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!Class 1.8: The Vocal Diaphragm !Topic Timestamp Page #

Oms, Opening Chant 0:00:21 1

Welcome, Review, Questions 0:03:20 1

What is the Vocal Diaphragm? 0:15:21 5

Video #1: Leslie’s Vocal Diaphragm 0:22:24 6

Whispered Speech 0:30:10 8

Screen Door 0:32:12 8

Guitar 0:35:00 9

Alphabet Pitch 0:39:07 9

Video #2: Mel Blanc 0:42:50 10

Internal Structure 0:46:19 11

Video #3: “Ave Maria” 0:50:15 12

Oms 0:53:27 13

Video #4: Beat Boxing 0:54:34 13

Phonetics 0:57:45 14

Alphabet and Chanting 1:20:10 19

Q & A 1:49:46 26

YogaAnatomy.net Principles 2.0 Class 1.8: The Pelvic Diaphragm ![timestamp 00:00:00] !Leslie & Students: Om Om !Om namo pranaya Pranaya nama om Pranaya swaha Om namo apanaya Apanaya nama om Apanaya swaha Om swaha Harih om !Thank you. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving. That's the American Thanksgiving, if you're viewing this lesson out of temporal order. I know it's celebrated in other parts of the world at different times, or not at all. It's kind of an American thing, or North American, anyway. So, last lesson we talked about the pelvic diaphragm, mula bandha, bandhas in general, and we spoke a little bit about ujjayi. As you can see from today's lesson we're going to go in more detail into the mechanics of what goes on in this region of the body, the vocal diaphragm, and we're going to use the structure of the Sanskrit alphabet as a map, guiding us through that part of the body in terms of how we produce sound and the basics of phonetics as it has been mapped out by the Sanskrit language. Before we do that, any lingering questions? I know it was awhile ago, but anything that you wanted to discuss relating to the last lesson, the guided tour of the pelvic floor? It always brings up interesting conversations. Okay. This is very active corner over here between Kirtan and J. Let me get to Kirtan first. !Kirtan: I think towards the end of the last class you were explaining to us what you feel is our job or our role as a yoga teacher. But I was thinking about how much of an impact, a profound impact your teacher had on you. So if we're just to create a controlled stress environment and make sure they're breathing, which I accept, but your teacher changed your life and had such a profound impact on you. !Leslie: Yeah, but if I were to boil down the essence of how he did that, that's basically how he did it. It was in a controlled stress environment. Based on his interaction with me, the practices he gave me and his insistence that I basically find the answers for myself. So rather than go into the specifics of those interactions all at once, I mean, I tell this story from time to time. To extract the essence of how he did it, I think, is basically that. But that's just the teachings of the Sutras if you really go to their core, which is what I think he was so brilliant at. !J.: But he did more than just that though, didn't he? More than just give you a stress environment. If

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you boil it down, yes, but he did more than just that, is what I think my friend is asking. !Leslie: Yes, and I would say the most powerful ways he interacted with me was in what he didn't do and what he didn't say. What he refrained from saying. The information that he refrained from putting into the process, which would have been someone else's answer, not mine. So I think that's often what goes missing or under appreciated with a master teacher. You can be enthralled by what comes out of their mouth and the teachings and the beauty of them, and that's certainly part of what's being imparted, but to see underneath that or behind that in terms of, and besides, when he is talking to a large group of people he is saying general things. When he gets asked specific questions in that environment he would most often refuse to answer, because he didn't know the person well enough to give an answer that would be right for them, and the answer that would be right for them would probably be wrong for everyone else. It was like when Health, Healing and Beyond came out. I will give you an example. The wonderful book that we recommend. He made some statements in there about yoga and vegetarianism, how vegetarianism is not a necessary part of yoga. Now there were certain teachers who didn't take kindly to that. You can imagine who they would be. People that are into animal rights and veganism and all of that, who insist that that's a part of yoga, being a yoga practitioner. One of them actually wrote a letter to Desikachar, this is someone we all know, challenging him on this, saying, 'What do you mean vegetarianism isn't a part of yoga?' In fact, he would go further and say, 'Vegetarianism isn't even an original part of Hinduism. It was brought in from Jainism historically,' right? And Desikachar's response to this letter was, he wrote him back very politely and said, 'I don't know you well enough to answer this question you have. I don't know your context. I don't know you. I don't know who you are. I can see you're very sincere about this,' but he politely refused to answer because there was no connection or relationship there within which an answer could be given. And I’ve seen him over and over do that again, not just with me, but with many people. So do you have a separate question? !J.: I do have a separate question, more about ujjayi. It's somewhat related but different. I really appreciated and I even experimented with this idea that if you don't tell people of ujjayi and you don't tell them to make a sound, but you just tell them to move their body slow and make their body move, it will happen. I found that it is true in some circumstances, but not in all circumstances. !Leslie: Ah, and there's where the instruction may be necessary. !J.: And that there are instances when giving that information is helpful. I do appreciate the idea that it gets overworked, but I think the point I want to add is the reason why that happens, the reason why there's this pattern of ujjayi that's very hard to undo, is not because you give people the information. It's because it's happening in this context where people are doing these really obscene vinyasa sequences and then putting ujjayi on top of that. !Leslie: Sure. !J.: It's almost like cushioning the blows more than it being central. !Leslie: Sure, and it's the same thing for squeezing your sphincter too. If you put that on top of it as an extra thing you're going to have a hard time undoing that. !


J.: I guess this is about a teaching methodology that goes to my friend's question, and even Amy, in your example, if someone is in a lunge and their knee is like that, and instead of telling them to just move their knee, if you say, 'Hey, notice where your knee is, and are there other possibilities of where your knee could be?' And then they are going to arrive at that, I also think that's only true if, like you said, the prana is already in their body. ![timestamp 00:10:12] !If somebody is not there for that inquiry to be had then they aren't going to be discovering more about their body or that alignment by giving that instruction. Sometimes for that person it is good to say, 'Hey, move your knee over here.' !Leslie: It can be. !J. Yeah. !Leslie: If that's what it's going to take to get them to be safe. But it's important to remember that just because we can make the observation about them doesn't mean they're capable of making it about themselves, and if they realize they're not able to make that observation about themselves, they need to realize that. !J.: That's true. !Leslie: So it's just about having an appropriate or useful starting point for people. So it's a great conversation, obviously. We teach these things to make people say, whether it's alignment or breath or whatever, but I have seen so much of this technique that gets layered on top of a situation that fundamentally is not being addressed, which is that their prana is not in their body, they're not able to feel what's going on and they're just reproducing techniques without knowing what they're for or what they're intended to accomplish. And that's what I want to avoid. Even if a group class you can do that by leaving that door open for them to make that discovery, even if their discovery is, 'Wow, I don't know what the hell is going on inside my body.' That's the recognition of confusion as a form of clarity. So, yes. There's a lot to today's lesson. This is a very rich conversation. I don't want to shut it down, but I do want to put a time limit on it. So go ahead. !Student: A different question if you need to take… Last time you spoke about your concern, for example, in women who get so attached to actually holding up the pelvic floor that it . . . !Leslie: It gets in the way. !Student: . . . I just wondered if you had a few comments about the postnatal period for women. !Leslie: Where they need to get the support back. !Student: Yes. !YogaAnatomy.net Principles: Class 1.8: The Vocal Diaphragm ! of 30 3

