834 – The Breath Control Process

2023.04.14 – 0834 – The Breath Control ProcessBreath control (or ‘supportive breathing’) ensures that your vocal folds are getting just the amount of air based on what it is you want to say.[1]1. Your brain has a thought and sends a message to your ribs and diaphragm muscles that you will need air to vocalise that thought.2. Your ribcage expands and that leads your diaphragm to drop, which in turn creates room in your chest cavity for your lungs to expand. Aristotle coined the phrase “nature abhors a vacuum”, and that’s what’s happening here: the lungs expand into the space by taking in oxygen.This process of breathing in is called ‘inspiration’. 3. Then your stomach muscles are activated, moving in, which lets the diaphragm move slowly up, and the ribs slowly close. That process squeezes a variable amount of air out of your lungs as you talk, your brain calculating just the right amount of air that’s needed to fuel your thought.The muscles being used here are:the transversus abdominis – sometimes called the ‘beach muscle’, which wraps around your lower torso. It’s one of the core muscles, stabilising the ribcage and the pelvis when you do things like lift heavy objects. It’s the muscle that keeps your belly tucked in so you look good on the beach, hence its nickname.internal oblique muscles and the external oblique muscles (‘the twisters’) are diagonal, connecting the ribcage and the pelvis and help you to twist, turn and bend, hence their nickname. The process is called ‘breath support’ because these three muscles help compress the abdominal wall, pushing the belly in, and supporting the stability of the diaphragm by helping it stay low and move up slowly. In ‘normal’ breathing when we are silent, the airflow is still and silent. But we need some ‘push’ behind the airflow when we talk, and we get that by regulating the contraction of the stomach muscles. Think about it: in repose watching the tv and not talking, we barely notice the belly moving in; when we talk, we can sense a slight tightness as we control its movement to supply just the right amount of air-power; now imagine yourself yelling a cry of support to your sports team and you’ll notice the swift and strong movement of the ‘belly’s breathing muscles’ to push more air out more quickly, to create that loud sound.4. The air moves up to the larynx where it is vibrated by the vocal folds to create the initial soundwaves. It’s by controlling these muscles (the transversus abdominis and internal and the external oblique muscles), that you can adjust the airstream leaving the lungs, the volume and velocity, to create the right amount of sub-glottal pressure to vibrate your folds to create a basic sound5. The sound moves up into spaces in your throat, mouth and nose, where they get amplified6. And finally your speech muscles shape the sounds into words. [3][1] Adapted from the “Voice What Matters” podcast 3/7/2019[2] https://anouska-taylor.com/ [3] Adapted from https://tips.how2improvesinging.com/anatomy-of-breathing/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.