Page 10 - Write Away October 2019_Neat

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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