Leslie: Sure. Yeah. That's where it's useful. !Student: Anything in particular? For example there are many women who suffer injuries sometimes in the course of a natural birth. How do you work with that in your experience? !Leslie: I don't think I can give any real specifics at this point, but knowing the principles allows you to come up with what's going to be appropriate for those people in those moments, knowing the principles of the prana moving up, the apana moving up, the apana moving down, depending on what it's doing, and how to get the various diaphragms to coordinate in movement in breath. That's what I'm trying to focus on. Because whenever I end up working for somebody, regardless of what their situation is, I don't have a preplanned menu of, 'Oh, here's this problem, let me pull this technique out of this menu because I know it's going to help.' It's really tuning into where they're at with their own understanding, with their own training, with their own bodies, with their situation, and understanding enough of the principles of how breath and movement work together that I can come up with something that's going to be appropriate in that moment. It may be something similar that I used to someone else in that similar situation, which informs what I do. So I don't have to figure everything out from scratch. But you always have to be open to the unique situation people find themselves in, and not try to get what you're seeing to fit the tools you already have. I think that's important to keep in mind as well. Yes? !Student: I just want to add something onto what he was saying, that approach to teaching. It involves the student, actually. I think it can be done with anybody, even a person that doesn't have . . . I think one of the teacher of the teachers, Socrates, it's about philosophy, but that's a way to actually approach anything. So he never gave answers. He always… !Leslie: The Socratic dialogue? Sure. !Student: Yeah. It's a great way of really teaching it and bringing power in the person, because you can learn . . . !Leslie: But Socrates always, he did have a destination in mind. He had his own ideas. !Student: Yes. !Leslie: It wasn't, like, any answer you come up with is equally valid. But because you're dealing ultimately with reality and how it works, so it's not like we don't have a destination in mind for the student. It's that each person is going to find their own way there in their own unique path. But that's just the constant interplay between space and boundaries that we're always dealing with. How do you set up the boundaries to make this experiment safe for the person, and then within that, they’ll have the freedom or the space to find their own way to what they need to know. It's a tricky thing. It requires constant attention, and it's no wonder that people sometimes simply default into just learning rules and procedures, and, 'Just tell me the right way to do this.' !Student: Or dialogue. !Leslie: Yeah. So it's the harder path to do it this way. But I find it's much richer and more rewarding.


!So this is a class that I love to teach because it involves a lot more audience participation. We're going to be making some sound as we explore the vocal diaphragm. What is the vocal diaphragm? Well, like the pelvic diaphragm and the respiratory diaphragm, it's a structure that exists in this plain, in this horizontal plain of the body that serves as both a barrier and a passageway. You can say that about diaphragms in general. It consists of these vocal folds, which we also call the vocal cords, which are basically these ligamentous structures that are stretched from front to back in your body. They are supported by these bits of cartilage that we call the cricoid and the thyroid cartilage. The thyroid is this one here. Then this little point here, we have it a little more prominently, and it's known as our Adam's apple. But everyone has it. You can find it right there. It's that little bump. And you can see that these two bits of cartilage are sitting on top of each other and they are hinged. They can change their relationship to each other based on what these little muscles are doing. The chords at the front are attached to the back of that thyroid cartilage, okay, and then they get stretched back. They are hooked onto what are known as the arytenoid cartilages which sit - this little hat shape here, on top of the cricoid cartilage. So the arytenoid cartilage can rotate into various positions based on what these muscles are doing. The cords can be pulled tight together. They can be pulled wide apart. They can be relaxed so that nothing is pulling them together or apart, and they can be pulled tight to the point where this little space rotates open at the back to leave a little almost pinhole opening. So all of those relationships are described in this drawing here. This is actually flipped from those other drawings, the front and back now. You can see that at the bottom of these drawings is what's happening at the back of these structures, and here again you see the outline of the thyroid cartilage, the front of which has the vocoal cords attached to the back surface, right? So when those muscles are relaxed the cord is just hanging open. Presumably this is what's happening when you're sleeping and nothing necessary is happening to the space. By the way, the space is what's known as the glottis. The glottis is not technically a structure. The space between the cords is the glottis, and so when the vocal cords are relaxed that space is fairly open and it's not being made smaller or bigger by the action of the muscles that control the cords. Is there a question? !Student: Yeah, I'm a little confused. Are the cords the cartilage? !Leslie: No, the cords are attached to the cartilage. The cords are ligamentous structures. You'll see these in real life soon. I have video. Oh yeah. I have video. And remember, the cartilage, the arytenoid cartilage that they're attached to, is at the back here. When it is pulled open wide by those muscles, you have this big sized opening, and that happened, well, it's happening right now as I speak. As I'm speaking and you hear my voice, this is what's going on with my cords. They are being pulled together and the air that's being forced across them is being caused to vibrate, and that's my voice. So this is called phonation. But you'll notice that I run out of air at a certain point at the end of a phrase, right, and I have to get air back in really fast. I'm running out of air right now and I do it in the moment. There, see, I did it. There. And I use that as I'm speaking again. How did that happen? I had to have a big opening for the air to get in really quickly, and that's what happens here. And you’ll see that in some of the video that I show you. This is an interesting arrangement that we as yogis have a particular fondness for, because it's the position of quiet whispered speech. ![timestamp 20:00] !YogaAnatomy.net Principles: Class 1.8: The Vocal Diaphragm ! of 30 5

