The Voice

Since the start of the college year, many skills have emerged in to my inventory in the acting industry. This can help benefit me in the future when it comes to in depth analyzing of acting and the performance industry. From a brief explanation of what I have learnt since September is that acting does not have to be pretending to be someone else and that a part of the character can live within you or vice-versa. For example a part of you can live within the character to allow you to portray the character as natural as possible. Activities that helped me with this are vocal exercises, physical warm ups and a deeper analysis of a script given through annotations.

Firstly, an introduction to the voice itself, we had been lucky enough to see a break down of the human voice, how it works and how we can explore its range. For example, where our tongue is placed, our volume of our voice and how it can be adapt to different situations or case studies. There was also an explanation of how the voice is produced and how everyone has their own unique voice that no can directly imitate another's. The voice is built up by air pressure when breathing out against the larynx. When the voice is not in  use, the larynx just opens and closes up to allow air to pass through. But whilst the vocals are in use, the larynx vibrates. With higher pitches, the larynx gap is smaller compared to lower pitches. From watching this video, it allowed us to realize how powerful our voice can be in the performance industry and how it can be changed with tongue positions, tempo and so on. Some of the vocal exercises we had done ranged from tongue twisters to breathing exercises to test the strength of our diaphragms. For example, some of the tongue twisters we had used were 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' and 'Red leather, yellow leather.' By doing these tongue twisters often helped us with our articulation, especially when it came to playing a character from a Shakespeare play where the language slightly differs from modern language. When confident with  articulation, tongue twisters can also help with tempo and pronunciation with words at different speeds.

Relating to tongue twister exercises requires warming up our breathing. Some of the activities we had done to see if we had been breathing and using our diaphragm correctly, we had been put in to pairs. We had been set the task for one of us to position ourselves on a chair bending our top half over to the ground whilst sitting down. Whereas our partner had to place their hands on our lower back to see if it was expanding whilst we breathe. Various other exercises such as leaving a gap between our mouths whilst expressing the consonants helped the movement of our tongue and how this can deeply affect the range of our voices.

Combining our voices and breathing together, the exercises we had been doing frequently such as 'OO, OH, OR' helps sustain and practice the strength of both efficiently. The benefit of exercises like these is that we are able to perform as naturally as possible throughout the use of our voices.