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ij8 TRAINING THE SINGING VOICE
experiments conducted by Stanley, the movements of the jaw, lips and cheeks in singing do not appreciably affect the quality of vocal tone or vowel purity. Therefore mouth resonance has little effect on properly produced voice. [578] Wilcox, Bartholomew, and Negus have combed the field of scientific vocal research and report that the throat, generally speaking, is the main place of resonance of vocal tone. [669, p. 7; 39; 418, p. 440]
Chest cavity. Regarding the function of the chest as a resonator, the
observations of authors are related to two main points of view, namely, whether the air space alone in the chest constitutes a resonator or whether the bony and muscular walls of the chest contribute to vocal resonance. Evetts and Worthington hold that the chest cannot act as a resonator at all because the chest cavity is closed during phonation by the glottis. [167, p. 36] But Redfieid finds experimentally that every frequency imposed upon the atmosphere surrounding a musical wind instrument is likewise imposed upon the air confined within the mouth, throat, laryngeal and chest cavities of the player. [461] If this be true of musical instruments it must also be true of voice since the column of air supporting the lips of the player of an instrument is analogous to the column of air supporting the vocal cords during phonation. Therefore, acoustically speaking, the chest cavity is not closed to vibration by the vocal glottis during phonation. This may be simply tested with a stethoscope held on the chest wall. With the exception of the flute, every musical wind instrumnt (including the vocal tract) h a doubly open tube in the sense that an antinode exists at the mouthpiece end (vocal cords) with approximate constancy of air pressure there and with the consequent establishment of pulses of identical frequency both inside the instrument (above the vocal cords) and inside the player's lips (below the vocal cords). [Ibid.] In other words, sound may travel either with the stream of breath that generates it or against the stream of breath that generates it. In the latter case the sounds of phonation generated at the glottis would travel downwards into the subglottic area of the chest. The subglottic air therefore constitutes a resonator -which because of its total volume reinforces the fundamental and lower partials or overtones of the voice. [Curry 124, p. 49] This eSect is usually described as chest resonance.
The only modern references to the other point of view regarding chest resonance, namely, that laryngeal vibrations are conducted into the chest by means of the bony and muscular structures which compose its walls, are given by Scott [501, p. 47], Hemery [238, p. 61] and Austin-Ball [31, p. 383. All three agree that vibrations may be definitely felt in the chest walls during phonation, especially in the lower range of the voice, and |
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