Now, whispered speech is interesting because it's the kind of speech that doesn't require these cords to be vibrating. It's actually a hissing sound, 'sssssss' that's created when air is forced through a tiny little pinhole, as opposed to being forced across your vibrating cords, right? That's what causes the cords to vibrate, is the air being forced across it, which is why when you have laryngitis, when these cords are inflamed and covered with mucus which prevents them from vibrating, you can still whisper. But singers who have laryngitis are advised not to whisper, to just do vocal rest, because you don't want to put additional strain on your cords. You just want to rest them. So whispered speech doesn't require the cords to be vibrating. !So those are considered the four basic positions of the cords. We're going to be working and exploring what we can do to this vibrating air once it gets above your cords. Once the exhaled breath is pushed across these cords, when they're in this phonation position, how we then shape that vibrating stream of air with our tongue, with our throat muscles, with our lips, with our teeth, with the shape of our mouth structures, is what constitutes speech. That's where phonetics comes in. How we create space for or block that vibrating stream of air will determine whether we are making a vowel or a semi vowel or a diphthong, or a consonant. So we'll be exploring all of that. Because what we've inherited from the ancient people is an amazing map of the human mouth. This is an anatomically based alphabet, and we will be exploring that in a few moments. Before we launch into that I wanted to share with you some video footage. Now, I went to the trouble of making an appointment with a doctor friend of mine, Dr. Steven Park. I will be providing a link to his wonderful book Sleep Interrupted in today's lesson. He has an office up in Montefiore, which is here in New York in the Bronx. So a few weeks ago I went in to get some video footage of my glottis in action. What we discovered was interesting, which makes the footage not as clear as I had hoped, is that I have, and you can see it here, an enormous uvula. You know, the uvula is that little tag that hangs down at the back of your soft palate. It should be just a little thing, just hanging out there. Well, mine is so large and elongated that it can go all the way back and sit on my epiglottis, which is just weird. He has seen a lot of uvulas in his life, trust me, and he was, like, 'You got a big uvula.’ You will hear him in the . . . Yes, thank you. If we can just drop the lights down. Okay. Commenting on my uvula. So this, and I also have a very active epiglottis. So it keeps flapping in and out of the view. What we're seeing here—this is the back of my body, this is the front of my body, right? He has put this tube down my nose and is hanging out right above my vocal cords, and here are the cords right there. Right? I have to restart this to get the sound going. Okay. Make sure we have sound here. Okay. So you're going to hear Dr. Park and I interacting on this. So I'm doing phonetic sounds. There you can see I'm taking a breath. That's that forced inspiration position, right? I think we need more volume. !J.: Is it hard to chant with a thing down your nose? !Leslie: Well, it's not the easiest thing in the world. You’ve got a tube down your—now fortunately I had some training for this. As part of our Shivananda teacher's training we learned to do sutra neti. Has anyone done sutra neti here? Raise your hand if you have done sutra neti. !Students: Yes. !Leslie: Did you do it with a string or a catheter? A little rubber catheter is what we used. !


Student: Catheter. !Leslie: Yeah, a little French catheter, right? It was about the same gauge as this very thin camera, fiber optic camera he had down my throat. So it was not an unfamiliar experience for me. I was able to suppress my gag reflex. But then he sprayed this numbing agent, which made it especially difficult to do some of this. Plus I had a cold that day, which was the worst day to have a cold. So you see a little mucus in there from time to time. Anyhow, this is how it went. That's my epiglottis. There are the cords, and this is my enormous uvula trying to get in the way. !Student: [inaudible 26:53] !Leslie: He was using the tip of the camera to get it out of the way. He was pushing it out of the way with the scope. Now I'm raising the pitch, right? Now I'm trying a falsetto. Now my epiglottis insists on getting in the way. There's kind of an automatic reflex that happens when you have something that far down your throat. Your swallow reflex kicks in. Now what happens with your swallow reflex is that your epiglottis, it's main job there in that moment is to flap down and cover these structures. Why? Because anything you're swallowing, you don't want it to go down into your windpipe, which is at the other side of these cords. You want it to go down your esophagus. Here we go. Thank you. Yeah. This is your first guitar, right? It has his . . . Yeah. All right. So. The falsetto is really hard with all of the numbing agent and everything. There's the epiglottis. You can see it's just really huge. Sorry, not the epiglottis, the uvula. Now here's what I want to show you. This is whispered speech. See if you can make it out. There. See how I've narrowed the passage down to a tiny little pinhole? You can barely hear it because I'm whispering very softly, but that's the position for whispered speech. That's what I've never been able to get a video of before. This was the main thing that I wanted to get out of this session, that position for a quiet ujjayi, right? Okay, now I want to skip forward here a little bit. Because what I start doing, now I'm going to do a loud ujjayi breath. Not whispered speech, but a loud ujjayi breath. You can see every time I talk my epiglottis is articulating. That's a lot of movement there. Now look what just happened. As I was preparing to do a loud ujjayi, you see how the throat muscles above contracted, and they are assisting in narrowing the passageway? And also the cords moved away from the camera. Did you see that? Let me just go back a moment and you can see that happening again. !Video: . . . ujjayi breath. It sounds like this… !Leslie: There. There, and that's me doing it softly. Watch what happens when I do it more loudly, if you can see past my uvula. There it is sitting on the epiglottis. That's just weird. See how it's flapping around? Get out of there. See, and the louder I make it the more retracted the cords get downward, and the more involved those throat muscles get above it. So I just wanted to point that out. You have a lot of ways of narrowing that passageway. If you're just doing a quiet whisper, just say the alphabet in a quiet whisper here. A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, you can bring the lights back up. Right? That's the minimal amount of muscular involvement to create that narrowed passageway. Now you're just sitting quietly. You're not moving. You're not stabilizing your whole system off of that vowel. You're just doing a quiet, whispered speech, right? ![timestamp 00:30:09]


