Breath control

[igenlode]

Tried an experiment based on something I read in an article about teaching choirboys, and to my surprise it worked. If I hold a strip of paper up right in front of my mouth when I'm practising, it doesn't flutter or lift even when I'm singing quite loudly, and in fact I can feel with my hand that there's very little 'breeze' being created.

This isn't something I'm doing consciously, so it's either a result of previous training or just a natural consequence of the energy of the exhaled breath being absorbed by the vocal cords on its way out; breathing out silently produces a much greater airflow!

Comments

[watervole]

Fascinating! I had to immediately try that myself.

I guess getting good resonance requires air to be directed to the right part of the mouth rather than out of the mouth.

[igenlode]

It's certainly a counterintuitive result -- I can imagine Hoffnung caricaturing a Wagnerian bass with a vast river of air rushing away from him knocking all the audience flat, but in fact it doesn't seem to happen.