Anatomy and Physiology series: Applying the concepts to singing (a summary)

I believe the end-goal of operatic training is to resonate the voice over the sound of the orchestra while having the technical freedom to effectively meet the musical demands and communicate with the audience for however many hours long the performance is.  (Luckily for us, technical freedom and resonating over an orchestra are not mutually exclusive.)  Although many singers are able to accomplish this, I believe keeping up to date on vocal science can make vocal training more effective, thereby allowing motivated singers to accomplish this goal in a shorter period of time than our current model of training.  (Especially since the days of intense, one-on-one training with voice teachers multiple days a week are probably not coming back…at least in the US.) 

We should be taking already built-in biological functions:  using muscles of inhalation during the checking action (or appoggio), it’s relationship to adjustments of medial compression to air flow, neurologicalconstructs of articulation, and a basic understanding of the relationship of some cognitive process to motor control can help teachers to stream-line their training and can help students to better monitor their technique when out on the professional performance circuit.  Bel canto technique did not develop in a bubble, nor where those old master’s of singing granted some great vocal wisdom that was lost to history.  So how did they develop this technique?  I hypothesize that healthy singing technique was developed to meet the vocal demands of the opera house and increasing orchestral size by observing and building upon the already-existing healthy function of the human voice.  (Just as any Olympic athlete builds on the body's natural abilities while training to do amazing things.)

Much of the healthy coordination, the minute adjustments our body makes throughout our day, happen in the background of our consciousness.  To train, we must bring some conscious awareness to the adjustments required, but once the proper coordination is in place, we must remove it from our consciousness once again.  When I took vocal pedagogy classes, the function of the brain and nervous system was never mentioned.  What a fallacy in training future teachers to leave out the “boss” of the whole system!  The great pedagogs of the past cannot be blamed for this.  The greatest discoveries into the functioning of the brain are rather new thanks to improved imaginging technology.  The fault is our own for thinking the pedagogs of the past offered all the information we needed to know.  I don't believe those great pedagogs ever intended for their work to be the end-point, I believe they wanted it to be a beginning:  A beginning of continued discovery between voice science and voice teachers.  (But enough of my rant.)  

There are neurological constructs that aid in healthy vocal production:  checking action, articulation, etc., and there are some that counteract healthy vocal production:  engaging pharyngeal constrictors, contractingthe abdominals while singing, etc.  This is why it would be equally important for voice teachers to also be aware of biological relationships that counteract proper singing, such as the rigid support system which involves abdominal contraction and laryngeal closure.  Eliciting that response by making the abdominals rigid might initially produce an impressive sound, but is asking for vocal trouble down the line.

I’m going to get into some posts on the physics of resonance, but for now, just remember that the way to maximize vocal resonance is by maximizing space in the vocal tract.  However, space in the vocal tract is not maximized by trying to create space.  Rather, it is maximized when the entire vocal system is functioning efficiently.  The kicker is:  When it is functioning efficiently, there isn’t a sensation of “work” being done by the throat or articulatory system, you actually feel nothing happening in the throat.  In fact, the little bit of sensory feedback we get from the laryngeal area is only there to tell our brain when something isn’t right…so if you feel something adjusting in your throat while singing, it more than likely is a sign of tension.  Healthy production feels like “doing nothing,” or feels “as easy as speaking” (if you have a healthy, unstrained speaking voice).  Indeed, the only direct sensations most high-level singers talk about feeling are either sensations of resonance or sensations in their “breath support” system (i.e. ribcage, upper back, lower back, etc.).

So here's a summary of what re-learning to sing seemed like to me after learning all of this stuff:  When my checking action (or appoggio) is engaged, I feel a sensation of my ribcage staying elevated.  To do this, I consciously think in opposites:  I think of making my ribcage larger and larger as the air is going out.  The result is a slow, but consistent, exhalation.  Because air is going out, my ribcage is going down, I just don’t have a sensation of it going down.  Because of the neurological connection of the checking action to medial compression, I don’t feel anything happening in my larynx at all as long as the checking action is engaged.  But must be engaged constantly while I sing, in every part of my range and at the end of every phrase going into my next inhale.  This is the closest thing to straight-up strength training a singer will do, because maintaining contraction of the muscles of inhalation is very tiring to those muscles at first, which is why I would suggest practicing it in short bursts at first:  5 full minutes for a few days, going to 10 full minutes, to 15, and so on.  And remember, the muscles of inhalation are more than just the intercostals, which might be why some people feel it in their upper back, some near the lower ribs, some feel it near their sternum.  I don't think any of those sensations are wrong as long as the result, i.e. free vocal production, is present.  (What was difficult for me, though, was training to feel the sensation of the checking action throughout my range…even all the way up and down fast-moving scale, or during large jumps from low to high to low again, so it might take a little "play time" with this concept to accomplish it consistently.)  If I obsess too much about any part of my articulatory system, I personally start to feel strain near the root of my tongue, so what I do is pause, speak through the text, and then sing through it with the idea that everything above the larynx is just “talking” the text.  That tends to free up the resonance and tongue for me right away.  There is more to my current technique than just that, but these are the main concepts from physiology that I apply consistently in my singing and my teaching.

As a teacher, I see the biggest gains early on in my student's training once we train in the checking action throughout the range.  The exhalation will increase as a person goes up the scale, but maintaining the sensation of resisting exhalation, even as exhalation increases, really opens everything up...once it is attained.  It takes a while for folks to get used to thinking in opposites like that, but think of it like a yin and yang, two opposing ideas sometimes allows you to find the proper balance.  (Oh, and always remember that biologically, the larynx is a valve, so if you throw too much air at it, the valve will close off to try to control that airflow.  And closing off the valve gets the pharyngeal constrictors involved, which results in a "pushed" vocal production.)

So there is, of course, a little more to it than what I outlined there, but that gives some idea of how these concepts from anatomy and physiology of the whole communication system can be applied to singing.  I think I covered everything, but if you've got any questions, please feel free to post them.  I might have accidentally left something vital out.