!So try that same level of whisper, not with the alphabet, just with the breath. So you can do, like, a, b, c, d, e and then close your lips and just keep exhaling through your nose instead of your mouth. A, b, c, d, e, f. Can you keep it at that same low level of quietude that you were using for the whispered speech when you shift to our ujjayi pattern? A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, and now imagine that you're taking that into movement, right? So take that [breathing] into an arm movement, and as you're using it for more work to stabilize postural actions in the system, we talked about that in the last lesson, right? How that vowel can stabilize the whole system by creating that pressure support? More of that musculature is going to get involved, and if you're in a full blown [series of breaths] or you're really working it, [labored breathing], okay, you're going to start recruiting more of your throat muscles. The epiglottis is going to drop a little bit to help narrow the passageway. There's a lot of different ways to stabilize that passageway that the air is moving in and out of. The minimal amount of effort comes from just the cords. It's the same thing you do to whisper. It depends on how much work the valve is doing, how much muscle engagement will be involved. As an example I use the door closing example. Can we get over here, or is it too close? Hello. Can we see? Yeah? Are we all right? Can we see the door? !Student: I can't see anything. !Leslie: You can't see? Well, can the camera see is all I care about. See here we have a door. Now, this is an unsecured door. It is completely free to move on its hinges, and the amount of effort I put into movement is directly translated into the structure holding this all together, and you could tell if I were to do this hard enough and frequently enough we would start to have a mechanical breakdown of the hinges or the frame or even the glass, who knows. So what do we do to protect a structure like this? We put something like this into the system. What is this? Does anyone recognize it? !Student: It's like a shock absorber. !Leslie: It looks like a shock absorber. It's a screen door closer. Is it making a familiar sound? [sssssss sound] It is ujjayi. It's the same principal, the same mechanical principal of what you would put in here to protect this door, and there's a screw here, okay, which is an adjustment. The tighter I make that screw, the less air can get out in any given moment and the more slowly the door will close. So if it's a heavy, heavy door that needs a lot of stabilization you're going to need to set that pretty high. If it's a lighter door you open the screw, the passageway gets wider, the air can escape more quickly and the door will move more easily. But however you adjust it, the door will not be able to move more quickly than the air can escape from the system. That's an air cushion, protection, support that we impose onto a structure like this to keep the hinges safe. Think about your hinges in your body, and how we can keep those safe using exactly the same mechanical principal as this. Ujjayi is a variable valve that we use to accomplish this to protect our hinges. Does that make sense? !Students: Yes. !Leslie: Okay. Cool. I stole this from my Dad. It's Dad's screen door. !Student: And now it bangs every time. !


Leslie: Now it bangs every time, yeah. We were replacing it. I didn't steal it. I just inherited it. Let's say that. Now why did I have Sean bring me the guitar out here, you may ask. Well, that has to do with pitch, okay. So the . . . [guitar string] The finger plucking the string, causing it to vibrate and emit a note, which is just vibrating air, it's just pressure waves propagating in air molecules, is what this is, okay, is the equivalent of the air, the exhaled breath, pushing out across the cords, causing them to vibrate. Now if you want to vary the pitch on that note there are two ways to do it. You can do this, [guitar], in other words I'm making it shorter, or I can do this. [guitar] I can tighten the string with the pin. Both things will vary the pitch. So what method do you think the body uses to vary the pitch of your voice? Does it make the cords shorter or does it stretch them tighter? What do you think? I have video. !Leslie: I have video. So we have evidence. This actually came up in a dissection I did once in a Montreal lab north of Montreal when I was teaching. We went and sat in on this wonderful lab that was run by this very very lovely fellow, and he insisted that the cords were getting shorter as the pitch went up. I unfortunately had to correct him in front of everyone. He kept saying, 'No, they get shorter!’ Cause he was thinking this, he was thinking was happening. [guitar] I said, 'No, it's like making the string tighter,' which is what raises the pitch. Fortunately I had video. !Student: Maybe you can use your uvula as strings like a guitar. !Leslie: Me? I can use my uvula? That's very funny. Like putting my finger on the string, right? Actually, Dr. Park was convinced that it was my yoga training that kept me from gagging on my own uvula because it was so huge. So stop that. All right. I guess it doesn't want to show. [sounds of different voice pitches] Hear it? There you go. There's the evidence, right? Stop that. So you can see the cords got longer when the pitch went up. That's what I wanted to show you, and that's what I showed him. I had my laptop right there in the dissection lab. I pulled this out. He was, like, 'Oh, okay.’ It's always nice when you can back it up with actual evidence. So how does that happen? Well, these two plates can move in relation to each other. This top drawing shows how these muscles here, the orico-thyroid muscles, the muscles that run between the cricoid and the thyroid cartilage are angled in such a way so that when they contract they will pivot at this little joint here, the cricothyroid joint, which is the pivot point. They will hit that cartilage downward, which pulls the ends of their attachments away from each other. So it's the precise control of these muscles that allows us to control the pitch of our voice. Let's all do the alphabet, and we'll change the pitch halfway through. Start low. A b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z. So what you did there was you stretched your cords and then you released the cords using those muscles. That's all you did. Let's do that with a whisper now. We'll do the same thing, the alphabet, and we'll change the pitch halfway through. Let's give it a try. A b c d e f g h i j k l m n, any luck? !Students: No. !Leslie: We have a changed pitch, if you would. You can't, because the relationship of those two pieces of cartilage is fixed and stable when we do this. So it's a very stable arrangement, all right, of those cords. You can't change the pitch of a whisper because it's not happening at the cords. ![timestamp 00:40:04]


!The cords are locked together. They can't vibrate. All you've got is a little pinhole to push air through, and that's what is creating the sound. !Student: Leslie, I was thinking about how when you're trying to hit a high note, if you're singing in the shower or whatever, you're automatically stretching up. In a low note you kind of . . . Don't most people do that? Like your voice gets higher? !Leslie: I think that's a response to trying to get it up there. Whether it's functional or not. !Student: That's what I mean. It's a physical response. I'm just trying to think of what that relationship is between that urge to sort of stretch or narrow…. !Leslie: I think it's an impulse to stabilize the cords for what they want to do. Whether it works or not is a question of singing pedagogy. Yes. Well, I don't know much about formal singing pedagogy. I do know one thing about singing, though. It is a breathing pattern. Singing is a breathing pattern. It's a long, slow, vibratory extended, supported exhale followed by a short, quick inhale that gets you to the next exhale. It's mostly exhaling. The actual pattern of—I mean, you don't see an opera singer going, 'I'm singing my note and my phrase and I'm going to run out of air in a moment, and just wait a second,' [inhaling], 'because I had to make the inhale exactly equal with the exhale. That's not singing.’ It's a short, quick inhale—efficient—a short, quick, efficient inhale followed by a very long, slow, sustained, supported vibratory exhale. Unless a singer's body is trained to be able to do that pattern of breathing well and efficiently, they are going to have trouble. At its root, all the other details of singing pedagogy rest upon a singer's body being able to do that breathing pattern well. If they can't take a short, quick, efficient inhale, right, that gets them to the next exhale without losing the support they need to produce the sound, they're going to have trouble. So at that fundamental level, a singer's body needs to be trained for that pattern. That's where I see a lot of people having trouble, knowing nothing else about singing pedagogy than that. But that's like a foundation thing. If your body can't do that it's going to get in the way of anything else you're trying to accomplish with your voice. So I have some more video for you, right. You saw the pitch change video. What I would like to show you are probably some of the best trained vocal cords that ever existed. We can douse the lights here a little bit. This is readily available on the internet. That's where I found it. If you don't recognize the name you'll recognize his body of work. !Video: Eh, what's up doc? […] Pepe Le Pew is […] of the kisser, [smooching sounds]. This is Fred Flintstone. That's the way he talks. Yeah. !Leslie: So I flipped the image now. The epiglottis is at the bottom, right, just to clarify you on what you're seeing, and you're seeing his amazing control, not just of his cords, and his epiglottis is hanging back. It's not flapping down like mine was. But the muscular control of his throat muscles is extraordinary. He is able to move the cords towards and away from the camera at will, which is another way of manipulating sound. !Video: Let's see now. Can I do Yosemite Sam? Yosemite Sam! He's a real tough character, tough […] gumdrop!


