Ep 2 Live Q&A – February 27 2019 – If your voice is naturally nasal, how do you tone it down to being less nasal?

And so we’re going to jump into our first question here. I’m going to try this new little … They call it a slider. So okay, so the first question comes from, this is from one of our … Alex Anderson writes in, okay, if you have a natural nasal voice, how do you tone it down to being less nasal?

Matthew Edwards: Yeah, so this question comes up a lot. Most of the time we believe that nasal quality comes from a soft palate that’s not lifted all the way, okay? And so there’s what I like to teach my students is that there are basically three main soft palate positions. The first one is when the positions all the way down so everybody you can go “ng,” make an NG sound. And then as you do NG and then as you do NG, you can pinch your nose and go “ng.” And as soon as you pinch it stops. That’s because all the sound is going up and through your nose. I have a diagram back here, the sound goes right up and goes right up into your nose. The complete opposite of that is the British ahh. So if you go, “Ahh” like a big domey feeling in the back, that inverted pear feeling, “Ah-ha.” And then you pinch your nose, “Ahh.” Nothing changes, that’s because in that position the soft palates all the way up. Then we have a place somewhere in the middle which is a lot like a French nasal Oh. And on a French nasal oh that, “Ho-ho-ho,” sound, the soft palate is about halfway down. And if you pinch your nose then. Some of the sound changes, but not all the way. Now I shared with you an MRI video that I put together.

Matthew Edwards: I don’t know if you can pop that up on the screen here, but-

Mike Elson: You give me two, which one did you want?

Matthew Edwards: Let’s do the MRI soft palate.

Mike Elson: Okay, got it, okay.

Matthew Edwards: So he’s going to toss up this video on the screen. I’ve been doing some work with dr. Aaron Johnston at NYU Langone Medical Center where we’re using MRI technology to research professional singers. And this was when we were just testing out the equipment. And I got inside of an MRI machine, you’re laying on your back. But I sang through these three different basically locations of the soft palate, the ng, the British ahh, and the French nasal oh. And I can actually show you now on the screen what it looks like.

Mike Elson: Great, I’m going to share. Let me share my desktop here. Trying this out, so you guys actually get to see the broadcast room, sharing your desktop. Click share, there we go, okay. If it’s going to share, come on, a little share screen [inaudible 00:13:39] cloud share. Is this sharing right now?

Matthew Edwards: It’s not on my end. So if we can’t, we can throw that link up and have them go check it out.

Mike Elson: Okay, stop sharing here. Let me try one more time. I might have clicked too many, share your entire screen, share your desktop. Okay, it does say it’s sharing, but I don’t actually see it sharing here, so it looks like we’ve uncovered a new setting there. So I’m just going to drop the link then.

Matthew Edwards: Yeah, let’s just drop it to them. And basically, if you get on YouTube and search soft palate MRI you’ll find this video. And it’ll show you all those things that I just walked through of those examples. And so what often happens is someone’s soft palate is falling, and it’s going more towards that ng or French nasal oh position instead of more of a British ah. And if you’re wondering if that’s you all you need to do is grab a flashlight and go to a mirror. And if you go to a mirror and sing, you’re just going to put that flashlight inside your mouth. And you’re going to see your uvula hanging down in the back, this should be on camera. It’s that little dangly thing, yeah right. If you go ah, and it’s all flat and hanging down in the back your palates not lifting. If the pallets lifted you’ll see it raised up and out of the way and there should be a hole between your tongue in that soft palate. Now the key is in some traditional pedagogies, the idea of lifting the palate is connected to a specific tonal goal, and it tends to be a warmer vowel.

Matthew Edwards: When you’re working in commercial styles and musical theater you’re not necessarily lifting the palate to try to get a tonal quality, but rather lifting the palate to make sure that there’s a hole in the back of the mouth that sound can get out of. And you’re just trying to make sure that there’s an opening back there, so you’re going to train to do that in the mirror of just breathing in trying to get that guy to lift up in the air. And then when you breathe in and can lift it up, one of the things I’ll tell people is to imagine they’re getting a strep throat test because we all know what that’s like when the doctor comes [crosstalk 00:15:32].

Mike Elson: It’s like the doctor says, “Ah.” And you open up and then he’s looking in there right to see if there’s redness or irritation, and swollen, right?

Matthew Edwards: Yeah, absolutely. And so that gets you that opening, look in the mirror try to sustain that opening, just holding it by itself it’s like an isometric exercise. Then after you can just keep it up in the air, start sighing through it, try to keep it up as you sigh because a lot of times it’ll try to close down. Then after you’ve mastered sighing try to do descending five-tone patterns, just breathing, lifting, ah, and then bringing that tone quality down. That’s like your base entry-level place so starting to play around with whether or not your soft palates lifting. The other thing they can create some of those nasal sounds is constriction down here in your pharynx. One of the easiest ways you can tell if that’s happening is to put your fingers down here around your Adam’s apple or your Eve’s Apple. And you’re going to first go “Goo, Goo, Goo,” like you’re squeezing, “Go, goo, goo.” And then you’re going to laugh and go “Hahahahaha.” And you should have [crosstalk 00:16:35].

Matthew Edwards: Yeah, so on the goo it’s going to narrow in and tighten up and on the hahaha it should relax open. If when you’re singing you’re feeling a lot of that goo, goo, goo feeling happening, it means you’re constricting and that constricting, and narrowness, and raising of the larynx can also lead to some of that nasality in your sound.

Mike Elson: Got it, right. So I was going to say what I learned this axiom is … Let’s see, I wrote it down because sometimes I say sometimes I get confused. I say backward and then the joke is lost. But the nose is in the tone, but the tone is not in the nose.

Matthew Edwards: Absolutely.

Mike Elson: So it might sound like it’s got a little bit of nasalness. But you’re actually you can’t put the sound into your nose because you can’t get air to go through your hard palate. And [inaudible 00:17:26] exactly the point, it has to go back behind the soft palate. You have to have too soft palate lifted and raised. And that soft palate is like what do they call the vibrational relay to the head resonators, so exactly.

Matthew Edwards: Well actually the other term, if you’re into voice science, to check out is VPO. They call it the velopharyngeal port opening. And that’s basically the fancy complicated term for a slight opening in the back. But if you go through research studies they’re finding that even opera singers do not seal the nose completely off, that in a lot of opera singers there’s a slide opening. But if you look inside of a nose you’ll find that it’s full of fleshy structures that do not create one just open tube and it’s not firm surfaces, so the nose is a really poor resonator. So it’s not usually a goal. People sometimes will use nasality to try to find mix because when that port opens a bit it does take off pressure off of your vocal folds, but that’s usually just a stepping stone and not a permanent solution.

Mike Elson: Right, no, you bring up a great point too. The nose is actually a terrible resonator because it can’t adjust the size. And in order to change what we need some of the other resonators that we have and the pharynx and behind in the oral cavity are you changing pitches. And because you’re changing the frequencies, you’re going to have to change the shape of the resonators to increase that. And you can’t change that size, it’s just not going to-

Matthew Edwards: Not without a really ugly surgery, I’ve seen it done on TV [crosstalk 00:19:14] wrong television shows watched.

Mike Elson: And I just want to acknowledge we have had some other questions come in so I want to keep moving on.

Matthew Edwards: Yeah, yeah, let’s move on.

Mike Elson: John, I see your question. We’re going to get to that too, thank you. If anyone else is joining in has a question just drop it in. We will try to field as many as we can. So let me move on to the next question we have. And this is actually a fun one. And when it came in I thought do we want to do this question, but we’re going to go for, right?