Continuing on, I’m going to write more on the physics behind the resonance of our voice, and I’m going to go a bit into the ear and why we hear our voice the way we hear it…and also why “not listening to yourself” seems like such an impossible concept for so many beginning singers; the answer to that might just surprise you.  

Anatomy and Physiology series: Physiology of Articulation

The physiology of articulation is an incredibly complex act...which is why I felt it necessary to go through the posts on the nervous system first before I attempted to explain any of what we know about it.

To refresh, we're talking about all the muscles of articulation, from the soft palate, to the tongue, to the muscles of the jaw, to the facial muscles.  I thought about counting how many muscles are involved here, but I decided to be lazy and so I didn't...but there are a lot of them.  When you produce a phoneme, or smallest sound in a language (think IPA symbols), your articulators are creating the appropriate, corresponding shape for your vocal tract in relation to that sound.  When you move on to the next sound in a word, the articulators are moving to the position that corresponds to that second sound.  Now add to that the knowledge that we speak an average rate of 10+ phonemes per second (in Standard American English...most other spoken languages are actually faster), and you start to get some idea of how rapidly and precisely these articulatory muscles have to move for someone to produce intelligible, fluent speech.  

Here's the real deal with how we are able to produce such rapid, fine-tuned movement for speech:  We don't really know.  Sigh.  But we do know a few things about how it works:  We use sensory feedback from our muscles and auditory system to learn how to articulate speech in any language.  We also use this sensory feedback to correct our errors in production as well (like if you ever found yourself saying "sable" instead of "table," you probably caught it and corrected yourself).  And motor coordination for the whole act typically happens behind our conscious thought processes in our brain, although it does respond to what we are consciously thinking about (see this post.)

When it comes to the motor-planning aspect of speech, things get a bit muddy.  There are theories that hypothesize that the command for motor-movement comes directly out of linguistic needs; meaning, we coordinate speech in order to communicate something.  Other theories, called dynamic theories, say it's controlled by a series of movements comprising of a system which would work in succession to bring about the articulatory goals.

The current thinking lies somewhere in between those two theory ideas.  The idea is that there are underlying neurological coordinations that control articulation in speech and that there are separate coordinations that control the articulators during non-speech tasks (such as chewing, swallow, and making nonsense sounds).  Much of the evidence for this stems from brain scans and also from the failure of certain therapeutic exercises to work with disordered speech.  See, there used to be a lot of "strength training" exercises for articulation that involved improving muscle tone and flexibility...or so it was thought.  It was believed that these exercises, which are comprised of many, sometimes strange, non-speech tasks and non-speech sounds (some of which crept into the acting and singing world), would help teach children with disordered speech to make the correct sounds.  The failure of these exercises came from two things:  Most disordered speech is not from lack of muscle tone (and ones that are need can't actually do these exercises anyway) and proper execution of non-speech tasks does not generalize to speech-tasks.  So what does that mean?  If a child or adult with disordered speech needs to improve their speech for the purpose of communicating, then they need to practice meaningful speech.*  This is why there's a lot of research going into understanding these coordinations better, if we know what's going on in a normal system then we'll better know how to treat a disordered system.  (We've got some good treatments out there already, but the SLP world is always looking for ways to make their treatments more effective and more efficient...exactly what good voice teachers do in a non-scientific-stuck-in-the-lab-for-years kind of way.)

What does this mean for the singer?  Well, a lot of what I will say here is my hypothesis, but I will say that, based on my own experience with re-learning how to sing as well as experiences teaching these concepts, I think I'm on the right track.  I hypothesize that the articulatory system works best when it is left to function outside conscious thought as much as possible whether speaking or singing (at least in the case of a healthy-functioning system).  Therefore, in order to best train the articulatory system for singing, one needs to train with meaningful speech/communication.  Obviously, vocalizations can be hard to accommodate this, but it seems that when singers think more about communicating something than about making the perfect vowel or sound, then they feel a freedom in the articulatory system automatically.  (And this can work on vocalizations as well:  If I think of making meaningful, musical phrases out of my vocalizations then my articulators don't add unnecessary strain, even when sustaining a single vowel for a long time.)  I believe this is due to the underlying coordination for communication, which would be the built-in, most efficient way to articulate anyway.

How many of us have had the effect of feeling more vocal freedom once we were told to focus on our expression of the text while we sing instead of on how we sound?  And equally, how many of us experienced freedom with our diction in a foreign language after being told to speak it with the proper accent and then sing it?  (And for that matter:  How many variances are there in articulatory movements among the legendary opera singers of the past century?) Although the specific reason for this is still a mystery, I believe the answer lies with how our nervous system already has a built-in system for communicating with our articulators.  We don't usually put our articulators under conscious control in everyday speech, and so if we put them under too much conscious control during singing the system becomes inefficient.  (Like how if you're asked to do someone else's job for a day you'd be much less efficient at that job than that other person.)

That's not to say that they must be under conscious control during some part of our training.  Studies have shown that the brain of professional opera singers do show heightened sensorimotor, prefrontal cortex, and fine motor control activity during singing*; and most training that involves changes to brain activity must be put under conscious control at some point (usually near the beginning of learning a new task).  All I'm saying is our timeline in training is often wrong.  If we train our articulatory system to function efficiently in all the languages we must sing in through speech first, the result is often an efficient system within a few weeks to months, rather than years.  (And if the articulation system isn't free when singing, but is unstrained during speech, then it's usually an issue with compromised laryngeal function rather than the articulatory system itself.)

So up next, I'm going to bring all this A&P stuff together with my current ideas on technique and how current voice science can be applied to learning how to sing.  And if you have any questions, please feel free to post below.  I'll do my best to answer them.  

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.


