Portfolio Week 4 - Articulation

What is Articulation?

In this week of voice we learnt about articulation and different exercises to do to help articulation. Articulation is the movement of the tongue, jaw and other speech organs in order to make speech sounds. articulation is key for actors when presenting or on stage so the audience can become more engaged and find it easy to understand. The sound is produced from the lungs and the way to articulate is by certain mouth organs like the lips, tongue, jaw and others. For example to pronounce a 'T' sound you would put your tongue on the upper mouth know as the hard palette, and blow air from your lungs to release your tongue making this sound. where as an 'M' sound, I would exhale and push my lips together. As shown by the image the mouth is the area where articulation takes place. The soft palate located behind the hard palate is used to retract and elevate during speech to separate the mouth from the nasal cavity.

Vocal Warm Ups

In this week we also did vocal warm ups to help our voice with articulation. We stretched muscles and motivated the joints, this help to warm up my muscles so articulation would sound crisp. In our group we also did an exercise called 'why fly so high', in which we used our head voice which was high, then our nasal voice which was medium then our diaphragm voice which was low. This helped our resonators to find different frequencies. We also did some tongue twisters to get out tongue exercised so it could articulate quicker as its one of the main organs used to articulate. These I found fun to do and I felt my tongue responding quickly.

Conclusion

Overall I think this week on voice helped me to learn to articulate when performing as it could be crucial information that the audience may have to hear. I think my voice has developed from the first week and that I'm ready for performances coming up.