Vocal Function Exercises (Voice Therapy)

Transcript

Hello! My name is Madeline Lawyer. I'm 
a speech language pathologist in private   practice in Northern Virginia and today I'm 
going to be telling you about Stemple Vocal   Function Exercises. These exercises are meant to 
help strengthen and rebalance the subsystems for   speech. Including the respiratory subsystem 
which is our air that we should be using   to drive phonation using diaphragmatic 
breathing and engaging this muscle here.   Our phonatory subsystem, which is our voice box. 
And last, are oral and nasal resonance which we   use to shape our speech. So follow along for 
some exercises and more information. When we   think about Stemple Vocal Function Exercises, we 
can kind of consider them like physical therapy   for our vocal folds. There are 13 muscles that are 
responsible for turning on our voice. And so these   muscles, if they become weak or if we have an 
imbalance in those subsystems, they might require   some attention through physical exercise. There's 
four parts to these exercises, and the first part   is the warm-up. For the warm-up, you're going 
to do the warm-up exercise on a hyper nasal /e/   with the focus on your soft palate. There should 
be no excess laryngeal tension although you also   do not want to be breathy when you complete this 
first exercise. Be sure to have upright posture,   relaxed shoulders, and engage your diaphragm 
with a big full breath to drive your phonation.   This warm-up exercise should be done for as 
long as you can possibly hold it out if you   produce a very quiet /s/ sound and time yourself. 
That's a good goal for your lung capacity to know   whenever you are completed with the exercises 
and your systems are rebalanced, how long you   should be able to phonate. To test this, you 
can get a timer and produce an /s/ like this... This first exercise should be produced on a F 
above middle C for women and F below middle C   for men. You can download a free piano app or a 
pitch pipe app to a smartphone that works really   well for pitch matching. The research shows 
that you don't have to be able to produce the   exact match note. You just have to be able 
to come close. I'm going to go ahead and   demonstrate this first warm-up exercise for 
you. As a caveat, we want to make sure that   we do not start with a hard onset called a 
glottal stop that would sound like this... You want to make sure that you're 
going into it with intention. However,   you don't want that hard glottal 
stop and you also don't want to   have a breathy start or you're not 
going to benefit from the exercises. Okay! This should not sound like singing. The 
literature actually even describes it as   a nasty nasal sound. So if it sounds nasally, then 
you're doing it correctly. The next exercise is a   stretching exercise. We are literally stretching 
out our vocal cords to work out that cricothyroid   muscle. Whenever we do this, we want to have our 
throat wide open and our lips closed, but barely   touching. You should be able to feel vibrations 
in your lips or your teeth or even your nose.   Sometimes this lets us know that you are using 
what's called a semi-occluded vocal tract for   this exercise. This means that your vocal cords 
are coming together just enough to touch without   any type of vocal press. Yet, no breathiness. So 
for exercise number two, you're going to start on   the word "know," facilitating that big open throat 
with those lips just barely apart. So, it's going   to sound like this and you're going to glide 
from your lowest note up to your highest note. Again you should feel those 
vibrations in the front of your mouth.   For exercise number two, it's normal if you're 
doing these exercises to have pitch breaks. It's   probably part of the reason why you're doing these 
exercises because you don't have proper balance of   your subsystem or you have something like a vocal 
cord nodule that might cause pitch breaks in your   glide. Persist through the exercises despite 
the pitch breaks and hopefully at the end of   your exercise program, you'll see that you don't 
have pitch breaks and your range has improved.   This next exercise is the Contracting exercise. 
It's meant to work the thyroarytenoid muscle which   is responsible for vocal cord contraction. 
When we contract our vocal cords, our vocal   cords shorten. They thicken and their vibration 
becomes greater. Similar to the last exercise,   you want to start at a comfortably high note, 
but not the highest note because you want to   make sure that you have adequate range. When you 
do reach the lower range that you're going for,   you want to make sure that you're not engaging 
in a voice that is too deep. Pitch breaks again   are okay. However, you don't want glottal 
fry which would sound something like /uh/   when you reach down low to a note that 
is uncomfortably low. So the exercise   is going to sound like this and it's going 
to be conducted again on the word "know." Again, big open throat and lips just barely 
touching so you can feel the vibrations.   The last exercise is a power adductory exercise. 
It's responsible for strengthening those muscles   that pull your vocal cords together. You're going 
to do this across five musical notes starting with   middle C for women and one C below that for men. 
You want to sustain it as long as you can and   you're going to produce this one on Old without 
the D. Again you want to focus on big open throat   and use your diaphragmatic breathing. So I'm going 
to demonstrate the power reduction exercise for   you now. I've got my piano app here to pitch match 
again just like the other exercise. With matching,   you do not have to perfectly match each note. 
You just have to come close in order to benefit. You're gonna hold that out for as long as 
you can and then move up to the next note. You'll continue this across the five notes.