Steven and Vocalisters:
Coffin's Vowel Mirror is a simple gadget. It is nothing more than a 3" loudspeaker which you can buy cheaply from Radio Shack, connected to a small, portable keyboard via the earphone jack. Usually it is necessary to amplify the rather weak signal from the speaker jack but this can be achieved with a very small amplifier unit also available from Radio Shack.
You use the vowel mirror by placing the small loudspeaker near the mouth, almost touching the lips, projecting a single keyboard pitch into the mouth. It is best to begin by selecting a keyboard pitch that is somewhere in the middle of your singing range. Keep your finger on the key to sustain the pitch during each exercise.
Take a medium breath and hold it, closing the vocal folds gently, then silently form the vowels /u/ through /i/ as a continuum. Do not whisper the vowels because to do so will open the vocal folds. Simply mouth the vowels silently as you would if mouthing the vowels to a person across a room.
You will hear the keyboard tone increase in loudness whenever the vowel you form in the continuum from /u/ to /i/ matches the sustained keyboard pitch you are playing. The tone is increased in loudness because the mouth acts as a sympathetic resonance chamber when the vowel formation best matches the pitch being played. The resultant mouth formation is approximately the maximum resonance for that particular vowel on that particular pitch. In most cases you will not only hear an increase in loudness of the keyboard pitch but the keyboard pitch will sound like the particular vowel that is being produced.
Throughout all of the above, the voice has not been used, only the resonance chamber of the mouth with the tongue changing position to produce the vowel continuum. Once the maximum resonance vowel has been found, the keyboard pitch is stopped and you take another breath and sing the "found" vowel, remembering how the shape of the vowel felt during the finding process. The body has tremendous muscle memory and most singers find it relatively easy to reproduce the same mouth/tongue position immediately after taking the breath just before singing the "found" vowel.
Coffin developed this device when he discovered that the singer could not hear his maximum resonance because of the distortion caused by sound conduction through the bones of the face. It was an attempt to shorten the trial and error system of finding maximum resonance which required the presence of the teacher to determine when such resonance was achieved. By introducing a sound into the mouth from outside the body the singers ears could more quickly and easily determine when that sound was affected by a particular mouth/tongue position. It was then a simple matter of replicating that particular mouth/tongue position as the singer sang the tone, or, to put it another way, introduced a tone into the mouth resonance chamber from an internal source (the vocal folds) rather than an external source (the vowel mirror).
I have used the vowel mirror for many years successfully. Most students adapted to it quickly when they discovered that they were able to produce clearly defined vowels that were rich is quality and easy to sing. Very frequently they discovered that what sounded to them as a beautiful tone was, in reality, a muffled or a raw quality because they had a mismatch between the phonated pitch and the tuning of their vocal tract. The vowel mirror quickly defined that mismatch and, more importantly, gave them a positive tool to find the correct match of phonated tone to vocal tract tuning.
If you have any question about this device feel free to let me know and I will try to be of help.
-- Lloyd W. Hanson
|