*Bunton, Kate.  (2008).  Speech versus nonspeech:  Different tasks, different neural organization.  Seminars in Speech and Language, 29(4), 267-275.


*Kleber, B., Veit, R., Birbaumer, N., Gruzelier, J., Lotze, M.  The brain of opera singers: experience-dependent changes in functional activation.  Cerebral Cortex, 20(5), 1144-1152.

Anatomy and Physiology series: The Central Nervous System part II (aka...uh...um...Pillow Talk?...yeah, I'll go with that)

Alright so now we've got our lobes:  Occipital, Temporal, Parietal, and Frontal, and we know a little bit about what these guys do, so let's get more specific for the sake of understanding the system we use when we speak and sing.  So now, we're going to talk about the areas involved in language and speech production.  I'm going to lay it out from an auditory message we need to respond to (in speech...for now).  Let's say you're vocal coach has just stopped playing and asked you:  "Did you realize you're singing /e/ when it should be /ɛ/?"

Okay, so this message goes through your ear and ends up in your primary auditory cortex located in the temporal lobes.

shown in green here

This is where all of the pitches your coach put out (in terms of their intonation and inflection as well as vowel formants of their words and consonant pitches) and the loudness of their voice was processed.  All of this information got put together and sent off to the next region, Wernicke's area.

Wernicke's area is also located in the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere.  

Don't worry about Broca yet, we'll get to it below

Wernicke's area is known for attaching meaning to this auditory information from the primary auditory cortex (and visual info when you're reading).  It also seems to generate information in the form of linguistic rules like word meanings, etc.

Next, the information from Wernicke's area gets sent on to the arcuate fasciculus.  This is a little information highway that traverses the temporal lobe to the frontal lobe and connects Wernicke's area to Broca's area, and newer research shows that it also sends some information to premotor/motor areas as well.

So once all of this gets to Broca's area in the frontal cortex, the language gets comprehended at the syntactic (grammatical) level.  Function of Broca's area is a little fuzzy since reseachers are still trying to figure out exactly what goes on there, but in a nutshell, this area is involved in connecting incoming and outgoing messages to the motor act.  What's cool is that all language signals, even sign language, gets processed in Broca's where the outgoing message also comes through.  So while we're not sure of all the functions Broca's is involved in, it is definitely connected to the motor pathways we use for speech, gestures, sign language, and all other forms of communication.

The message  you want to say back to your coach, perhaps "Oh yes, bad habit of mine.  I need to work on that," will go through Broca's and get sent to the primary motor cortex located near the back of your frontal cortex.

Where your intended message will be sent out through the lower portions of your brain, to your brain stem and spine, and out to the muscles of your respiratory, laryngeal, and articulatory systems where your message is formed.

So what I've just outlined for everyone is something called the Wernicke-Geschwind model of the way the brain produces and analyses spoken language, but this model isn't considered the end-all-be-all of spoken language at this point.  Some of the problems with this specific model include an over-simplification of anatomical regions in speech (i.e. it seems to include more activity than just these areas, especially around the perisylvian cortex); inappropriate compartmentalizing of language into receptive and expressive parts (since evidence shows there are a lot of shared components to reception and expression); and inaccurate framing of language as a serial process (since brain imaging shows parallel pathways at work and more activity during all language tasks).  So while it's not an entirely accurate model of speech and language, it is the most basic one we've got for the moment.  And so, as a friend once told me, go ahead and put this information in a box for you to use, but leave the lid open (cause it's already changing in the research world).

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.

Anatomy and Physiology series: The Central Nervous System part I (aka Braaaiinns!...for any zombie lovers out there)

(Note:  The central nervous system does also comprise of the spine as well as the brain, but for the sake of brevity, I'm going to just focus on the brain and, more specifically, on the areas most involved in speech and communication.)

I wrote a bit about the central nervous system before in this post, so I might repeat some of what I said there here, but I will hopefully go into more detail than that previous post.  Topics we'll go over are the regions of the brain and their associated functions, including lobes of the brain, and the Wernicke-Geschwind model.  Let's build our brain from the "bottom up," or from the lower-level functions to the higher ones.  Conveniently for us, this is the way our brain is organized already, so...yay!

If you travel up a spinal column on a skeleton up to the skull, you'd see a big hole there, the foramen magnum (which conveniently translates to "great hole").  This is the point where the spinal cord enters to connect to the brain, and if you're looking at a spinal column above this hole, it traditionally becomes the brain stem at this point.  The brain stem is the most primitive, or oldest (evolutionarily-speaking), part of our brain, and it includes our medulla and pons.  It's in charge of our heart beat, breathing rate, maintaining conscious awareness, transmission of sensory and motor information from our brain to body and vice versa, and regulating our sleep cycle.  It's got a lot going on, but all of these functions are essential functions for our survival.  This is why damage to the brain stem often results in death (heart beat and breathing stops), and why if our brain is severely damaged but our brain stem is intact, we would still be breathing and have a beating heart.

The hypothalamus is right above the brain stem, and is involved in a whole lot of functions that I'm not going to get into too much here.  Among other things, it links the endocrine system with the nervous system, controls hunger, thirst, sleep cycles, and all kinds of other things.

The thalamus is located right above the hypothalamus and it is considered a major relying-station, if you will.  It receives and transmits sensation and motor signals to our cerebral cortex, and newer research has shown that it is actually selective (on an non-conscious level) of what signals it sends on (but we don't know how or why it acts this way).

The cerebellum, or "little brain," is important for fine motor control.  Now, it's important to say that the cerebellum does not initiate any motor control, it just fine-tunes it to allow for precision and smoothness to our movements.

The rest of what we're going to talk about are areas in the cerebral cortex.  The cerebral cortex is a layer of neural tissue that lies on top of our cerebrum.  This cortex has five layers of neural tissue that vary in thickness based on function.  (So if you're looking at the cerebral cortex from the motor area of the brain, you'd see that the layer of neural tissue for motor function (the fifth layer...containing mostly pyramidal cells) is much thicker than the other five layers.)  Now, because the cerebral cortex is involved in so many, many functions that our brain does, we've isolated certain areas by function just to make it easier to talk about the dang thing.  So the first way it's classified is by lobe.

