Here you will be producing your Better Voice without the help of either a hum or a friendly consonant to focus your voice in your head. So move on to these exercises when, without effort, you can produce a bright head-focused sound with your mouth open after only a very short ‘m’, ‘n’ or ‘w’. 

The aim is to feel the sound has ‘arrived’ without you making any effort to produce it. If you’ve previously controlled your voice from your throat, you may have the disconcerting feeling that you’ve lost control of your voice. This is a good sign! It means you have successfully shifted the focus of your voice to your head, and as you get used to it you will actually have greater control than if you were using your throat. 

Exercise 28: Float the notes  

• Imagine you’re about to switch on a hum but don’t make any sound. 

• Let your lower jaw drop a little and switch on an effortless ah. 

• Switch the sound off in your head while your mouth is still open. 

• Repeat the exercise using different notes.  

This exercise is very simple but not necessarily easy. If you feel you’re not getting it you could:  

• put a finger on your forehead, as you did for the first humming exercises, to remind you of where you’re visualizing the sound; or  

• if you feel you’re concentrating too hard, use a distraction technique such as bouncing a ball; or 

• check whether the problem is in the way you’re opening your mouth (the earlier section on this is repeated below). 

Solving possible problems with opening your mouth 

The aah sounds rather woolly, and is not as bright and focused as the original hum 

Cause: You have gone back to producing the note from your throat rather than keeping the focus high in your head. 

Remedy: Make sure you keep imagining you’re still humming even when your mouth is open. 

The vowel sounds more like a dull er than a bright aah 

Cause: You are not simply allowing your jaw to drop open. You might be tensing it, moving it downwards too forcibly, forcing it too wide like a letterbox, or tightening your lips over your teeth. 

Remedy: Watch in a mirror to see what the problem is. The aim is to keep your lips, mouth and jaw as relaxed as possible. Starting from a point just in front of your ears, use your fingers to massage gently round your lower jaw, or gently stroke your fingers down each side of your face, as you practise opening and closing your mouth. You can do this at any time to help relax. 

You can see a lot of your tongue between your teeth as your mouth opens  

Cause: You are not allowing your tongue to move downwards with your lower jaw. This could be because you’re rather tense, or you just haven’t got the knack yet of how to do it. 

If your tongue stays high it will block some of the sound that should be coming out of your mouth. As you hear your own voice to quite a large extent through the bones of your skull it won’t be very noticeable to you, but it will be to anyone listening. 

As a general rule, whenever you speak (or sing) your tongue should be lying in the bottom of your mouth unless it is being used to form a consonant that needs it to come up higher (‘d’, ‘l’, ‘n’, ‘r’, ‘s’, ‘t’ or ‘z’). 

Remedy: Keep practising, and use the jaw massage described above to help stay relaxed.  

The next stage is to be able to move the ‘floating’ sound to different notes, first sung then spoken. 

Exercise 29: Float next-door notes 

• Switch on note 1 with an mmmm hum then allow your jaw to drop to produce an aah.  

• Keeping the position of your mouth and the sound the same, slide to note 2, slightly higher in pitch, and back to note 1. 

• Next open your mouth onto an aah without the hum first, then do the slide between notes. 

• Now try the whole sequence with the nnnn hum initially, and moving to a lower pitched note. 

• Finally, mix and match the two types of hum and higher and lower pitched notes. 

Exercise 30: Float next-door spoken vowels 

• Speak a vowel sound on two next-door notes that either fall or rise in pitch. 

• For the falling notes try Aah!, with the intonation you’d use if you were saying ‘Aah, what a shame!’. 

• For the rising notes try Oooops! 

• Then try two falls with a rise in the middle. For example, Oh no!, as in ‘Oh no! I’ve dropped my car keys down the drain’. 

The important thing is to keep the sound and feel of the two notes the same: bright and focused in your head. Even if you’re a man with a deep voice the sound can be bright – rather than dull or woolly. It will give your voice a lively, energetic quality that people will enjoy listening to. 

The voice exercises in Part One are your basic Better Voice toolkit. Keep practising them and you will develop an effort-free head-focused voice that will gradually become your normal way of speaking.

Q: In the ‘float the note’ exercises have you experienced the ‘out of control’ feeling yet of producing your voice without physical involvement?