Just Little Old Me

Breath is SUCH a big influence on the voices that one can create for characters, which is something I never really thought about. I knew about the importance of the voice in regards to characters, but I didn’t realize how large of a part breath played in the creation of a voice. The fact that when and where you breathe can have such an influence on the way the character comes across is, really, so fascinating, because I find breath and it’s relation to the voice to be one of the most impressive things. Something else that caught my attention was the technique of “expanding” to allow more breath in sounds a lot like the work we did in class recently, and the idea of keeping the ribs open so as to negate the need for taking more breaths. I currently try to work on that in regards to my characters because when I speak text, I like to be able to speak for long periods of time, as well as being able to speak texts fast (depending on the text, of course).

There were a few things that truly resonated with me. One of them would be the fact that changing your voice for a character can lead to a kind of “emergence” within oneself, within the actor. Another would be the large influence age has on the types of roles offered to different actresses (at least in regards to the time Streep mentions), because there are only certain characters that people want to relate to (either young, vibrant females or old, crones/cougars). There is no in between, which relates to the part that resonated with me the most (despite the fact that it isn’t technically related to V&S): the fact that men find it more difficult to relate to females characters. This may be partially related to the fact that men tend to find the idea of putting themselves in the position of women to be a diminishment, because being regarding as a women automatically means that you are less in the eyes of society. Maybe it’s even the idea of the fact that people like to see a reality they can relate to on the screen, and in most cases with men, they want to be able to see female characters in movies and on TV who are similar to the women they’d want to be with in their own lives.

Ah yes. Time to answer the BIG question. How does the voice work? Well, first of all, there are THREE main components that contribute to the production of sound (and they have cool names to help you remember them, too!): your lungs (AKA “the power source”), your voice box/larynx (AKA “the vibrator”), and your throat, nose, mouth, and sinuses (AKA “the resonator”). 

So - your lungs. Whenever you inhale, it causes your diaphragm to lower and the rib cage to expand, to allow air to enter your lungs. The same happens when you exhale; exhalation actually determines the power of voice. The airstream that has entered the trachea provides the energy to your vocal cords to produce the sounds. 

Now - ONTO THE LARYNX, which sits on top of the windpipe. It is composed of two vocal folds/vocal cords that open during breathing, but close during swallowing and vocal production. In order to produce sound, air passes between the two vocal folds; these folds are soft, and are thereby set into vibration (these vibrations can range from 100 to 1000 times per second, dependent entirely on the pitch of the sound). 

Finally, the nose, throat, mouth, and sinuses. Now, while the vocal folds can produce sound on the own, it simply sounds like a buzzing, but all of the structures (the aforementioned nose, throat, mouth, and sinuses) are part of the resonator system, so the previously mentioned buzzing sound is changed by this resonator tract to produce SOUND. 

WOO.