Marthea wrote:
>I've found the most
> strange vowels sounds coming from my young students,
which is definitely
> related to their speech. I'll say sing "ah" and they
sing "uh." I repeat
> it correctly again and again and all I get is "uh." I
know you have to hear
> the sound in your brain before you can sing it. I'm
not sure how to get
> some of them to hear it!! Ideas?
Oh, boy, can I ever relate to that. I'm having just
this problem with a student. She's not studying voice
with me, but rather (spoken) English diction. She is a
native of Italy, and has been in the U.S. for a year.
She studied English before she came here, and speaks
quite well, at least from the standpoint of vocabulary
and grammar. She has a very heavy accent, though, and
many people have trouble understanding her. This
problem becomes even worse the more quickly she speaks,
which she tends to do in both languages. Unfortunately
but not suprisingly, she is not familiar with IPA.
When I can get her to slow down and pay attention to
some of the sounds we have worked on, her speech
improves considerably. Still, it's very painstaking
work, as she does not have a good ear, and we repeat
particular phonemes (more often than not, vowels that
don't occur in Italian) over and over, with me saying
them and then her trying to match the sound. Once we're
happy with that result, we try it in the context of the
word in question. At that point, we're often back to
square one, as she very readily allows the shape and
position of the phoneme to be altered by those preceding
or following it.
The thing that has seemed to help the most is pure
repetition, best achieved by taping the lessons and
having her listen to them over and over again (which,
thankfully, she does quite diligently). Still, with an
ear that is less than discerning when it comes to
matching sounds accurately, sometimes I'm concerned that
she is practicing and reinforcing bad habits when I'm
not around to correct her.
The other thing that has helped is that she has asked
her American friends to correct her when they hear
something egregiously amiss, but I'm afraid this
wouldn't apply in the case of fine-tuning the speech of
a native English speaker whose friends may not set the
best example, either.
And if anyone can tell me how to get her to remember the
sound of the "i" in "sit", I'll be eternally
grateful. . .
Robin Lynne Frye
Mezzo-Soprano
Voice and Piano Teacher
New York, New York
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