The tongue and why it gets blamed for everything.

The tongue has been the major troublemaker according to voice teachers for a long time. Teachers believed that tongue tension and placement has been getting in the way of other functions of the vocal tract and have tried to "tame the tongue" for better vocal abilities. But that is simply not true, the tongue to trying to do its job. Tongue is an important structure for swallowing and speech production. It is also the most flexible structure in the vocal tract and has the greatest potential to influence the resonance of the voice. There are four parts that make up the tongue including the tip, the blade, the dorsum, and the root. Each of these parts affects that way that resonance is produced. For this week, we will focus on the dorsum which is explained with the following pictures. 

The dorsum has three positions and each produces a unique sound. The first is low dorsum. This is where your tongue lives in the jaw at or below the teeth. The sound produced will with dark and throating because the root of the tongue is positioned in the pharynx.


Next we move to mid dorsum position. The tongue lives between your teeth in this position. The sound will be a little bit brighter than low. The singer will have better access to pronunciation and it will also be very speech like. 


The final position of the dorsum is its high position. In the high position, the tongue will be close or touching your top teeth. The sound produced will be much brighter, this is position will also give the singer the best access to articulation. 


Now is the fun part where we as singers can experiment 
on these different dorsum positions and how they affect individual voices. 



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