Page 10 - WriteAwaySept
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              Joni Mitchell is one of the all time              ‘feature’? Well, this is what happens
              legends of the 60’s-70’s folks scene.             when you speak in customer service
              And rightly so. She’s amazing. In an              voice, or an affectionate voice. The
              interview I watched, she said that she            voice you’d use to talk to a cute dog.
              was always a painter first and her songs
              came from those images. Gorgeous                  Given that humans are social animals,
              tunes.                                            we take a lot of cues from the sound of
                                                                the voice as well as the words spoken.
              Let’s break down her distinctive voice            Thinning of the vocal folds sweetens the
              and see how she did what she did.                 voice, makes it naturally higher and
                                                                does a bunch of other stuff like
              She has a very highish, smooth, con-              encourage vibrato.
              trolled and relaxed voice. One of the
              things I love about that is how it never
              gets in the way of the lyric. It’s like the
              voice is merely the vehicle for the other
              part of singing - the message and the
              emotion.

              Most of us have heard of the terms
              Head Voice and Chest Voice. Not that
              these terms are wrong, but I always
              found them a little hard to understand
              because they don’t explain the
              physiology, only the sensation.


              Joni Mitchell is a head voice singer. So
              what exactly is head voice?

              In the front of the throat are two
              muscles either side of the voice box
              called the cricothyroid muscles. When
              these activate and shorten, they tilt the
              Thyroid cartilage forward - Said another
              way, the Adam’s apple tilts slightly
              forward. The vocal folds are physically
              connected to the back of the Thyroid
              cartilage. So when the CT muscles
              shorten, they pull on the front of the
              vocal folds and thin them by lengthening
              them (think of what happens when we
                                                                                                     Image
              pull a rubber band tight).
                                                                                                     Baron
              Why does the human body have such a                                                    Wolfman






            10                                                                       www.writeawaymagazine.co.uk
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