 The next most important thing for our voices is placement, where we place the voice. So again, if I hold the voice in the back of my throat, like this, then the majority of the vibrations are getting absorbed by the soft palate. So in terms of reaching out to that, what am I going to do back here, where I'm going to push harder, clear back here. And they'll never be able to hear me anyway. And it's just a question of, if I can think about bringing my voice to the front of my lips instead of being in the back of the throat. So that those little vibrations, they've done their job. So that those vibrations have a chance to get up to the hard palate to that cathedral dome inside my mouth, ricochet off, and get out to my listeners. So placement's really important. And here's a couple of ways to think about placement. You know when you yawn, so everyone take a little yawn, feel how open your throat is when you're yawn, and how lifted that soft palate is. It's literally like you just parted the curtains of that big velour curtain that I talked about that absorbs all of the sound vibrations. You just parted the curtain, and you allowed the vibrations to get past the soft palate to ricochet off the hard palate to get out. So in your head, you kind of want to be thinking about always speak on the edge of a yawn. So you're always just feel that for a second. Just like right before you yawn, there's this. And feel how open and relaxed the throat is. Feel how the tongue drops in your mouth, again, which opens the back of the throat. Feel how the soft palate lifts. And suddenly, like the tunnel for all those vibrations to come through went from here to, oh. Here listen, I'll do the exact same amount of breath support. I won't do anything except open up the tunnel. Yeah? Oh. Oh. The difference? And then in terms of text that becomes, the next point of my lecture is to, the next point of my lecture is to, I didn't even like increase dynamics. All I did was opened up the back of my mouth. Sometimes I also use the image, you know those amazing little orange cuties, those little small oranges that come out at Christmas time? I just have one of those in my mouth. Oh. Yeah? It's hard to do that with the ss sound, yeah? But it's easier to do it with the ha sound. So if it was written out in letters, it'd be something like H-H-H-A-A-A-A-H-H-H-H, okay? Ha. So it's a nice open released breathy ha. When you lift the soft palate, that allows the vibrations to also get up into these other resonators. So suddenly the nose resonators are in play and the head resonators are in play, that changes pitch as well. But now those vibrations are going all over and now your voice has more dynamics, it has more interest, has more variety and your students are falling asleep like we were talking about before. Can we try that? Just find the spot back there on the wall or on one of those chairs and just with the edge of a yawn, that image of a little small orange cutie in your mouth. Ha. Yeah, how's your breath support? Are you saying that from your breath, not your throat? Try again, keep going. Again, the key things to take away, the three main ideas so far that we've covered, no tension, release body, vocal support, placement of voice. An exercise that can help if you're like, oh, no, I'm a throat talker. When I'm off stage, when I'm at home, my wife gives me a hard time all the time. Like, I'm a throat talker, because we're lazy, right? So it's like, yeah, yeah, I'm coming, I'm coming. Fine, except when you are performing, i.e. lecturing. And at that point, then you can't allow the vocal vibrations to die in the back of your throat anymore. You have to have some dynamic engagement, yeah? And often this comes with the passion that we have for our topics, the excitement for our students. So we just want to make sure that we're making the mental note that that excitement to convey information has this energy to it. Yeah, and that's what I mean by vocal dynamics. It's not volume, it's energy, it's dynamics. And again, it's the emotional thing, right? The voice and the emotion are inextricably linked as well. So, we're just sending the voice ha out. But sometimes we have this tendency still to hold the voice in the back of our throat. And there's this great exercise. But where we kind of like use this image to literally like reach in and pull the voice out of the back of our throat and send it out. So listen very carefully and you'll hear the voice start again in the back of the throat and then just come forward in the mouth to where I'm in imagery in my mind. I'm thinking about the voice coming right out here to the front of the lips, okay? So to start it sounds like, ah, do you hear that beginning? Ah, it's back here. All I'm doing is taking it from the vibration from back here and bringing the vibrations here and in my mind and my imagery, I'm putting the vibrations in that seat. Here how it fills the space more, right? Because now the vibrations can bounce off these walls just like they're bouncing off the hard palate. So if I can get the vibrations up to bounce off my hard palate and get out, then they will go find other walls to bounce off of and amplify. If they're in the back of my throat, they're gonna get absorbed by the soft palate, the curtain. Can you hear that right there? They're getting totally absorbed here. And if I wanna talk to the back of the room from here, I'm gonna shout from here. I won't last 10 minutes lecturing that way.