normally it looks like this, during sports it’s opened wider because of stronger breathing and when you talk or sing the vocal folds are closed. they are virtually pressed together. how this works exactly is not really important and even if it was, i could not explain it in english. suffice it to know that the air goes through the larynx and passes the vocal cords inside of it. that’s where it gets interesting. take two sheets of paper, hold them together and blow through them. one would imagine that they just get blown apart but they don’t. they kind of flutter, right? well they should, just try harder the next time, will ya?
this is exactly what happens with the vocal folds during singing. they are pressed together first, airtight. a thin layer of fluid helps with that. then the air comes from down below and is stopped there. now a certain pressure is needed to get through. if this pressure is high enough the vocal cords are blown apart and flutter or better: vibrate. that creates the soundwaves, which are nothing else than differences in air-pressure. so this is where the tone begins. it then travels through the throat and the mouth where it gets it’s characteristic sound and color. every person has a different shape of the throat, mouth, nose-region and so every person has a different voice because the reflections are different – some frequencies are amplified (those are called formants), some pass through and some are weakened. the mixture of all those frequencies defines the sound of someone’s voice.
i think that’s enough for now. i’ll make the connection to the candle-experiment in the next entry of this series…
p.s. i hope it’s allowed to embed this picture here. if anyone has a problem with this, just let me know and i’ll delete it right away…