![…] !Speedy Gonzales is […], yeah. !And Sylvester is all sufferin' succotash. That's almost my normal voice. !And Tweety is, oh, I taught I taw a putty cat, I did tee a putty tat. He thought he saw a putty tat, sufferin' succotash. !Now we have Porky Pig. Porky Pig here that talks with […] got that, okay? !Leslie: And that's all, folks. !Student: Is it one person who did all those voices? !Leslie: That was Mel Blanc. When he died, the studio took out a full page ad in the major newspapers with all of the characters whose voices he did looking very sad, and there was only one word on it. It said, 'Speechless.' !Students: Aww. !Leslie: I know. It gives me a lump in the throat every time I think of that. !Student: It's so sad. !Leslie: And apparently he was the sweetest guy. He was always available for the kids to do the voices and he never resented people saying, 'Do this voice, do that voice.' He was just apparently the sweetest guy. I am going to put a link to that on today's lesson page. There's also this wonderful documentary about him, which is also on YouTube, which I will put up there, which is well worth seeing when you have the chance. But that was Mel Blanc. !Student: The cords looked like the characters. Well, in a way. !Student: Yeah, I thought that too. !Leslie: Well, you can see how articulate he was with his muscles. Everything he pronounced had a movement there. Now I just want to go into a little bit more of the internal structure here before we get into the phonetics. Now, don't worry about all the words and the lines and everything. The main thing I want you to look at here, is here's the tongue, okay. Here's your lips. Here's the back of your teeth. Here, this is what we call the cerebral location. First of all, just feel your lips opening and closing. That's one way we shape this stream of vibrating air that leaves our body. Feel the back of your teeth with the tip of your tongue, okay. That's another place where you can make sounds, where you can shape and form this stream of air, and then slip the tongue up here. Start at the back of your teeth, come up, and there's a vault up in there. Can you feel it? That's another place. We call that the cerebral


location, okay. To get further back, okay, the tip of your tongue doesn't work for speech. You need the center of your tongue. Can you press the center of your tongue up into the palate, this center of the hard palate there? Yeah. That's another location. Then all the way back here at the root of the tongue, can you feel how you can make contact there? Right? Now I was showing you my uvula in the way. You can see that this one is only depicted as being this long. Mine can come all the way down here to the epiglottis, okay. Now this actually is a big part of articulated speech because it can control whether the air can get up into the nasal passages or not. So your soft palate is actually quite involved in the phonetic sounds that we make, okay. Down here is the hyoid bone. Here, this is the level where your thyroid cartilage is and your cords would be down here, okay. !Student: Where's the actual thyroid? !Leslie: Well, the thyroid gland isn't really being depicted here so much. It's just showing the cartilage and all of that. I have some video that goes along with this particular image, which I found recently, which is really quite wonderful. These are MRI scans that were done. So here I'm superimposing this on this to match up what you will be seeing and hearing, okay. This is an opera singer signing “Ave Maria”. Ah is a guttural sound. Ah. Where does it go to do Ve? A ve. 'Vuh'. You can feel that with the lips. Ah ve mah is a nasalized consonant. In order for that to be nasalized, the passageway to the nose has to be clear. So if you look carefully back here you will see this little thing there. That's her soft palate. This is the passageway to the nose. When she does mah it's going to drop to leave this passageway open. When she's not doing a nasalized sound it's going to be closed, so it's a lot to see here. ![timestamp 00:50:08] !You will see what her tongue is doing, what her lips are doing, what her soft palate is doing, and I can play it a couple of times. Let's just watch now. !Video: Ave Maria. Gratie plena. Maria, gratia plena. !Student: Wow. !Leslie: Amazing, right? So focus your attention here. I'm going to play it again. See which sounds involve the soft palate dropping so that the air can get out through the nose, and which sounds involve it going back to block that passageway. We do that all the time without even knowing it to make our sounds. !Video: Ave Maria. Gratie plena. !Leslie: You hear on the mahs? Every time she does mah that space opens. I was having trouble controlling that when I first started working with Desikachar. I was nasalizing my Oms. I had learned chanting and Oms and all of that at the Ashram, and Swami Vishnudevananda, who started the Sivananda organization, was a very nasal chanter. We all just copied him. We just thought that was the right way to do it. So our Oms, we were copying his Oms. So there was, like, Om. Now, if when you're Om-ing and you pinch and un-pinch your nose the sound changes, you know you're nasalizing. Om.


