Dente, C. (2017, May) Voice instrument picture.
We started the day with theory lessons about voice production. I could liken our voice to an engine, which is something I can relate to as an engineering student. It made me realize that in fact, our bodies work more like a machine than what I ever imagined because the ways devices work was never really that simple and it is the same for our voice. Even the production of sound requires certain knowledge in where we could utilize so that we may produce the optimal output while using lesser effort and causing lesser damage.
Since we learnt that having good breathing and good posture will help with our voice, having a different posture will result in being able to make an alteration to the voice we produce. This was when I realized that this is how emotions are injected into words, or rather how our emotion can influence our body to produce a sound that everyone will instinctively relate to our common emotions. It shed more light as to how a voice is trained, rather than to just try and mimic certain voices.
I decided to investigate common bad postures so that I can find out what to avoid in order to improve my voice. In this age, almost everyone owns a smart device and thus spend quite a significant amount of time looking down at the screen. It results in creating a lot of force on the neck as it tries to support our head, which is about 8 kg and will, therefore, move our posture out of alignment. Over time, the neck muscles that are constantly in tension will start to lose strength and our scalene muscles will be pulling back on the throat in an attempt to hold our head up. Also, people tend to carry heavy items in their bag daily and at times carry the bag with one shoulder, they tend to end up slouching and having uneven shoulders. Similarly, slouching causes our head to bend forward and again the posture will be misaligned due to a tight chest and weak back muscles.
Emily (2017, December). Bad posture photograph.
The bad postures can be easily seen if we were to look into the mirror and can be easily rectified as well with some stretching exercises. To strengthen the neck muscles, one can gently lift the chin up towards the sky, then tilting the head to the left and right without the shoulders being lifted up for half a minute each. To stop slouching, an easy stretch would be to simply hang from a pull-up bar while keeping the head in a proper alignment for up to 3 minutes (Altman, 2017).
The lesson progressed into how voice nodules can affect our vocal folds, which is something we should always take note of as overstraining our voice produces the same effect as well. As for the stretching activity, it was a rather general way of stretching our bodies and activating our muscles to prepare our articulators. My personal opinion was that since everyone abuses their body differently, a set of personal warm-up exercise will benefit us the most. The optimal result to obtain will be to be entirely comfortable and ready to speak, which will put us in a good mood where we will be raring to give our best efforts. Being able to reach such a state will probably apply for everything else as well, from making presentations to getting ready to study or work.
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