#episode17

Gretchen: So. Vowels. Lauren: Human voices are amazing. Like, the fact that we communicate by speech is this amazing process that’s basically that humans are giant meat tubes, and we make air go through those tubes to make sounds. But that’s disgusting, and that’s why we call it phonetics instead of meat tubes. Gretchen: Meat tube science? Lauren: The science of meat tubes and air! So, we kind of push air through, and then we have different parts of our vocal tract, so our – what we think of as voice box and our mouth, and all the things in our mouth, to kind of change – Gretchen: And especially our tongue! Lauren: – especially our tongue! – changes the way the air flows, and that changes the quality of the sound. And so all of this that we’re saying now is based on that outflow of air, but it’s how we stop and change and shape the air that makes different sounds! Gretchen: So, you have a mouth. You’re listening to this, you’ve got a mouth. You’ve got a tongue in it. That’s kind of weird. Your tongue has a certain amount of space that it can move within your mouth. So, you start from behind your teeth – your tongue can be kind of up there. Lauren: Nnn… if you are not pulling funny faces to yourself on the train, you’re not doing this right. Gretchen: I’m pulling funny faces right now, I can’t even talk ‘cause I’m trying to act it out! You can go down a bit, so you can go down below your lower teeth. Lauren: It has a really great effect. Gretchen: You can go back – go back in the kind of, like, dentist move, like, “Open your mouth as wide as you can and say aaaah!” Lauren: Aaaah! Gretchen: Aaaah! And then you can go kind of back up as far – like, to the top of the roof of your mouth at the back – and you have it up here. You know, maybe you can hear me sounding kind of weird, that’s 'cause I’m trying to act it out. You should act it out! You’re sitting here anyway, you’ve got the time, what else are you doing with it? Don’t answer that. Lauren: Just let a big – especially if you’re in public, just let a big bunch of air go and go, “Eeeaaaaayyooooauuugh.” Kind of. Move that tongue around. Gretchen: Eeeaaaauuuooo. And you can go backwards, too, you can go, “Aaaeeeeiiii.” Lauren: Hours of fun. Gretchen: Hours of fun! What’s cool about this is that the vowels – we think about them as distinct, like there’s this vowel and there’s that vowel, there’s /i/ and there’s /a/, but they’re on a continuum. And when you drop your jaw in a vowel position, you can sliiiide down from one vowel to the next. Or you can slide back up when you raise your jaw again. Lauren: Eeeaaaaaiiiieeee. Gretchen: Or ooooouuuaaaaaa. Lauren: That was a good one. Gretchen: Yeah! Yeah, that was a different one. So you can do “aaaoooouuuu.” And you can also slide front and back, so you can go “iiiieeeeeaaaa.” Lauren: Iiiiieeeeeaaaa? It sounds like I’m asking a question.

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