Day 14: Soft Palate, Lips, Tongue

Today's work started with the soft palate. The exercise is as follows:

Standing upright, imagine a yawn in the throat and then yawn several times. Allow the lower jaw to relax and the tip of the tongue to rest against the back of the lower teeth. Look in a mirror and observe the soft palate. Lower and lift the soft palate and alternate the sound "ng" and "ah". Then, avoiding moving the lower jaw, use a "modified yawn", you will release the throat and mouth. Allow the jaw to relax and lips to touch each other lightly and induce a yawn. Let the stretch occur in the mouth and throat while the lips stay in contact with each other.

Reflection: We did a lot of yawning work with Linklater and I found this work to be helpful as well. The most useful thing was watching my soft palate work in the mirror. I was able to see what was happening and I was able to better understand the difference in the work. I also had not done much work with the specific "ng" sound so it was neat trying this new sound out. Inducing yawns is one area of this exercise I want to keep working on specifically because it is something I think will be beneficial if I can get better at it.

Lips Exercise:

Blow air through your lips, allowing them to flutter. Repeat by blowing voiced air through the lips. Repeat the sounds (wee, waw, and wee-waw) lightly and easily, feeling a crisp movement with as little tension as possible.

Reflection- While this exercise was short, I still found it useful and I loved the adjectives "light" and "flutter". The simple connotation of these words made me relax and I think this better improved my work in the exercise.

Tongue exercises:

Relax the lower jaw and point the tongue out, in, right, left, up, and down. In a smooth rhythm, make a perfect circle with the tip of your tongue. First inside the mouth and then outside the mouth. Shake out the tongue by blowing out air over the tip and allow the tip to flutter against the gum ridge. Repeat using vibrations.

Neapolitan Ice cream- Go through ee, oo, aw, as if they were distinct flavors of ice cream. The sounds should flow into one another without glottalizing between sounds.

Edith's Favorite: Working through MAH, MAY, MEE, MY, MOH, MOO (as well as all of these with an N and an L in front instead of an M).

My favorite exercise was moving the tongue up and down and all around. It was the most useful as it was specifically focused on the tongue. The other exercises, such as the neapolitan exercise and Edith's favorite, were more text focused. They also started working with the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is something I still cannot seem to grasp and understand.While they were useful, I was unable to tell how this would be beneficial to the tongue specifically.

Two pieces I really found useful were the International Women's Day 2017 message from the UN Women's Executive Director. It talked about inequality for women in the workforce. It emphasized the importance of the right education and training skills, especially in STEM classes, to allow more women the opportunity for higher education. It also emphasizing changing stereotypes - including the negative stereotype that men should not stay home.

I found this piece interesting in comparison to the Women and Minorities in Technical Entertainment presentation by Lily Twinning and Karen Walcott. It goes into a lot of details about production management and technical direction specifically toward the end of the presentation. It also mentions why these differences might occur (i.e. women are less likely to negotiate for themselves) and I was stunned how large the differences were. One example is men nonprofit production managers were making around $81,000 while women were making around $53,000. The differences were larger than I thought and I encourage you to check it out to see more of the specifics. Both of these pieces are on the inspiration pieces page and I strongly encourage you to check them out!

Tomorrow I will be wrapping up with the articulation exercises.