That's a nasalized Om. Desikachar heard me do one Om like that. He was, like, 'Eh.' He gave me this practice, I just found the sheet the other day. I will bring it in, where I was supposed to chant Om with this little vinyasa, three Oms of three mantras long, the correct three beats for each Om, times three, and each vinyasa I did was three Oms. The next time I would do the same vinyasa doing three Oms times two, in other words six Oms, and then nine Oms, all of the proper length. Now, what this forced me to do was to preserve every molecule of air I possibly could. If I had Om air escaping through my nose there was no way to do this practice, and it completely forever forced me to stop nasalizing my Oms. Ohm. What does that mean? It means I have lifted my soft palate to block the passageway. He didn't say, 'I'm going to teach you to lift your soft palate.' He just gave me something to do that would have been impossible to do unless I figured it out, right? Try your Om and then pinch and un-pinch your nose. !Students: Om. !Leslie: Did the tone remain constant or did it change a little bit when you pinched? Did it change a little bit? Figure out how to do it so that it doesn't change? Literally, what are you going to have to discover anatomically? Om. You have to lift your soft palate. That's all it is. It prevents the air from coming out of your nose. If there's no air coming out of your nose pinching it should make no difference at all to the sound. !Student: Can we try […]? !Leslie: Go ahead, do it nasal. Om. !Students: Om. !Leslie: There you go. What did you do to nasalize your Om? What did you do? You dropped your soft palate. When you went to nasalize your Om you dropped your soft palate. It's that simple. Now, here's an even more fun scan that they did. You're going to have the douse the lights here. Sorry. If you thought the opera singer was fun, how about a beat boxer? !Video: [beat boxing] !Leslie: Look at the accuracy at the tip of his tongue. That's one place to look. !Video: [beat boxing] !Leslie: La di da di. La is a dental semi-vowel. Watch when he does la di da di, the tip of the tongue hitting the back of the teeth. !Video: La di da di. La di da di. We don't cause. We don't bother nobody [beat boxing] !Leslie: Those are nasalized. Watch the soft palate. !Video: [beat boxing]


!Leslie: Ow! !Student: Is that his vocal cords, down the lower? […]. !Leslie: Yeah. !Student: Where does that base come from? That boom that I cannot do at all? I was trying to look for it. !Leslie: Yeah. The lower frequencies come from the bigger spaces, and when you want to get that under tone, okay, the sound has to resonate in the bigger spaces that you have. The under tones and over tones that color our vocalizations allow people to identify who we are. That's the uniqueness of each person's vibrating air leaving their body. So if you go to imitate someone else's voice you're basically controlling your overtones with your throat muscles. So if I do Kermit the Frog, right, what have I just done? I tightened my throat muscles to produce those characteristic overtones. It's what the tube and throat singers do. Some of them go for the low, low frequencies. Some of them are in the mid range some of them are way up high. There are three basic ranges of tube and throat singing, but it's all about controlling throat muscles. When we get into the phonetics, which we're going to do right now, you'll feel some of that happening as we explore the different locations. !All right. So. Just to review the anatomy, okay. There are five locations where this vibrating stream of air can be shaped and formed and interrupted in various ways and to different degrees. The least interrupted way that the air leaves our body is with the nasalized, because you have air coming out of your mouth and your nose. That's the most vibratory wide open passageway that we make for air. Then there is what we call voiced and unvoiced. We will be getting to that. But for now I just want to focus on the five locations. Guttural, if you do guh, guh, guh, guh, guh, that's guttural. 'Guh' is a guttural, it's a voiced guttural consonant. That's in the back. A little further forward, where you press the center of the tongue up into the palate is the palatal location, so instead of guh, guh, guh, we get juh, juh, juh. Can you feel the difference between Guh and Juh in your mouth? Guh, Juh. Guh is further back, Juh is the next step forward. Guh, Juh, like Gajananam. It's a name for Ganesha. Guh Juh. Now the tip of the tongue up in that vault is the next place forward. That's the cerebral location, right? There you get Duh. Duh. Duh. Duh, which is different from the tip of the tongue back of the teeth Duh, which is dental. Dental Duh is different from cerebral Duh. Duh, Duh. Can you feel the difference between Duh and the? Tip of the tongue up, tip of the tongue forward. Duh, Duh. Duh Duh. Okay? And then the last place, of course, is lips. Buh. Buh, Buh, Buh, is a labial. I have been doing all the voiced locations. Buh. So you can go back. Buh. Lips. Back of the teeth, Duh. Up in the vault, Duh. Juh. Guh. ![timestamp 01:00:00] !Those are the five voiced consonants at the five locations. That’s just to define the locations for you, all right? Now, if we go to the alphabet and we start at the top . . . Now, I want to say on the outset that I learned my Sanskrit phonetics from my friend Vyaas Houston right back when he was just starting the American Sanskrit Institute. He studied with Dr. Mishra Ramamurti, the founder of the Ananda Ashram, and he was teaching very widely to a lot of people at the time, the details of Sanskrit grammar,


pronunciation, and phonetics. I became so enamored of the phonetics when I learned them from Vyaas, and the anatomical basis of the alphabet that I never made the extra effort to learn much of the grammar. I was just doing the phonetics in the shower, in the bathtub, wherever I could, and it was kind of taking over for awhile. So although what I'm going to teach you is based on what I learned from Vyaas, I’ve made some tweaks. I’ve made some changes to the way it's traditionally taught. I just want to say that. This is my stuff, not Vyaas'. Vyaas would most likely be horrified at what I'm doing right now, but so be it. Anyway. And by the way, that's Vyaas' calligraphy over there. That's all hand lettered. The chart that he sells is a hand lettered chart of the alphabet that we hang on the wall there, and it's the same chart you have in front of you here. !So at the top level we have the three root vowel. A root vowel is, and I'm giving you a homework answer here by the way, remind me of what the questions are so I make sure I answer them in the class . . . A root vowel is a sound, think of it as an asana that you hold and you stay in and it doesn't change, right? Ah. That's the fundamental root vowel, and it arises in a certain location. It's guttural. It comes from way in the back. Ah. !Students: Ah. !Leslie: If you made a recording of that and visited that recording at any point during that sound you would hear Ah, because it does not undergo change from beginning to end. That's what makes it a root vowel. It's a steady, unchanging sound from beginning to end, and it stays at its location. Right? Moving forward. Ee. !Students: Ee. !Leslie: Can you feel that that's further forward in your mouth? That's in that cerebral location. That vault. Ee. Now go back to Ah. Eee Ah Eee Ah. Can you feel how the vibration is moving forward and back as you do Ee A', right? And then skip forward to Oo. Oo. !Students: Oo. !Leslie: It's at the lips. Oo. Now this is literally yoga for this part of the body, but it follows the same rules as yoga for the whole body. You do not just materialize into an asana, dematerialize and show up in another asana, and then another. There has to be some kind of connecting movement that gets you from one position to another, and in the same way in the mouth there is a connecting sound that gets you from one location to the next. When you went from Ah to Ee listen to what happens. A e ah e au e. See, you can't in a continuous sound you cannot just jump from guttural to cerebral to guttural. It's not ah ee ah ee ah ee. You would have to interrupt the breath to make that jump. It wouldn't be smooth. Ah ee ah ee is one thing, but ahheeeahheee there is a connecting sound. Can you hear it? !Student: Yuh. !Leslie: Yuh. It's yuh, and that's what is known as a semi vowel. It happens in between the vowels. Ahheeeahheee. That will become important in a moment, and from ee to oo. Eee oo eee oo. Hear the semi vowel there. Something interesting happens when you go from oo back to ee though. Oo ee oo ee.


