Voice Portfolio

Describe your Vocal Characteristics:

I feel like when I speak faster not all my words are pronounced clearly. My voice is shaky when I am nervous after speaking too quickly, my words aren't articulate any more. The shakiness is something that happens during my performance.

I don't seem to have a 'falsetto', 'high in head' voice, or to speak too breathy. The way I talk seems to all be in one monotone. I need to change the tone and intonation of my voice because it can pull the way I speak down making me sound quite dull.

The volume of my voice varies and becomes quiet when I get shaky. I don't think I use projection that well either, which could help raise my volume. I am able to take into context the size and acoustics of the place where I perform or rehearse. However, I need to imagine how many people are in my audience to take into consideration about how quiet or loud I am.

Reflecting upon my voice and posture:

To stop the shakiness, I need to improve on my breathing control because it is probably to do with irregular breathing. I need to breathe when I need to, not wait till the end of my sentence, otherwise I won't have enough for what I say next. By breathing and using support from my diaphragm, I will be able to control my nervousness and make sure it works for me. In order to control my breathing rate it's important for me to slow my speech down. 

My posture isn't good because I don't use my height and tend to bend forward or slump. If I stood tall it would show confidence but, also expands your lungs. When finding out about my bad posture habits I can find a way to stop them, reduce stress and strain on my spine. If you don't sit up or stand up straight it reduces the chance of deep breathing. When you come to the time to try and have a good posture, your muscles and tendons have already adapted to be more comfortable in the slouching position. The body's posture feels more tightened and causes certain restrictions of breathing easily. 

I feel like my back has tightened as when I sit up straight or stand up straight it does feel tight. I need to change my poor posture habits. However, if the muscles in your body don't work that well the neck muscles will help out however, if they overwork you get headaches or migraines, shoulder pain or neck pain. I need to start to include core strength exercises each day of my vocal workout to help balance out my body. 

Projection is something I need to improve on at times along with articulation. The exercise "What to do to die today" is a good exercise which contains a lot of buzz sounds with a difficult combination of words in this tongue twister. It's possible to do but, controlling the air that you are breathing out is important. Articulate every sound is a target of this exercise, 

Voice improvements:

My voice improvements are to relax better to get rid of tension in my body and facial muscles. The importance to me is to do exercises for example in lessons to massage each other really helped me to get rid of any tension I had. However, I felt a bit too relaxed and sleepy. So, it would be a good idea to do a massage in the tense places and not a full massage before doing work. The massage got rid of too many tensions and made me a bit too relaxed. I think it was because the person giving me the massage hit the right places that had a lot of tension e.g. shoulders, neck and back.  It sounds best maybe to have a full massage that Max a led in class to be a cool down activity instead.

My Tone needs to change instead of being just one tone. In order to improve I need to try to make sounds based on diaphragmatic breathing whether I'm laughing or speaking I can develop the habit of my projection.

What are my vocal strengths?

My vocal strength is fluency.  Slow speech allows to learn other fluency skills. This has increased my confidence when I speak.  However, my strength still has room for improvement. By practically speaking I need to imagine my upper and lower teeth attached together but, are stuck together whilst I speak. This would increase my vocal volume and increase local muscles effect. To expand this effect, it has been suggested to show your teeth too. 

Observations and improvements of my vocal workout


My breathing control is improving a little but, I need to include some more tongue twisters like unique New York or red lorry yellow lorry. These silly tongue twisters I'd benefit from because I struggled with these exercises in class and it would be a good thing to help me improve my articulation. 
An usual but simple exercise, is yawning which will help stretch, but open my mouth and throat. It can help to release tension in your neck and throat, the easiest way to trigger a yawn for me was doing the pumpkin and raisin warm up like if you're eating one whole one. As soon as I opened my mouth big as I was eating the pumpkin it made me yawn and I decided to use yawning as exercise for every morning. 
A gentle way for me to warm up the voice is to hum. Either humming a 'm' in different pitches is an exercise that I do. I do sometimes hum along to the tune of the song that I am listening to or have listened to. These are all different things that I now include in my vocal workout. The different hums exercises vary though but, I can end up doing them when I need to work on monologue. 
One of my favourite warm ups in my vocal workout is to do silly exercises whether it's to massage your face or make odd faces whilst doing exercises. It may be strange at first but, it has shown me lately that it helps to articulate words when I warm up in a silly manner and I feel less tense. 
I need to cool down to make sure my voice is not tired after all the vocal exercises I've done. Perhaps any of my vocal warm ups could be a cool down, I could possibly use lip trills this would release any lip tension and may be a healthy cool down after working with my vocal workout. My target is after the cool down exercise I need to feel comfortable and relaxed but, not tired.