In this video, I am talking about SOVT exercises or semi occluded vocal tract exercises with
Oren, the creator of this beautiful tool for singers and voice users,.
You will learn why straw phonation is a fantastic way, not only to heal your voice, but also
develop strength and coordination.
So stay tuned.
Hi, I'm Katarina speech-language pathologist and here on this channel, I share practical
tips about using your voice in a healthy way.
So if this is a topic that interests you consider subscribing to this channel and hitting that
bell notification icon so that you don't miss any of my future videos.
If you've seen my videos before, you know that I am a big fan of straw phonation, this
type of exercise is a so-called semi-occluded vocal tract exercise, which means that there
is a narrowing in the vocal tract, which helps the vocal folds to vibrate more efficiently.
So I was very excited when I met Oren, the creator of this beautiful tool called the
OB1 SOVT straw.
When I spoke to Oren, it was immediately clear that he's not only amazingly knowledgeable,
but he's also very passionate about the voice science behind this tool.
I will also post a link to Oren's website below this video, if you are interested in
learning more about his work and his straw.
So I hopped on zoom and I asked him a few questions about the straw, about the science
behind it, and some exercises.
Let's watch it together.
So, why don't you introduce yourself, tell us who you are and what you do.
Yeah, I actually, I always love this question because, it's never what people think.
So, you know, you know, that I'm a singing teacher, voice researcher.
And so I work a lot in studying specifically SOVT semi-occluded vocal tract exercising,
but with straws.
But that's, that's not at all how I started, like I started in psychology.
So my undergrad was in psychology and I was specifically looking at improving people's
musical ability through new brain stimulation techniques.
So that's kind of, that's kind of like my entry point into the, into the arts, in a
way.
Um, and then I decided, you know, well, I don't want to do psychology it's rubbish,
in comparison to something like singing and research, which I, which I kind of fell in
love with.
Um, so yes, I, I kind of transitioned into the vocology domain as it were.
I love being in this community.
Um, and I love both teaching, students, specifically musical theater with an interest obviously
in SOVT, but then as well, educating other trainers and teachers and professionals on
all of this cool stuff that I'm working on in researching.
So why straws, like you started somewhere completely different and now you are drawn
to straws and tube phonation.
And I'm when we met for the first time, I was really surprised how much research is
behind your work.
It's not just another straw, it's really backed by your research.
So why straws?
Um, so again, this is my, every anecdote that I, that I give you is, like proceeded by a
funny story.
Basically I was training myself and the coach that I was working with at the time just told
me one day to take one of the straws and to start working with it.
And I kind of looked at him and I was like, what, what, why this is just ludicrous.
Why on earth are we doing this?
Um, and he kind of gave me a sort of a brief explanation as to what it did for the voice.
Um, and then we did some exercises and we worked on it and we practiced it and it was
one of those things that I was an immediate skeptic.
And then the second I did it, I was an immediate convert.
Um, and from then, I guess it just had me hooked and I was like, okay, I need to understand
what's going on with, with how these straws affect the voice and the mechanics behind
it.
Do you remember what it did for you, why you were hooked immediately?
I think, it was, I was working on a song at the time and I'm trying to remember, I think
it was Prayer from Scarlet Pimpernel and there's some, there's some pretty high notes in it.
I know we were working on it at the time and I just couldn't get those top notes.
And it just like, it was not happening and the coach that I was working with, we did
some straw interventions, we did some straw work.
And I think that was the first time I was able to reach the pitches that I had and I
was like blown away, straight away.
It was like, wow, this, this did not have the effect I expected, but it far exceeded
all of my expectations.
And so, yeah, I think was like the little convert moment I was like, right.
I could not get those notes I'm singing normally.
But when I used this, what I at the time thought was this wacky little intervention, it just
works.
And yeah, I think that, that had me, that was my little hook point.
I know that, you know, more way more about straws than me and in my previous videos,
I talk about benefits of straws.
So can you tell us what are the benefits of straw phonation for our voices?
Yeah, so, there's actually a few different benefits kind of, depending on the task that
you're doing with the straws, but as well the type of tube or the size and magnitude
that you're using, and those factors will determine the benefits.
So principally, there are kind of the inherent benefits that are a function of the device
that you're using.
And then you kind of have secondary benefits after that.
So the principal kind of benefits, are it lowers what we call phonation threshold pressure
PTP, which for people that don't quite know what that is, it is essentially the minimum
amount of sub-glottal, lung pressure essentially, needed to set the vocal folds into oscillation.
And so by lowering that with a straw foundation work, we in essence make that task easier.
And we make the ability to set the vocal folds into vibration far more accessible.
So that's one of the principle benefits.
Less efforts needed to produce them.
Yes, basically.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And kind of everything almost springboards off of that in a way.
And so we, we balance out the pressure systems.
So we bounced out the pressure systems, both above and below and within, the vocal folds
and the, and the glottal, the glottis.
And we create an environment that encourages more efficient air flow throughout the entire
system in a couple of ways.
The first is that we shape and align the vocal folds in a more aerodynamic posture.
We call it posturing them.
And so we shaped them more aerodynamically.
The result of that then is they're more complimentary to the athlete, that's moving through them.
And so they resist that airflow less, which makes that the use of that energy more efficient.
And we also within that shaping mechanism, we actually just align the tissues and the
structure of the vocal folds more optimally for that vibration process to happen.
So we get better closure as well.
All of these factors promote the secondary benefits which obviously allow people to sing
with ease because we make the process easier.
Depending on what kind of tasks you're doing, you can strengthen the voice to strengthen
the intricate muscles of the voice in a more athletic way.