Is it yuh? No. It's a different one. It's Wuh. Wuh. Okay? Which in Sanskrit is the same as vuh. Wuh and vuh are the same letter. They arise differently as sounds depending on what sounds come before or after, so let's do Ah ee oo ee ah. Ah ee oo ee ah. !Students: Ah eee oo ee ah. !Leslie: Ah ee oo ee ah. One interesting observation I made, which I shared with Desikachar when we were doing some changing, which astounding hadn't occurred to him, which I felt very proud of, was the spatial elements of these sounds. Watch what happens to your face and your mouth when you're producing each of these sounds. Ah ee oo ee ah. Feel what your body, what your face, what your jaw does. Take a breath. !Students: Ah ee oo ee ah. !Leslie: Can you feel the movement that's occurring in the three spatial dimensions? In ah, your jaw drops down. You are elongating top to bottom. In ee, your lips widen, ee, as you move the sound forward. You are creating movement in this dimension, and then for oo, your lips press forward and you're elongating your facial structure in this dimension. All three spacial dimensions that we discussed as being part of three dimensional breathing are reflected in these three root vowels, which I find very interesting. Now, that's not the only way to do these sounds, though. One of the nice things in terms of practical application for exercising, you know how we sometimes like to do facial exercises to just get people to take their mask off a little bit, right? Like, the one we wear out on the street? 'None of this is getting to me. I am okay.’ So this is a good way to loosen this stuff up. Ah ee oo ee ah ee oo ee ah. You really do the maximal facial movement when you do it. Ah ee oo ee ah ee oo ee ah. Okay, now do it with your eyes open. Stop squinting. Ah ee oo ee ah ee oo ee ah. Good. Now the ventriloquist version. Watch. Ah ee oo ee ah ee oo ee ah. Ah ee oo ee ah ee oo ee ah. No jaw. No lips. Can you do it? It's your throat muscles? !Students: Ah ee oo ee ah ee oo ee ah. Ah ee oo ee ah ee oo ee ah. !Leslie: Can you feel those muscles deep in there? !Students: Yeah. !Leslie: Do they need a little exercising? !Students: Yeah. !Leslie: Some of you were cheating with your lips, but that's okay. Beginning ventriloquists do it all the time. Lip movement is the enemy of a ventriloquist. They eliminate labial sounds from their dialogue as much as they can, and when they can't avoid them they replace them with dental sounds, which is the closest location. Watch carefully a skilled ventriloquist and you will see him doing that. Is there a question? !Student: I just had a comment. When you had us try to change pitch in the whisper, I notice that I


wanted to disprove you and I was trying, and I noticed my whole head was getting involved, my forehead, my cheeks, everything to try to change the pitch. ![timestamp 01:10:05] !Leslie: Yes. There are people that can. I came out with this bold statement that you can't change the pitch of a whisper in front of my friend David Hikes ones. David Hikes is the master of harmonic overtone chanting. We will be providing a link for his work. These are a lot of links on today's lesson page. He said, 'That's not true.' And he proceeded to change the pitch of his whisper, but he was proving my point because he wasn't doing it with his cords. He was doing it with all that stuff you were struggling to discover, which he has mastery over because of who he is. So I said, 'Yes, but that's a non- glottal whisper you're doing.’ He said, 'Well, okay.’ He wasn't using his cords, in other words. He was using all of that other stuff that you were looking for. Yeah? !Student: […] just able to change the overtone of whatever the fundamental was? !Leslie: Yeah, that's what he was doing. He was using the same mechanism he uses for his chanting, just with a soft . . . !Student: But he wasn't able to go up a half [step], for instance. !Leslie: He was able to do a lot with his whisper. It's on some of his recordings, actually. Have you heard his stuff? It's amazing. Yeah. So now, root vowels are steady. They stay in one location. Diphthongs are combinations of root vowels. A i o ow. A and i are combinations of ah and ee, and you were actually doing i when I asked you to go from ah to ee. Ah ee ah ee ah ee. That's this letter here. Ah ee ah ee, but you hear there's movement, right? It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It starts somewhere, it moves and it ends somewhere. Ah ee ah ee ah ee ah ee. A is a combination of ahh and ee that de-emphasizes the semi vowel yuh aspect of it. So if you do ah ee ah ee ah ee and try to take the yuh out of it you get aheeaheeahee, A right? So this little tale here kind of represents the emphasis on the yuh, the semi vowel, yuh, the movement part. When you go from ah to oo you get oo and ow. So if I ask you to go from ahh to oo, ow, right? Oooww all the way from the back to the front. Ooowww. That's this. If you Wah, if you take that Wah out of it, right, you get what? It's the most famous diphthong in yoga. Oh. There's something very powerful about the sound of oh because it's not a root vowel, it's a diphthong. You can hear elements of the ah and oo in it, which is why you see it sometimes spelled A-U-M. It's just breaking down the components, the root vowel components of the diphthong, because the diphthong is a combination of root vowels, right? This is where, to go back to what Liz said earlier about the resonant in the overtones and undertones, that's a particular location right up in here in this vault here where we generate our internal overtones. Listen carefully. I'm going to start with oh, bring it back to ah, come forward to oh and then very slowly move my way toward the mm, which ends the sound, right? But I'm going to spend a lot of time moving into that mm, and my lips are going to take a certain shape that's going to produce a certain sound. So you will hear the components of the Om coming out because I'm doing it very slowly. Oooaaaaooorrrrm. Did you hear the oo? The oo as an overtone in that space? Let's give that a try. Take a deep breath. !Students: Oooaaaaoooorrrm.