The lobes of the brain correspond to the bones of the skull with the same name.  And here they are!:

There are two temporal lobes, one on each side of the head

A super-brief summary of function goes like this:  The Occipital lobe takes all the incoming visual information, puts it together, and sends it to the frontal lobe.  The Parietal lobe takes in all the sensory information and also does some spatial processing (like with objects) and sends that info off to the frontal lobe for processing.  The Temporal lobes take in all the auditory info and olfactory (sense of smell) info, associates it (sorta like making a nice summary of the important stuff) and, you guessed it, sends it off to the frontal cortex for processing.  So the Frontal lobe is a bit like the manager of the whole thing.  It is where you consciously analyze all this information you're taking in, and there are some analyzing going on in the back of your conscious thought in this lobe as well.  The prefrontal cortex, which is like a sub-set of the frontal cortex, is the seat of your personality and your own personal perception of the world (or your qualia, if you read the "Neuroscience, I Think I Love You" post.)

At this point, I've noticed this is going to be a bit longer than I anticipated, so I'm going to split this post up into two different ones.  So part II will get into the communication and speech systems going on in our brain, and then, in following posts, I'm going to finally put it all together into the physiology of the articulatory system.  Whew.

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.

Anatomy and Physiology series: The Peripheral Nervous System

Hey, hey, hey...wait a minute here!  Where's the post on the physiology of the articulation system?  Did I seriously just post several posts full of boring old artic. muscles and skip the physiology?!  How dare I?!  If any of my regular readers (if I have regular readers) are currently feeling that way, have no fear!  I'm gonna get to it.  I'm taking a detour and going over the nervous system, peripheral and central, first because the physiology of the articulation system is actually still a bit of a mystery.  What we do know is that how the articulatory system all works together has a lot more to do with the nerves that control speech than it does the muscles themselves, so to understand the mystery, we've got to understand the nervous system...at least to some extent.  So welcome to the post on the peripheral nervous system.

The peripheral nervous system consists of all the nerves and nervous system connections that lie outside of your brain and spinal cord.  (The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system, which will be the topic of my next A&P post.)

I've decided to not go into the super small details of how neurons talk to one another...their axons, dendrites, terminal buttons and neurotransmitters...but if any of you happen to feel jipped and would really like me to post on that, let me know.  (Geeks are always willing to geek out even more if given the opportunity. :p)  But I do want to talk about some terms of the PNS and its basic divisions:  The somatic system, autonomic system and also the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, which are both part of the autonomic system.

The nerves in peripheral nervous system are divided into two basic groups by their function:  afferent and efferent.  Afferent nerves carry their signal up the body back to the brain, and efferent nerves carry their signal out of the brain and down to the rest of the body.  Afferent nerves are considered sensory nerves, because all sensory information is sent to the brain for processing (think of them like the "paper work" of the body being sent of to the central office for processing and filing).  Efferent nerves are classically classified as motor nerves, because motor impulses are what go out of your brain to your muscles so you can complete the tasks your brain says  you should do.  (And I'm going to rip off the little mnemonic my professor taught us:  "A" stands for arriving, so "afferent" nerves are arriving at the brain, "E" stands for "exiting", so efferent nerves are exiting the brain.  And I'm going to let that go unaccredited because I don't know if she would want me including her name here, and also because I'm pretty sure she wasn't the only one to think of that one.)  Now, I'm going to stick to the traditional classification of afferent being sensory and efferent being motor, but you should know that in reality, there are mixed nerves that do both jobs, but they are usually classified by how the nerve function can be assessed (motor or sensory).

The somatic nervous system is the easiest one to talk about.  It's associated with the motor control of your voluntary skeletal muscles.  So that means that for every time you want to raise your arm or walk around, your somatic nervous system is handling those motor tasks.  What the somatic system is not involved in is any sensory information, such as someone touching your arm or leg, or any reflexes that occur, such as when you touch a hot surface.  Any muscle movement under your conscious control involves the somatic system.  So does that mean that the autonomic has to do with involuntary?  Well...not completely.  In fact, the autonomic system can still play a part in the function of skeletal muscle, but only when it's not involved in conscious control.

So how does the autonomic system work?  Well, this system does control involuntary muscles, like your heart and digestive muscles, but it does also impact the background tonicity of the skeletal muscles involved in things like keeping you erect when sitting up.  For example:  When you're maintaining a certain posture, you don't maintain it through conscious thought, but nerve impulses are still sent via the autonomic system to maintain partial-contraction of the proper muscles to keep you upright.  Any voice teacher or voice student has probably experienced this when a singer starts out a vocalise with great posture when instructed to think about it, but the posture slowly returns to that person's typical "steady state" posture as soon as they stop focusing on it.  (This is probably why my teacher just stopped working on posture with me a few months after I started a regular yoga workout.  My background tonicity was strong enough to maintain a healthy posture without my thinking about it...I guess.)  Breathing is usually a part of the autonomic system, but it can be put under conscious control, (and all singers out there say "duh") which would involve the somatic system.  But breathing rate is usually autonomic, and is determined in part by either the sympathetic or parasympathetic systems.

A lot of folks have heard about the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, and I've met a few folks who seem to think of one as "bad" and the other as "good."  I suspect this is mostly related to reports about the effects of chronic stress on our systems, but in general, these two nervous systems compliment one another.  And when you get down to it, these systems are not as cut-and-dry as we usually talk about them...but I'll talk about them that way anyway just cause it's easier that way.

