Calming Vocal Toning Practice

Melt stress away by using this sound healing and body awareness practice to calm and focus your mind.

This guided toning practice supports you in building connection to your singing and speaking voice. We are breathing and sounding with curiosity and intention, playing with a few fundamental mechanics of the voice you may not know make a huge difference in your ability to speak and sing with ease and resonance. Molar position, palette position and tongue position are all explored in this relaxing and accessible practice.

Enjoy and please let me know how your voice and body feel after this practice!
Nico

Transcript

Hello and welcome back. Today we are using this beautiful instrument called a shruti to look at making tones with our voice and we're going to focus on one specific tone, Making just one tone with our voice and learning how to enjoy the nuance of sound that can come through. And to do this we're going to use the O sound, So just do that with me, O, And to play with manipulating this sound and playing with the dynamics of what just one note and one vowel can do we're going to play with how wide or close together our molars are, Our tongue position, This sense of the yawn opening the back of the throat up, Where our lips are, How circular we can make them, As well as maybe some other things. So in order to set up here today we're going to use C sharp and F sharp. I just like you to relax the body a bit, Shake it out. If you haven't moved around today maybe just pausing the video and just doing a little bit of stretching and shaking and getting to be in touch more with your body and how it's feeling. And then come back here and settle into a comfortable posture where your ribcage has space to expand and breathe. And just start to tune in with your breath and feel it traveling all the way down, Opening up the pelvic floor and the belly, And then letting that breath come up, Supported from the pelvic floor and the belly, Coming in and out through the nose. And just opening your hearing, Listening to this sound. Feeling what it might evoke in you. And we'll just hum a couple sounds first. And if you can't find that specific note right away, Just exploring, Scrolling up and down. There's many notes in there that actually sound quite good with this drone. And so you can choose to sing the note that I'm singing or something similar that feels good in your body, It sounds good alongside it. And first we're just going to make this sound. Just connecting with the sound of ooh. And continuing to sing now, I'm just going to offer some prompts, Some places where you could start to change your body position, See how that changes the sound coming through. Just noticing if you widen or reduce the space between your molars, Maybe even having them touch, Seeing how that changes the sound, How easy it is to sing and how resonant the sound feels, How easeful it feels to sing. Each vowel has a little bit of a unique quality to it, How each one sounds best in everyone's individual architecture, Their bodies. So just finding what feels good for you. For me it feels better to have the molars quite open on this one, Leaving more space for the air to travel. And actually the teeth are resonating here as well, So when we have space between the molars, Between the teeth, We allow for more resonance to come through. Now I'd like you to bring your attention to your lips. What are your lips doing? Are they relatively flat? Are you holding tension in your jaw? Can you relax your lips open? Can you pucker them out, Almost like a fish giving a kiss? And then just noticing how your tongue is in your mouth and how wide your mouth is versus how closed. Press your tongue behind your front teeth or having it sit just atop them or pull it back in your mouth. How does that change the sound? Maybe you start to hear some harmonics and overtones as you change the position of your tongue. And can you relax your jaw open and have more space in your mouth or does it feel better to have a closed shape? And finally how does it feel if you bring this sense of a yawn into the back of your throat, Feeling this lift, Feeling the spaciousness like a cathedral raising up? Some people have described it like feeling this egg shape in the back of their mouth. So just knowing now you have all these things that you could be paying attention to, Just playing with one note and one vowel, Let alone a whole song. And all this nuance is the colors and the paintbrushes and the different brushstrokes that you can use to paint this beautiful song with your voice. So now just before we close this session, Let's just explore singing freely on that note without thought of all these different things going on. Just letting a sigh out and then returning to this place of relaxation and ease, Knowing that you can sing, You don't need to focus on these things, And the sound that's coming through is beautiful in and of itself. A sigh to your heart, And I invite you to return to this practice of using a drone to tone and explore through all the different vowels, Just noticing this relationship to tongue, Molar, Lip, Palate, Placement, And how that all makes lots of difference in the resonance of your voice and how you can more easily and authentically express what you're trying to express when you tune into what's going on, What you have the capacity for. Thank you and take care.