Conversely to that as well, depending on what tasks you do, you can actually use these interventions
as a therapeutic method to relax the voice and to recover from tired fatigued voices
and kind of the stress within the vocal fold mechanisms associated with perhaps performing
for long periods of time.
Obviously as the vocal folds come together, they have what's called collision forces.
And so the way I like to kind of describe that is it's basically like capping, right?
The more surface area contact we have, the greater the amount of impact area that we
have within the vocal folds, depending on the pitch that we're singing, those, those
contact impacts will be more frequent or less frequent.
And so what happens with SOVT is we create different pressure systems that provide a
little pressure bubble in the middle.
And so as the vocal folds are coming together, it's like those amazing soft closing kitchen
cabinets.
And so, you know, those ones that you like, you let go, and then they swing close and
they're right at the very end, they like slowly come in to close.
And so it's like that with the voice you have this pressure cushion.
And so as the vocal folds are coming together, you have that kind of buffer in the middle
from those pressure systems that just prevents them slamming together with such force.
I like that analogy of the door.
So let's talk about your fantastic tool that I have here, your straw and what it can do,
because I know there's so much research behind this, except that it's beautiful.
Like the colors are beautiful and it's so versatile.
I love how you can change the resistance.
So can you, can you introduce your straw now?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah.
So the SOVT straw what you're holding it with you, it's something that I kind of I looked
at the problem and there's a couple of problems with just using normal straws, but I looked
at that problem and I kind of tried to backtrack and work out a solution, that is going to
benefit the most amount of people or the most amount of lives.
Should we say?
The first problem obviously is people use plastic straws, paper straws, that can damage
the environment and especially our oceans.
And I was like, right, if we're trying to use these straws as a regular intervention
for vocal training, then we have to have, we've got to do something else.
We've got to have some other way of doing it so that we don't impact the environment.
So that's, that's one of the reasons why we kind of struck upon this idea, but then obviously
more than that is everybody is individual in their anatomy and that their vocal makeup,
and using just a fixed size paper straw, fixed size plastic straw or whatever it is isn't
going to work for everybody.
And so I really wanted to create something that offers a dynamic range of resistant settings,
in various different ways that would compliment whoever comes in and decides to use it.
We have what we call linear scaling resistance.
And what that means is it comes with an attachment by default on the end.
So if you take that off and you just use the straw, it is this in the shorter setting will
always be the lowest level of resistance.
So the easiest to work with Exactly.
Yes, exactly.
And there's, there's a bunch of scientific principles that underpin that, but for most
everybody, it's just a nice visual way.
The shorter it is the easier it is.
As you extend the tubes out and you can extend this, you don't have to do the fixed size.
You could extend it to, you know, just a little bit or a little bit more, a little bit more.
And so as you extend it to maximum extension, this is, well, this is where this linear scaling
resistance comes in.
And so with that, with that increase in length, you also start to increase the resistance.
And so the task becomes harder as a result.
And so what that allows for, in terms of resistance is if you're blowing this way through the
mount of meter to the flat end, you get a different level of resistance than if you
were to flip it the other way and blow the other way.
And to like, to kind of boost that obviously we know that the smaller, the diameter, the
greater the resistance, so that's why we have the three millimeter attachment currently.
And so this is like the big leap.
So when you put the attachment on and you go through it again, you can even more feel
that resistance change.
So that's in essence how it works, kind of funny.
So how many resistance levels do you have in this?
I know it can be too, too many to count because you don't go to the extreme positions.
Right.
But how many?
Yeah, so actually we, we determine it minimum levels of resistance, because there is too
many to count when you consider those intricacies.
So we say there's a minimum of 12 levels of resistance.
And that is by virtue of the one and then two, and then three, you flip it around, you
do the same again, you put the attachment on, you do the same again.
So that's six, depending on the orientation and then put the attachment on another six,
depending on orientation.
Where should a beginner start?
Yeah.
So again, this is so individual and task specific.
Male voices might require less resistance to begin with as compared to female voices,
simply because of the gender based anatomical differences of the vocal folds and their native
impedance.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
So what I kind of like to say to people, instead of saying, you have it on this setting or
this setting, I like to say, play around with it and find something that is comfortable
for you.
And the way I define comfortable is obviously it's not so easy that you can, you know, you're
not getting anything out of it, or it's not too difficult that you're feeling so overloaded
with resistance and pressure and sensations.
So I like to say to somebody find something that's comfortable.
And then from there you can do a couple of different things with it, depending on what
task you're specifically aiming for in terms of, do you want to build vocal strength or
do you want to kind of use it as a rehabilitative intervention for vocal fatigue and things
like that.
And so if it's athletic from that comfortable spot, you want to increase the resistance.
You want to get a little bit more resistance out of it to get a little bit more working
of those intricate muscles.
And if you want something that's more therapeutic than you kind of back off from that and go
with something a little bit with less resistance, just to give you a lighter work load of the
vocal folds.
What I usually do, we start with the lowest resistance and build up to higher resistance.
And I work with many people who have vocal injuries, but then we want to strengthen the
muscles responsible for bringing the vocal cords together and lengthening and shortening
the vocal cords.
So in the end, we end up with higher resistance with almost everyone.
So, but it's a good idea to start somewhere comfortable and then slowly build up the resistance.
So did you enjoy learning about the voice science behind this straw?
I think it's fascinating.
I ended up talking to Oren for a very long time.
So I am going to make another video in which Oren will share his favorite straw exercise,
and more.
Check out this tool on his website.
I will post a link below this video and subscribe to this channel so that you don't miss part
two of this interview.
I will see you soon.
Bye.