The sympathetic nervous system is in charge of our "fight or flight" response.  When activated, like say...when you're nervous before that big audition, this system raises your heart and breathing rate, makes you sweat, and raises your blood pressure.  The only thing it doesn't "turn on" is your digestion;  digestion is actually turned off by this system, which is why eating before a performance is a bad idea...for me, at least.  This system also turns on the more primal parts of your brain that assess a threat, (which I believe might be why at an audition, you remember every detail of every judge...they are the "threats" your brain detects, so they're the ones you notice the most.)  (This one also causes a bit of our endocrine (hormonal) system to kick in, which is why calming down after kicking it in can take a while:  Those hormones can still be in the blood stream for a while.)

The parasympathetic nervous system is in charge of our "rest and repose."  This system "turns off" everything that the sympathetic nervous system turns on:  it slows our breathing and heart rate, lowers our blood pressure, and turns on our digestive system.  When you're just hanging out at home, this system is maintaining your resting state.  Deep breathing and other relaxation techniques can help to kick in the parasympathetic system during a nervous state, but they might not work totally if you're blood is flooded with adrenaline and such...hence why it might take you a few phrases into your performance before you calm down a bit.  (But practicing relaxation before a performance is always a fruitful and useful thing to do, in my opinion.)

Alrighty, so moving on to the central nervous system next.  If you have any questions, please feel free to post them, and I'll do my best to answer.

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar. 

Anatomy and Physiology series: Facial musculature

So...facial muscles...yeah.  I was debating with myself on whether or not I was going to write on the facial musculature that is part of our articulatory system (not all our facial muscles...that would just get way too long.)  To be honest, I'm really eager to get to the nervous system since that's where I feel the really important physiology comes in (and it's the system that is usually ignored in voice pedagogy texts and classes), but I decided, in an effort to be thorough, to include these muscles here just so folks know what they are and what they do.

The first muscle is the orbicularis oris.

This muscle basically makes up your lips (along with a mucus membrane and epithelial layer), and it's your oral sphincter muscle.  Some folks classify this muscle as two separate parts:  The obicularis oris superior and inferior, which makes sense, because the function of the orbicularis oris is to close your mouth.  For reals.  It also serves as a point of insertion for a lot of other facial muscles and moves in conjunction with those other muscles to form a lot of facial gestures.

The risorius muscle (which I always felt is a funny-sounding name for a muscle) comes from the masseter, and inserts into the orbicularis oris.

This guy retracts the lips from the corners.  

Another muscle that also pulls the lips back is the buccinator, which lies deep to the risorius.  

It originates from a ligament (specifically, the pterygomandibular ligament) on the bottom jaw, or mandible, and inserts into the orbicularis oris.  It also helps out a lot during chewing.  

The levator labii superious comes from the upper jaw bone, or maxilla, and inserts into the middle-side of the upper lip. 

This muscle elevates the upper lip when contracted.  

Then we have the zygomatic major and zygomatic minor muscles.  

Zygomatic Major

Zygomatic Minor

Zygomatic major originates from the zygomatic bone and inserts into the corner of the orbicularis oris.  It elevates the upper lip and also pulls back the angle of the mouth.  Zygomatic minor also comes from the surface of the zygomatic bone and inserts into the mid-side of the upper lip. It elevates the upper lip.  

The depressor labii inferioris originates from the mandible and inserts into the lower lip.  

This muscle pulls the lips down and out, which also happens to open the lips up a bit (you can also think of this as the "pouting" muscle).

The depressor anguli oris comes from the mandible and inserts into the orbicularis oris at the upper corners.  

This guy lowers the corners of the mouth and helps to compress the upper lip to the lower lip.  

The mentalis comes from the mandible and inserts into the skin of your chin. 

This muscle pulls the lower lip out, as well as elevating and wrinkling the chin...so this could be thought of as the "pout" muscle's accomplice.  

Also, the platysma, which was mentioned here, makes another appearance, since it lowers the mandible and has a lot to do with jaw movement during speech...along with all the other jaw muscles, that is.  

Okay, so that'll be my last post on musculature for a while.  Now, I can get to what I consider the "fun stuff," the nervous system, physiology of articulation (which follows a bit of nervous system introduction) and a bit of the physics of sound.  Where is this all going?  I suppose I'm building up to my little theory of the relationship between vocal science and vocal pedagogy, what's sometimes missing from that relationship, and how this knowledge has really, really helped my singing along by quite a bit.

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar. 

Anatomy and Physiology Series: Mandibular Musculature

I'm gonna truck right on through the mandibular musculature here, and go through some of the muscles of the lips next so I can get on to the interesting stuff about articulatory physiology and then the nervous system.  The mandibular muscles primarily function as muscles of mastication, but of course, the lower jaw is certainly involved in speech.

The mandible is your lower jaw bone, as you can see above.  There are eight muscles associated with elevating and depressing this jaw bone, so I'm going to start with the elevators.

The first mandibular elevator is the masseter. 

This is the big muscle you can see right where the man's cheek should be above.  This is the most powerful, and most superficial, of all the mandibular muscles...and if you suffer from TMJ (or TMD), then this muscle is the source of a lot of discomfort for you.  This muscle originates from the zygomatic arch (or cheekbone) and inserts into the mandible.  You can feel it bulge out near the outside of your cheeks if you clinch your teeth (hence why this muscle gets extremely tight in cases of TMD).  This muscle elevates the mandible, bringing the jaw closed.

The temporalis muscle is under (or deep to) the masseter, and it's bloody huge!

Seriously!  Look at that thing.

This muscle happens to be the reason I get tension headaches above my ears during exams.  (I tend to clinch my teeth during deep concentration.)   It originates from the zygomatic arch (or the "cheekbone") and inserts into the mandible.  This is the muscle that elevates and also pulls the jaw back if the jaw bone is protruded forward.  It also appears to be capable of more rapid movement than the masseter...but it's not as powerful as it. 

The medial pterygoid is not the name of a dinosaur, as much as the word "pterygoid" seems like it (at least I think so).  It originates from the medial pterygoid plate and inserts into the mandible.  This muscle acts along with the masseter to elevate the mandible. 

