Hi my name is Elissa Weinzimmer. I'm a vocal health educator and the founder of Voice Body
Connection, and I am so excited today to be sharing with you my intro video to my new
video series "How To Warm Up." So people have been asking me to make this video for awhile.
They've been saying "Elissa I don't know how to warm up, teach me how to warm up!" and
I totally want to, but I've resisted doing a video like this because I feel really strongly
that I want to teach you to fish, instead of fish for you if you will - that classic
metaphor, right? What I mean by that is if I were to put a ten minute video online and
say "Okay, follow along, do this, and you'll be all warm" I wouldn't be doing my full job.
It feels really important to me to share with you why we warm up and how to warm up so that
you can do it for yourself in the best way you need everyday. Okay? So, the first thing
I'm gonna share with you right now is a little progression - a series of how your voice works.
And I cover this in great detail in my online class "How Your Voice Works," and you can
actually watch the Overview video for free. So you can do that anytime... maybe after
you watch this. But for now, let's just go through this sequence, because when you understand
these steps of how your voice works, it's much easier to understand how to use it and
also how to warm it up. So the answer to the question "What happens when I want to make
sound?" is this seven step progression: So the first step is that I have an Impulse,
right? And when I say an impulse, I mean a desire to speak. And interestingly enough,
I believe that impulses come from the cells of our body, and our cells send a message
up to our brain and our brain interprets that message and then it sends it back down into
our Body. So the second step is body. So we have an impulse, our body responds to that
impulse - if the impulse is "I need to run" then you take a step, if the impulse is "I'm
gonna punch you" then you do that! But ultimately the impulse is often leading the body to move
in a way that is the beginning of a Breath. So breathing, obviously very important. It's
the power source for our voice and it's the next step in how your voice works. So you
have an impulse, your body responds, one of the responses of your body is the movements
that activate an inhalation, and then as you're exhaling the exhale travels up through your
airway, it encounters your vocal cords (or vocal folds). So this is what I like to call
the onset of Sound. And that could also be called phonation, it could be called vibration.
The sound is when the vocal cords come together and they're vibrating and it chops up the
airwaves into a frequency. And so we have a fundamental frequency happening at the level
of our vocal cords, but then the very cool thing that happens right above that is that
the sound bounces around inside the tube that is called the 'vocal tract' which is from
your vocal cords or that level is called your 'glottis' up through your throat into your
oral passages and your nasal passages - it's kinda a two-pronged tube - and as it travels
up through that tube, it bounces off the walls and it becomes Resonant. Resonance is when
that sound actually takes on multiple frequencies above the fundamental frequency - harmonics
we might call them. If you ever look at your voice on a spectrogram, you see those little
bands of energy above the bottom line... that's your resonance. After resonance - if we only
had resonance we'd have sort like this you know sound coming out of us - but obviously
we're able to make speech sounds. So the way that we do that is through Articulation. And
articulation is when our mouth, our teeth, our lips, our tongue, our soft palate, move
in different coordinated ways to either block or shape the airflow into speech sounds. And
then finally after you have speech sounds, we have an agreed-upon order that you can
put them in that's either, you know we might call it English, or we might call it Mandarin,
and that order is called a Language. And that's when we can start to have text and meaning... and let me make sure I spell language correctly for you.
Okay so you have Impulse, Body, Breath, Sound, Resonance, Articulation, and Language. That's
how your voice works. It's also how your warm up works, if you will. Because you've gotta
warm up your impulse, your body, your breath, your sound, your resonance, your articulation,
and your language if you want to warm up effectively. You want to be able to use all of those elements
of your voice well. Now, before we finish up this intro video, there's one last thing
I want to share with you which is a big question. It has three letters in it, and I'll erase
this so that I can write it on the board for you... And it is this question: W H Y ? (I'll put a question mark too) Why?
Why do we warm up, right? So I think we warm up because we're
letting our body - we're letting our voice - know how we would like it to function. Does
that make sense? Because here's the thing. If we do a warm up by rote, if we just follow
along with someone else, if we're a dutiful voice user who's doing our warm up like we're
supposed to, which I did for a long time, then we really aren't doing what is necessarily
best for us in the moment. We're not filtering it through our own needs and experience. So
if we ask ourselves this why question, ''why do we warm up?" then we know that we want
to get our voice functioning optimally that day, right? So we can go through that assessment
of all the steps we just went through and say "Mm you know what? I'm not feeling connected
to my impulses" or "Today my resonance feels like it needs some tuning." And then we know
what to warm up and we know how to focus our warm up so that we can do it really efficiently
and effectively. Okay, so what's gonna happen after this intro video is that every week
I'm going to be posting a new video with a very simple - you know, it'll be like a three
to five minute video - that is a warm up that you can do. And I'm going to go through each
of those steps every week. So the first week will be Impulse, and then we'll do Body, and
Breath, and so on and through the cycle over and over. So we're gonna amass lots of exercises
for you to do and then it will be your choice to do what you think is most important on
any given day. You can add it as a pre-warm up to your normal vocal singing warm up, you
can do it before you go into an audition or onstage to speak in front of an audience when
you're public speaking. So these warm ups are valuable for anything you're gonna use
your voice for, and I'm really excited to start sharing them with you. So see you very
soon. You can subscribe to this channel, you can sign up for the Voice Body Connection
mailing list, and/or visit voicebodyconnection.com. And here we go! How To Warm Up - see you soon.