I 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
nasalarea. They're both felt as "vibrations", but they're not the same
phenomenon.>>
Alan:>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.<
Before I had ever felt my head voice, I believed that vibration caused by an
"m" was really "it", but the difference in sensation, performance and sound
quality was clear when "it" was really "it". But I used nasal sounds
mi-i-i-i-O mi-i-A-i-O ) to help me, and they contributed a lot.
Even if my "trigger thesis" is right and that really helps find your head
voice, it may be misleading if not "understood" as I get the impression from
some singers ( and I know they're backed up by their teachers ) that they
assume nasal cavity vibration IS their head voice, so they pull that
terribly exxxxxxxxxxagerated nasal tone whenever they go up.
>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.<
Yes, I used the terms "area" and "cavity" on purpose, but I'm not so
convinced there really is resonance ( or "good" resonance, as in "good
cholesterol" ) in the nasal cavity when you produce nasal sounds. According
to a scientific paper I read somewhere and a post exchanged by two experts
on the list about two years ago, if there's anything a nasal sound does to
your voice quality is muffle most of the overtones produced ( P.S.: but now
I just read the rest of your post and I see you already know that ).
Does someone have a link to that paper?
>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?<
Mmm... how can you avoid air from leaking through the V-port, once it's
open? Wouldn't that be way too mind-over-matter??
>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...<
According to what has been said here many times, the nasal area resonance
typical of head voice is only SECONDARY, being responsible for too little
like 1%) of the sound someone hears. It's value comes from its being a
SIGN, like the pain you feel when a hammer hits your finger. If a
neuro-surgeon opens up your skull and creates that same sensation directly
into your cortex, you'll get the pain but will keep your finger intact ( but
what you want is, comparatively, hit it hard! ).
>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.<
If I got what you mean, you intend to add the possible "trigger effect" I
hypothesized to the advantage of "Bs" over "Ms"? I've just tried to do it
but I didn't get the same "forward nasal vibration" I get when I do the
conventional "mum". If there's any "trigger effect", it doesn't seem to be
much likely to happen in the pinched-nostrils variation.
>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???...<
Eustachian tube... My voice has these ups and downs, but when I'm listening
to my discman, and it's very much intensified during its ups, I feel higher
pitches going to the top of my head, following exactly the "resonance way"
described by my voice ( during its ups, of course ). It's as if my practice
made those areas ( or the neurons corresponding to them ) already more
sensitive to those specific pitches. That seems to have something to do with
what you said.
>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?<
That's what "they" say. Like when people place their ears on the rail joint
to hear the distant upcoming train. Solids, due to the proximity of their
molecules, conduct sound waves more efficiently.
Best wishes,
Caio
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