The arrow is pointing to the medial pterygoid, and the lateral pterygoid can be seen as the top muscle here.

The final elevator is the lateral pterygoid and comes from the sphenoid and inserts into the upper portion of the mandible (the part that comes right up near your ear.)  Contraction of this muscle moves the jaw forward, which is very useful when used along with the other elevators during chewing. 

The first depressor we'll go over is the diagastric muscle, which was also mentioned as a laryngeal elevator.  This muscle does elevate the larynx via it's connection to the hyoid bone, but it also depresses the mandible if both the anterior and posterior bellies work together.

In fact, a lot of the laryngeal elevators come back into the picture here.  The mylohyoid and geniohyoid are also both laryngeal elevators and mandible depressors.

The last mandibular depressor is the platysma, which is a large muscle of the face as well as a mandibular depressor.  This muscle originates from the tissue around the clavicle and inserts into the mandible and a few other facial muscles we'll go over next time.  It's runs above the sternocleitomastoid.

Don't know if you can read it when you zoom in, but the blue thing in the middle of the platysma is the jugular vein.  I think it's in the picture more for orientation.  The vein actually runs deep to a lot of the neck muscles.

I know it looks like one big, impressive muscle, but the truth is, it's not that strong.  This muscle's tissue is actually a rather thin layer of tissue, and so, it's not a very strong muscle.  It's more like the side-kick-best-friend of the other main characters, the stronger muscles of the face and neck.


*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.

Anatomy and Physiology series: Tongue musculature

The musculature of the tongue, much like that of the larynx, is divided into intrinsic and extrinsic musculature.  As such, the distinction is similar for that of the larynx:  Intrinsic muscles all have attachment points within the tongue structure and are involved in fine motor movement of the tongue, and all extrinsic musculature have one point of attachment within and one outside of the tongue and are involved in gross motor movements.  I'm going to start with the intrinsic muscles.

One more note:  The tongue is divided regionally into the tip (the front part that touches the teeth), the blade (the part that contacts the hard palate), the dorsum (the part that touches the velum), and the root.  The tongue root makes up the front wall of the pharynx, (which is why contraction of the root will directly impact the size, and therefore the, resonance of the vocal tract during speech and singing).

The superior longitudinal muscle makes up the upper layer of the tongue.  It is a fan-like muscle that runs from the area near the epiglottis all the way to the sides and front tip of the tongue.  It elevates, retracts (along with the inferior longitudinal muscle), and deviates (moves from one side to another), the tongue tip. 

Both superior and inferior longitudinal muscles can be seen here, but they're labeled as longitudinalis superior and inferior.

The inferior longitundinal muscle is the counter to the superior longitudinal.  It originates from the tongue root at the hyoid bone and runs to the tongue tip.  Contracting it pulls the tongue tip downward, retracts it (when simultaneously contracted with the superior longitudinal muscle), and deviates the tongue as well.  

The transverse muscle runs from the lingual septum to the sides of the tongue.  This muscle narrows the tongue. 

And finally, the vertical muscles of the tongue come from the base of the tongue and inserts into the membrane covering the tongue.  These muscles pull the tongue down into the mouth floor.  

Okay, so those are our intrinsic tongue muscles.  We have five extrinsic tongue muscles to go through.  Remember, these muscles are involved in gross motor movements, so while some of their functions might sound identical to the intrinsic muscles, the actual movement is much larger when the extrinsic muscle is contracted.

Extrinsic tongue muscles.  Click on it to zoom in and read the labels.

The first one is the genioglossus muscle.  This muscle originates at the inner side of your mandible (jaw bone), and fans inward to insert into the tongue tip and dorsum and the hyoid.  It's the big muscle in the front of the above picture.  What does it do?  Better question to ask is:  What doesn't it do?  So the front fibers of this muscle retracts the tongue, the back fibers protrude (or stick out) the tongue, and both sets of fibers contracted together end up depressing the tongue.  Whew.  It does a lot, doesn't it?

The hyoglossus comes from the hyoid bone and connects into the sides of the tongue.  Contraction pulls the sides of the tongue down.

The styloglossus comes from the styloid process and inserts into the bottom sides of the tongue.  Contraction moves the tongue up and back.

The chondroglossus is one of those funny muscles that is also considered to be a part of another muscle, the hyoglossus up there.  The reason it's listed separately sometimes is in its function:  It depresses the tongue.

And finally, the palatoglossus makes another appearance here because it does elevate the tongue while it pulls the soft palate down.  

Now when it comes to singing technique, we all do some battling with our tongue at some point in our vocal journey.  So does knowing these muscles automatically grant you some magical ability to be able to tell  your genioglossus to relax when you need it to?  NO!  Of course not.  Knowing the A&P of the musculature is just one part of knowing the A&P of the whole speech (or singing) system.  We've got to get to the neural organization that manages the whole system to understand why it's useful to know for teaching and/or singing, so hang in there and let me peel my intended onion for ya.

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.

Anatomy and Physiology series: Muscles of the soft palate

Now, we're getting into the articulatory system...which also doubles as the chewing/swallowing mechanism.  We're gonna start with the soft palate, or velum.  The nice thing about talking about the articulatory system is that you can see most of it in action with your own open mouth and a mirror, but I'll put up a couple of pictures to help out anyway.

Front view of the velum from an opened mouth.  It ends at the uvula.

Side view of the velum.  Allows you to get an idea of how it opens and closes the nasal port.

The velum opens the nasal port when it's elevated, and closes the nasal port when it's depressed.  As such, there are velar openers and velar depressors.  There is also one curious little muscle that used to be thought of as an elevator, but we now know that it is not.  I'll also go over that one too.  So on to the elevators:

The levator veli palatini is the primary elevator of the velum.   It originates from the petrous portion of the temporal bone, and inserts into the palatal aponeurosis.  (I know that contains a fair number of heavy anatomical terms.  Seriously, the first time I heard the term "aponeurosis" my brain just went, "huh?".  If you've never heard of them before, just click the links to get a quick definition at the top of each page.)  This muscle elevates and pulls back, or retracts, the back of the soft palate when contracted.  

