Mouth Placements: How can mouth placements brighten my voice?

Hello, and thanks for taking the time to read a blog about how mouth placements can help to produce a more feminine voice.

Mouth placements should be practiced once you have already got an understanding of Forward Focused Facial Resonance. If you would like to learn more about that, please read my blog “Tips to achieve Forward Focused Facial Resonance” first.

I’d like to start off with a disclaimer; this is freaking complicated! Don’t get bogged down by all the detail, just try to keep your mouth and tongue movements gentle and as much into the “ee” position as you can possibly make it.

However, since you’re here looking more information based off of research, here it is:

Smile through vowels and vowel pairs

Vowels can create a darker sound, except for "ee" and in "peter" and "feet" due to the light smile position. Try to practice producing all vowels with a gentle smile. Do not stretch too much, just feel a light lift. Eventually you will be able to feel this internally. Think "ee" to bring sounds up and forward, making the sound light and bright.

Tongue height and position

For the following pictures, height means how high our tongue is towards the roof of our mouth or how low it is towards the floor of our mouth.

We want our tongue to be high and forward. Think about what your tongue is doing when you pronounce “ee” “eh” and “oh”.

It should be moving down towards the floor of your mouth.

The “oh” sound

The “ee” sound

Tongue placement

Front/central/back vowels are the placement of our tongue as opposed to the height.

Think about what your tongue is doing when you pronounce “ee” “uh” and “or”. It should be moving from the front of your mouth to the back towards your throat.

Try smiling through all vowels, maintaining FFFR, to brighten the vowel.

Placement can be fun to play around with, but it takes a bit of practice, and I understand it isn’t easy.

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and they all say that placement can make a huge difference, but it takes a bit of work to change the speech patterns.

I’m here to help if you have any questions, just give me a buzz….a forward focused one (Speech Pathologist joke, does it “resonate” with you?).