In Unit 1 we introduced you briefly to the hum. You’re now going to practise it in more detail. It’s the best and easiest way to change the focus of your voice from your throat to your head, and is the vital foundation stone that the later exercises will build your Better Voice on.

We’re going to start with a hum that produces an mmmm sound. For this you need to have:

• your lips together but your jaw relaxed and your teeth slightly apart.
• your tongue lying in the bottom of your mouth with the tip touching the back of your lower teeth.

Exercise 2: Switching a hum on and off

Here’s a visualisation that can help you to imagine your voice as coming from your head:

You have a sound-producing machine behind your forehead with an on/off switch attached to it. When it’s switched on the sound flows down effortlessly from your forehead and out of your mouth.

With that visualisation in mind:

• Pick a comfortable note to work with.
• Switch the note on. Don’t try to do anything active: just allow the sound to happen. You should hear a very quiet mmmm.
• It may help you initially to touch your forehead with a finger as you start and stop the sound, to reinforce the idea of where to imagine the sound coming from.
• Keep producing the mmmm for as long as you comfortably can without taking another breath, then switch it off from the switch behind your forehead.
• Repeat the exercise a few times, trying always to use even less effort to produce the sound.

A correctly produced hum may cause some physical sensation in your nose and the front of your face, and possibly a slight tingling in your lips.

While there should be no feeling of effort in the throat, you may also be aware of a slight something going on there. This is because air is moving through the larynx. Just ignore any sensations in your throat and concentrate on your head.

Be prepared for this way of producing your voice to feel unnatural at first. Actually it’s completely natural, though may well not be normal for you – yet.

How not to

The wrong kind of hum, effortfully forced from the throat. The video exaggerates to make the point, but check in a mirror to see whether you do a reduced version of this.

After a while, try to speed up the process. You need to be able to do this because when you speak you have to switch the sound on and off for each word. 

Exercise 3: Switching a hum on and off faster

• Instead of humming the note for a whole breath, now switch it on and off more than once on each breath.
• Start with two hums per breath and work up to three, four or five.
• If you lose the effortless feeling, go back to slower switching for a bit.

The next step is to switch your voice on and off on different notes. Again this is relevant to speech as an interesting voice uses a range of notes. 

Exercise 4: Humming different notes

• Switch a hum on and off on one breath again (just as you did in Exercise 2), this time using some comfortable notes that are slightly higher or lower in pitch. Choose the notes at random – using a tune or a musical scale will divert your attention away from how you are producing the sound.
• Now do between two and five hums per breath on different notes.

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Repeat these exercises as often as you can, until you experience an effortless sound at least some of the time.

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