Another elevator is the musculus uvulae.  If you look at the first picture I posted, this is the muscle embodied within the uvula there.  Contraction of this muscle shortens the soft palate, basically bunching it up towards the back.  

The two depressors are the palatoglossus muscle and the palatopharyngeus muscle.  The palatoglossus originates from the palatal aponeurosis and inserts into the sides of the back of the tongue.  So, really, this is both a palatal and a tongue muscle.  Contraction both elevates the tongue and depresses the velum...but don't over think that as a singer, cause this coordination is all under the nervous system's control (so if it's functioning well for you, over-thinking it could muck up what's already working well.)  This is why I am going to culminate this whole A&P series with a introduction into the nervous system, so stay tuned for that!

The palatopharyngeus muscle is another duel-duty muscle, being both a palatal and pharyngeal muscle.  This guy originates from the hard palate and inserts into the back of the thyroid cartilage, so it's pretty long in comparison to others.  Contraction of this muscle both constricts the pharynx and lowers the soft palate.

*So here's a little physiology note:  When at rest, the velum is depressed, allowing us to breath through our nose comfortably.  So why do we need velar depressors?  Well, the velum is elevated most of the time during speech (or singing), but when we want to make nasal sounds, like /m/ /n/ or nasal vowels, we've got to depress it very quickly.  This is where the depressors come in, especially the palatoglossus.  Allowing the elevators to simply relax would be too slow for comprehensible, flowing speech.  

And the last muscle is the tensor veli palatini.  Did you go to the link and read about it?  Cause if you did, forget what you just read.  This is an instance where wikipedia is out of date and inaccurate.  For a long time, we thought this muscle tensed the velum thereby assisting the levator veli palatini in elevating the larynx, but we now know that this muscle doesn't elevate the velum at all.  It's sole function is to open the Eustachian tube to allow the air pressure in the middle ear to equalize.  This is the muscle at work when you either yawn or chew gum on a plane to get  your ears to "pop."  (This is also why babies always cry after take-off, cause they don't know to "pop" their ears, and this muscle doesn't work as well for them.  They're just uncomfortable when the pressure changes, and an uncomfortable baby is a crying baby.)

Up next is tongue musculature, which is gonna be a long post 'cause there's a lot of them!

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.

Anatomy and Physiology series: Pharyngeal Musculature

It's that time again.  Time for some A&P!  Oh yeah!  The next few posts in this series will be just straight-up anatomy.  I'm going to cover pharyngeal musculature here, tongue musculature, palatal muscles, and possibly a few facial and jaw muscles as well.  It's going to be a little while before the physiology really shows up here, because I will also cover the nervous system, at least conceptually, that's in charge of this whole thing before getting into the really interesting physiology of the articulatory system.  On to the pharyngeal musculature!  As you read, remember that the pharynx refers to the space, as well as the structures, above the larynx.  There are three sections of the pharynx, the laryngopharynx, oropharynx, and nasopharynx that I'll refer to just for orientation.

Pharyngeal musculature is biologically big-time involved with swallowing.  As such, these muscles are divided into pharyngeal constrictors and openers.  There are three main pharyngeal constrictors:  The superior pharyngeal constrictor, middle pharyngeal constrictor, and the inferior pharyngeal constrictor.  (Can't tell you how much I loved the easy naming system during my final exam last semester!)  These three constrictors overlap, a bit like shingles, and form the side and back walls of the pharynx.

All three of these muscles have a lot of attachment points, so I won't get into them too much here.  Let's just talk about the main function.  The superior pharyngeal constrictor forms the sides and back walls of the nasopharynx and also a portion of the back of the oropharynx.  It's function is to pull the pharyngeal walls forward and constrict the pharynx.  The middle pharyngeal constrictor and inferior constrictor both constrict the pharynx, but the inferior constrictor is divided into two parts, the cricopharyngeus and the thyropharyngeus.  The cricopharyngeus constricts the upper portion of the esophagus.  

Our pharyngeal openers, or dilators, are:  The stylopharyngeus, and the salpingopharyngeus.  (I always thought that last one sounded like a name for a dinosaur rather than a muscle...maybe it's just me.)

Same image, but the arrow is pointing at the stylopharyngeus.  It originates from the styloid process at the top and inserts into the pharyngeal constrictors and the thyroid cartilage.  The stylopharyngeus opens and elevates the pharynx.

And in the red above, we have the salpingopharyngeus.  This image is looking from behind, as if you could peek through the back of the head to see the pharynx.  This muscle originates from the lower part of the Eustachian tube and inserts into one of the palatal muscles we'll get to later called the palatopharyngeus.  It elevates the side of the pharyngeal walls.

These muscles are pretty closely tied into muscles of the tongue, face, and laryngeal musculature.  In normal speech, these guys don't usually do too terribly much, since they're much happier and better at being swallow muscles, but during singing, they can create issues in terms of constriction if you're compensating for something.  I'll get into some of that a lot later if you hang in here with me.

*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.

Anatomy and Physiology Series: Laryngeal Physiology (Part 2, muscular coordination)

In my last A&P post, I went over the air pressure laws that keep the vocal folds in motion during phonation.  Now, we're going to go over the muscular effort required in changing the pitch and volume of the voice in general.

