Weekly account of class:
For this week lesson, we focused a lot more on phonetics and our pronunciation of words. We started off with the usual warm up games. During the first warm up game ('whoosh' game), one of the thing that Claire picked out and mentioned was how the way the game is started by one player will affect the atmosphere of the game subsequently. For example, this week, Claire passed the 'whoosh' to Leon, who then passed it on to me, then Cass, followed by Nicholas. Just so happened, all four of us were rather lethargic and hence we did it with minimal energy, evidently filled with tiredness. The whole 'low energy' was passed on to the others. Claire called the game to a pause, and was telling us about how it was an example that solely by the voice, you can affect the response and mood of the other participants.
I felt that this was something that we could all take note of. Especially when we are doing our presentations alone and we can only rely primarily on our voice to attract, distract, affect the mood of the listeners - we really have to ensure we manage to 'hype' the audience up with our voice, rather than bore them and worst, lose their attention because our voices were not impactful enough.
For this week breathing exercises, I felt a lot more at ease while doing them and struggled a lot lesser. I can feel that my body was getting more used to the exercises and hence it was relatively easier for me. We were also going on to more developmental exercises, as now we were doing the inhaling and exhaling exercises for a longer duration. We attempted the 6-4-12 (breathe in, hold, breathe out) and this progressive exercise aimed at training the expansion of our lungs. Hopefully by doing these continuously for the next few weeks, I will be able to feel that my lungs capacity has got a little bit larger.
The main activity for the session was going through the transcription that we have done for a poem prior to the class. I think the class did rather well in transcribing the poem as majority of us managed to do it right. However, while transcribing the poem, I did faced some difficulties. One of the major mistake I made was confusing the 's' and the 'z' in words like becomes, wines etc. I felt that many a times, such mistakes was due to the way I pronounced such words daily. The wrong pronunciation hence led to me transcribing these words wrongly.
Something that I feel I will be referring to quite often in the next few weeks given that I have difficulties pronouncing my words properly!
We then went on to discuss about the emphasis on certain words. We were introduced to schwa (which refers to reading a word at half a beat), short vowels (one beat) and long vowels (those that have two vowels together or with the ':' - two to two and a half beat). These determined whether the words are to be emphasize on and whether it should be elongated or are they words that require us to just touch and go, reading only the consonants. By mastering such a skill, it will to produce a natural accent as well.
Takeaway from this session/Research findings:
I was reading up about phonetics and chanced upon some anatomy with regards to the vocal tract which interest me (since I am a sports science student). Picture below show where exactly the different sounds can be produced. Inside the larynx are two tiny but very important membranes, commonly called vocal cords, but usually referred to as vocal folds by phoneticians. These membranes are set into vibration by the passing air, producing sound. They are controlled by a set of muscles and cartilage which allows them to change their shape, and consequently the quality of sound they produce, including changes in pitch. Once the vibrating column of air had passed through the larynx, its shape can be moulded into different sounds as it passes through the vocal tract.
Speech sounds are also said to be of two major types - vowels and consonants:
Vowels are speech sounds produced with no obstruction to the air flow coming from the lungs. They can take on their different sound qualities by subtle changes of shape in the vocal tract as they are being produced. Consonants, on the other hand, are speech sounds that involve a momentary interruption or obstruction of the air flow. They can be described and differentiated from each other by using three main classifications: voice,
place, and manner of articulation.
