Caio Rossi wrote :
<< What you feel when you do the "mum" is the AIR friction in the nasal
cavity,
and what you feel when you do the head voice is the RESONANCE in the nasal
area. They're both felt as "vibrations", but they're not the same
phenomenon.>>
Of course, as several people have already answered, the pitch consonant "m"
also sends sound waves, and not only air, into the nasal cavity.
But I can feel myself and understand what you allude to. There must be
another difference... Could what you call "RESONANCE in the nasal area" be
only bone conduction, while what you call "AIR friction in the nasal cavity"
would be really resonance of the air inside the cavity?
Precisely, you have used the different terms "area" (which could be bone)
and "cavity", which correspond to that other couple of terms.
<< On the other hand, my ( and many other people's ) experience has been
that nasal sounds help tune into your head voice. And my tentative
explanation is that feeling the vibration created by air friction gives your
body the "vibrating feeling" and and helps fool your larynx muscles into
producing that same "effect" a different way.>>
I wonder whether it would be possible to couple the nasal resonator (by
opening, at least partly, the velo-pharyngeal port) without any air nor
sound escaping from the nose, but nonetheless modifying the resonance inside
the coupled naso-bucco-pharyngeal resonator?
For example, when we sing with nasality on purpose and close our nostrils
with our fingers to emphasize the sensation, the listener still perceives
nasality... But this "part" of nasality could be closer to what
pre-scientific pedagogues labelled "good nasality", that is the kind of
quasi-nasality that you can perceive in the head voice. It may be a kind of
"efficient", "positive" nasality, a part of the global nasality that would
increase some partials rather than decrease some others...
Or it could only be, as you say, a way of luring the larynx into a different
mode : closing the nostrils would increase the nasal impedance even further
than simply opening the velo-pharyngeal port, thus increasing the
supra-glottic pressure and allowing the vocal folds to stand a higher
sub-glottic pressure while still being able to work in a balanced and
efficient fashion.
The use of nasal consonants would then only be a way to increase the nasal
impedance for a moment, just enough for the vocal folds to get a "kick" into
a more energized operating mode... The resulting sound wave could then
generate enough impedance sent back to the larynx, so that the supra-glottic
would stay high and allow the larynx to go on working at a higher
sub-glottic pressure...
Another axis would be to think that we need the nasal feeling only for our
inner ear to get enough feedback through the Eustache tube (?) to allow for
this more demanding vocal mode???...
Same or other idea : why do we feel and "hear" the singing formant in our
heads while it is actually resonated in the epilarynx tube? Is it bone
conduction again? Or something that happens around the velopharyngeal port
or between the pillars of the velum, something that could be triggered by
the "ng" sound and that would perhaps make the opening of the epilarynx tube
into the pharynx abrupter and/or close the access to the piriform sinuses,
two things that Titze ans Story said would strengthen the singing formant?
| Alain Zürcher, Paris, France
| L'Atelier du Chanteur
| http://chanteur.net
______________________________________________________________________________
|