There's one thing very basic to the muscular process of phonation to understand:  It is only the onset of phonation where active muscular contraction is required.  During sustained voicing, the adductors are being held in position by background muscle tone, which is regulated by the information the sensory nerves of the muscle spindles send to the central nervous system.  So the continuous vibration of the vocal folds is a result of subglottal, intraglottal, and supraglottal air pressure/air flow and the physical shape of the glottis from the vocal fold properties and not from repeated adducting/abducting of the musculature.  Also, your folds need not be completely adducted in order for voicing to occur, although that usually results in a slightly (not abnormally) "breathy sound."  So onset is all about the active contraction of the adductors moving simultaneously to close the glottis.*

Now, the ideal adductor position for phonation would involve the minimal contact needed to maintain the minimum driving pressure, 3-5 cm H2O, of the vocal folds.  (Typically, this results in a vocal volume of comfortable, conversational speech.)  If a person goes past that ideal by increasing medial compression to an uncomfortable amount, pressed phonation occurs.  Pressed phonation increases the volume of the voice, but also tends to have a harsh sound quality, like someone shouting.  (This is pretty much the equivalent to "pushing" the voice in singer-language.)  Breathy phonation is the opposite of pressed, resulting from inadequate closure allowing too much air to escape during the closed phase of the vibratory cycle.  It can be a sign something is wrong or it can just be when you're trying to speak softly, like in a library or something. In solo singing, excessive breathiness it can also be a sign of inefficient coordination or it could be due to age in that young voices are naturally more breathy.  (Important take-away here for teachers:  Don't jump to "diagnose" a voice disorder from breathiness alone, refer the student to an ENT if you're concerned.)*


I think we should certainly go over pitch change in the voice to better understand the coordination that singing requires throughout the vocal range.  Most students of pedagogy know that pitch change occurs from the cricothyroid and thyrovocalis muscles stretching and tensing the vocal folds.  But why does that change the pitch?  It all comes back to physics, yet again.  It works the same way tightening a violin string works:  Increasing tension and decreasing the mass results in a higher fundamental frequency for that string.  Now, we don't actually change the overall mass of the vocal folds.  But we do change the mass per unit length by stretching them out over a greater distance.  This is called the effective mass of the vocal folds--or the mass that's actually making contact during vibration.  If a body has more mass, it will vibrate at a slower rate, resulting in a lower frequency.  If we decrease the mass per unit by increasing the distance (stretching the folds,) the vibration will be faster, which will result in a higher pitch.* 

Here's where things start to get messy for us singers:  Increased subglottal pressure typically results in increased vocal fold contact time during each vibration and complete glottal closure during vibration.  This results in a louder voice (or higher amplitude sound waves).  Because increasing pitch increases the tension of the folds, the vocal fold edges don't normally completely meet up at extreme ranges, resulting in that falsetto sound we all know so well.  If you want to maintain vocal loudness at extreme ranges, it could be through increased vocal fold contact during vibration and thus maintained subglottal pressure like when you were lower, or you could create the impression of maintained vocal loudness by shaping the vocal tract such that certain harmonics get an amplitude "boost" without having to actually increase vocal fold contact.  The tricky thing to figure out as a classical singer is when you are voicing loudly in an efficient way and when you are "pushing"--where you're really on the verge of screaming.  Most advanced singers I know mentally consider their loudest dynamic to be mentally within their "normal inside voice" speaking loudness.  That would require a lot of resonance work to balance out and still produce a professional sound that travels, but it does explain why so many of the greatest singers look like they're just hanging out with their mouths open on high, loud notes.  It's likely that advanced singers use a variety of these coordinations in their high ranges to produce various dynamics.  It's also likely that figuring out the ideal coordination on high notes is very individual, involving an intricate, flexible coordination of the respiratory system to the laryngeal system to the vocal tract such that different vocal colors and dynamics can be achieved.  So, if it took you a long time to "master" resonance and dynamic contrasts throughout your range, you're not alone!  It's the hardest and most complicated thing to master as the "how to" is so very individual--and receiving guidance requires a teacher with both the skill to explain things well and the ear to hear professional-level resonance/vocal balance versus vocal strain.  (Let's face it, a lot of amazing voices out there can still produce pretty good sound when they're straining.  The issue with this is they might not be able to sustain that throughout a career and it puts them at higher risk for voice injury in the future.  I see just as many classical singers "push" as belters out there and just as many well-balanced, unstrained singers in both genres, so singing "classically" does not in itself "protect you" from strain.)

Now, when we speak, we're changing the pitch and loudness of our voice all the time with our inflections, so these changes occur waaaayyy in the background of our conscious mind.  Where this becomes an issue in singing, I believe, is when we consciously train this correct balance of muscular tension, adduction, and subglottal pressure as we move well outside of our daily speaking range.  I believe the correct coordination requires training the proper balance of subglottal pressure throughout the range. The ideal balance will result in the unconscious coordination of subglottal pressure with medial compression up and down the whole vocal range.  When this coordination is relegated to the background functions of our brain, it tends to be the most efficient and therefore, it feels as though you're doing "nothing" to sing the way you do.


I feel, as a singer and a teacher, that we have a tendency to keep this coordination under our conscious control for far longer than we should, which does result in inefficiency since the conscious portion of our brain is not the best equipped to maintain fine-motor coordination.  Conscious muscular training is a pretty quick process, and once that is completed, it is time to allow the body to discover the proper coordination without encouraging our "control" over it, which requires an attitude of educated play and discovery rather than control or "right and wrong."


I feel I would be remiss in not mentioning a little about the extrinsic musculature here.  The extrinsic musculature can make adjustments to the laryngeal posture--raising it or lowering it.  The larynx tends to rise in coordination with an increase in pitch in untrained individuals.  The muscles that elevate the larynx are usually coordinated to the pharyngeal muscles that constrict the vocal tract.  This coordination is really, really important when we swallow, but we don't really want it to activate when we sing.  If you're painfully aware of those raising or lowering adjustments in the form of neck tension, the coordination at the fold-level is very likely compromised and inefficient.

(Updated: 08/23/2015)  


*Seikel, J. A., King, D. W., & Drumright, D. G. (2010). Anatomy and physiology for speech, language, and hearing. Clifton Park, NY: Delmar.