Hello!
My name is Madeline Lawyer.
I'm a speech language pathologist in Northern Virginia in private practice and today I'm
going to be telling you about resonant voice therapy and demonstrating some exercises for
you.
Resonant voice therapy is a type of therapy that focuses on oral vibratory sensations
in the facial plates, on the bridge of the nose, sometimes in the lips, or even the alveolar
ridge, which is that spot right where your top teeth meet your gums.
We begin to feel these sensations whenever our vocal cords are barely abducted or just
barely touching.
Slightly abducted meaning slightly apart.
Whenever we produce this, we achieve what's called vocal economy.
And the concept of vocal economy is we get the best voicing possible for the least amount
of push on our vocal cords.
When we can achieve this barely abducted vocal cord posture and increase those vibratory
sensations, we also know that we are increasing our harmonic energy compared to a breathy
or pressed.
Voice research demonstrates decreases in acute inflammation compared to vocal rest alone.
To begin resonant voice exercises, like all voice exercises, we want to make sure that
we begin by engaging our diaphragmatic breathing.
You want to start with a big deep breath.
To try phonation, you want your throat to be nice and relaxed, wide open and we're going
to be focusing on these oral nasal and facial structure vibration sensations.
The first exercise, you can start simply by humming.
You want to start with your breath and you can do it on one sustained hum.
Or you can move your voice up and down in order to create pitch changes like this.
[humming]
Feeling again for these vibrations to give you the feedback.
Than you know you're doing it correctly and increasing that harmonic energy.
Once you've achieved the ability to produce your hum and you're able to move your voice
up and down to different notes while feeling those vibrations in your face, then you're
ready to move on to speech.
M sentences can facilitate that frontal focus and help you feel for those vibrations to
give you feedback.
To let you know that you're performing the exercises correctly.
One of the common sentences that I start with for resonant voice therapy is, “my name
is…”
Only we're going to draw out that M at the beginning.
You're going to hear my voice carry a little more intonation and inflection and maybe even
increase pitch.
We want this to be the opposite of that kind of larynx locked, lower pitch that we hear
whenever we have something like muscle tension dysphonia.
So you can start with your full breath, and begin with “my name is.”
If you're unable to get the “my name is” with just the increased intonation and pitch,
you might also have your patient try chant talk “my name is” where your voice stays
on and slowly work towards naturalness.
As we're working through these sentences and we're working towards natural speech, I always
encourage my patients to find what I call a tuning formant.
So this would be a word that they are extremely comfortable with, they know that they have
achieved great resonant voice on and they can start a sentence to kind of recalibrate
their system.
So if my word was “my” or “maybe” I might start “maybe” and then I would
go into the next sentence that might not start with an “m,” perhaps “Tomorrow I need
to go to the pharmacy.”
Only after your patient has achieved good practice with resonant voice and they're able
to really turn on the resonant voice, you might choose to do some negative practice.
This way, when they take their practice home, they can really feel the difference when they're
carrying it over into conversation as well between that perhaps kind of throaty voice
like this with muscle tension, versus their new voice with more forward focused resonance.
It's important to keep in mind that if a patient has a vocal cord paralysis or a vocal cord
lesion they are not going to be able to achieve the frontal focus and feel the facial vibrations
as someone that has appropriate vocal cord adduction.
They may end up with a harsh or breathy voice, or a combination of those two due to the lesion
or the glottal incompetence.
I'm going to take you through a progression of some sentences with all voiced phonemes.
These sentences are going to start with chant talk, then they're going to move on to pitch
and intonation with less chant, and then just resonant voice with a bit of exaggeration.
Many men make money.
Mother made marmalade.
My mother will marry Mary.
Notice as I go through these sentences, I'm really holding out and focusing on those nasal
consonants or the M's and I'm prolonging this so that I can feel for those facial vibrations,
to know that I'm right where I want to be before I progress through the rest of the
word.
As you progress through these exercises, you will be able to auditorily hear and know because
of what it feels like in your throat, that you're achieving resonant voice without holding
out nasal consonants.