Module Two Lesson 16: The Vocal Siren: Your Secret Weapon for Vocal Health

Jun 2

Hello! Valerie here with my favorite vocal exercise — The Vocal Siren.

You can use this simple exercise in so many different ways:

To warm up before you practice, rehearse, or perform
To warm down after using your voice strenuously
And to regain vocal cord flexibility after you’ve been sick or trashed your voice from overuse or talking.

It’s simple and safe to use, no matter what kind of shape your voice is in. I’ll talk more about that after you’ve learned the exercise. So let’s get started!

The first thing you do is pucker your lips like you’re giving someone a kiss on the cheek. VERY important — Keep your lips puckered throughout the exercise.
Then, starting in the lower part of your voice, you sing an Oh vowel with a Y prefix and slide into the upper part of your voice into an oo vowel and back again. It sounds like this…
[EXAMPLE]
Got it? OK. Now do it with me.
How’d it go? Let’s try it again. And don’t worry if there’s some cracking going on or you hear a break in your voice. We’re still creating flexibility in the cords. Sometimes it takes a while for them to loosen up.
Let’s do it again.
[SING]
OK. A couple of things. Make sure you start and end cleanly. You don’t want to start or end in the gravel pit of your voice. So, don’t do this:
[SING]
Hear that noise? It’s the vocal cords rubbing together like sandpaper. Do that over and over again, and it will rough up your voice and thicken up the vocal fold tissue rather than smooth it out and create more flexibility. So stop the slide before you hit the gravel at the bottom.
So two more things. You can also start the exercise up in the top part of your voice. This time start on an NY prefix and an oo vowel and slide down into the OH and back again, like this:
[EXAMPLE]
OK! Great! There’s just one more thing to add to both of these sounds that will make the exercise even more beneficial, and that’s support. What do I mean by support? A gentle abdominal lift throughout the exercise.
Here’s how you do it:
Expand the tummy when you inhale, and then lift it in and up like this:
[EXAMPLE]
Let’s do that a couple of times together.
OK! How does that feel? If you feel like you don’t have enough air at the end of the exercise, try keeping your ribs expanded while you lift in and up.
When your ribs contract, they act like a bellows and push the air out too fast.
Put your hands on both sides of your rib cage and inhale while you expand the tummy and the rib cage together. OK. Now keep your ribs expanded while you do the exercise.
So there you have it. Pretty simple right? My favorite place to do this exercise is in the shower. All that warmth and steam, plus this gentle stretch, really works out the stiffness.
It’s different than doing other vocal exercises because you’re not asking the vocal cords to articulate pitches. You don’t get up in the morning and stretch like this [EXAMPLE]
That hurts, actually! A slide is a gentler approach.
Your vocal cords have a built-in safety net because of the pucker. When you pucker your lips, your vocal cords have a built-in safety net. That smaller opening to your mouth creates back pressure.
So, let me quickly explain how back pressure works.
Let’s say this is your neck…
You’re looking down. My thumbs are the front where your adam’s apple is.
The vocal cords are strung from front to back.
When you sing a high note, the vocal folds stretch.
When you sing a low note, they shrink down. This is why flexibility is important!
When you inhale or exhale, they open
When you talk or sing, they appear to the naked eye to be tightly closed.
Actually, they’re vibrating at a rate that’s too fast for the naked eye to see and tiny little puffs of air are coming through them and into four resonating chambers:
- Your mouth
- The back of your throat
- and your nose.
When you sing, the vocal cords have to stay tightly closed against that air pressure coming up from your lungs, or they’ll blow open.
When you pucker your lips, you’re creating back pressure. The subglottic pressure coming up from underneath meets the supra glottic pressure from the pucker and creates somewhat of a still point, so the muscles that are working to keep those vocal folds closed don’t have to work so hard.
So, when you vocally with the siren, that pucker is like a safety net. Then you can work on vocal fold flexibility without worrying whether you are asking those vocal fold muscles to do too much when they’re cold or have thickened up because of overuse or illness.
Does that make sense?