!Leslie: Can you hear as you sustain that slow movement of the lips towards the mm? You're making the shape of an oo with your lips and you're bringing that element of the sound out of the diphthong, right? You're emphasizing the oo element of the oh, just as when you drop back for the ah, obviously you're making the ah. Now can you just do an om, but still feel the ah plus the oo as part of the oh? Feel all the locations involved. Give it a try. !Students: Oooaaauuuumm. !Leslie: It’s a powerful sound. It gets all the way back and all the way to the lips involved, the whole - all the locations are really involved in that sound. Did it get a little more resonant? !Student: I don't think I can answer that. !Leslie: Practice in the shower. Practice where the best acoustics are in your house. That's usually the shower. Nice tiled, reflective environment. It's a fun thing to do. So back to the alphabet. Yes? !Student: I have a question. So when you Om, you start and you maintain the same pitch. I have heard lots of people who Om like Ooouuumm. !Leslie: That's a choice. !Student: It's a choice? !Leslie: I guess. Yeah. They choose to do it. !Student: Is it wrong? !Leslie: You guys are never going to stop trying to pin me down on a right and wrong answer, aren't you? !Student: Well, I'm just curious where it comes from. Does it come from trying to articulate those three sounds? !Leslie: I don't know. You have to ask the person doing it. Why are they doing it that way? Who taught them? What's the point? !Student: I have never known anybody who [….] !Leslie: Can I just make a broad policy statement here for now and all time? It's a full time job being responsible for the shit that comes out of my mouth. I have absolutely no interest in explaining, understanding, justifying what comes out of anyone else's mouth. Ask them. I have a full time job with this. Okay? That's a policy statement. Yeah? !Student: In the way you would teach, then. For example, in teaching Om sometimes I will see people


are tense, so I will have them move around and feel where the air is going. You're saying if you see that in your student that's a proper adjustment? !Leslie: A proper adjustment for . . . !Student: In other words, a way to teach. It's individualized to them. It's a way to remove tension. !Leslie: It can be. Yeah, the voice is a very powerful feedback mechanism for what's going on in the entire system. It will tell you how well supported your breath is, where the tension is or isn't in the structures that support your vocal cords. You know, they would frequently have us, as part of the training, do Vedic chanting in asana, and not just any asana. They are, like, let's see, Om namo pranayá Pranaya nama om. Pranaya swaha. You know, do that a few times and see how well supported your voice is. So it's a great feedback mechanism. I frequently find myself using it therapeutically. If I hear something going on in someone's voice or their pronunciation, because you can zero in with the phonetics on these different locations and you can help them find different parts of themselves. Keep in mind as yoga teachers, as yoga educators, our voice is the main tool we have for getting across what we're trying to get across. That and, you know, showing things with our bodies. The voice, it can't be overstated how important it is to have more power, more subtlety, more variation, more support, more articulation for what it is we do, how we communicate. Just as we are trying to be conscious of where our kneecap is or our shin or our arm or our psoas when we're practicing, it's just as important to have that level of connection with what's going on in here. We have been using speech and language our whole lives. Now this is a live chance to see how we do it. ![timestamp 01:20:03] !So I want to take you through the alphabet a little bit here, and we can do some chanting. So we covered the root vowels. By the way, this is short and long versions. Ah ahh, e ee, oo ooo, a ai, oh ow, and there's two ways to shut down a sound. You can do it with your mouth open, which is Ahh, where the air escapes out with your mouth open, Ah, or Um, closing the lips like at the end of Om. So the traditional way of chanting this would be Aahheeeuuuaaaiiioooowumahh. But I'm reversing it to turn it into a mantra, so we do Ahh ai eee oo ooh ay ai oh ow ah um. Right? So do you want to give that a try? Take a breath. AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHAM AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHAM AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHAM AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHAM AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHUAM !To make it easy in English, right? AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHUAM. Aham, as most of you know, means I am. Turns it into a mantra. So. AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHAM. See how much easier it is in English? But that's where it is in Sanskrit. Now what you can do once you have this vowel diphthong chain going - say that three times fast, vowel diphthong chain. Never mind. Tongue twisters are a great way of training all of this. But we can


start to see how in each of these . . . Now, this alphabet here is showing you the five locations. This row is the guttural location. This is the palatal, this is the cerebral, this is the dental and this is the labial. The same thing happens at each location. There's a nasal, a voiced and an unvoiced way of dealing with that vibrating air. Remember, all this is is your anatomy playing with the vibrating stream of air that's coming up past your cords, right? I would like to actually start with the lips. The lips are the most visible, accessible, easily manipulated part of the mechanism. It's the part we first learn to use, and you will hear why when we do the sounds, right? So we will do this. Let's all take a breath. AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHAM Now we will do ma. Ma ma mi mi moo moo may mi mo mow ma mum. Ma ma mi mi moo moo may my mo mow ma mum. Ma ma mi mi moo moo may my mo mow ma mum. Ma ma mi mi moo moo may my mo mow ma mum. The most primal sounds across cultures, languages, history that human beings start making, describing the most important stuff. Ma wasn't important? !Student: Da da da da. !Leslie: It was da da da da? Interesting. Was he nursing you? !Student: He was nursing me. !Leslie: Okay them. We will go into that later. All right. Ma ma. So try ma ma mi mi moo moo and halfway through pinch your nose. Remember how that shuts down a nasalization? See what consonant you come up with. Ma ma mi mi moo moo may my. What happened? What sounds was forced to occur when you shut down the nasal passage? What was it? Yeah. When you're sick and you're all stuffed up and you say, 'I want my mommy,' you can't say I want my mommy. You say, 'I want my bobby.' I want my bobby. So of course we don't pinch our nose every time when we shut down the nasalized location. We use our soft palate. So ba. This is ba. This is the labial voiced constant. We will do one line of ma and then we will go to ba. Ma ma mi mi moo moo may my mo mow ma mum. Ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. Did anyone feel their soft palate lift when they did that? Let's go back and forth. We will do ma ba mi bi moo boo, right? Take a breath. This is an exercise. Feel your soft palate. Ma ba mi bi moo boo may by mo bow ma bum. Ma ba mi bi moo boo may by mo bow ma bum. What is the difference between ma and ba? You're doing something with your anatomy. You're lifting and lowering your soft palate. That's what is either opening or closing the passageway to your nose. You can hear how it's a little less vibratory. I'm going to shut this off so we can hear better what's going on, because that's creating all sorts of overtones in the room. So ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. Ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. Ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. Ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. If you place your hands here as you're doing that sound, what you'll feel is there is still a continuity to breath. There's still a voice. There's still a narrowed yet distinct passageway for the air to leave your body. It's continuous. Ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. Can you feel that? We call it voiced. But when we get to the unvoiced . . . [police sirens] Welcome to New York City. You can hear that.


When we get to the unvoiced, that changes. Now you're literally cutting the voice into pieces. You're cutting the stream of air into separate pieces because you're creating a momentary closure of the passageway. We will do a line of ba and then we will get to pa. Ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. Pa pa pi pi poo poo pay py po pow pa pum. Do you feel it in your abdominals, in the diaphragm? It's like a tiny little Kapalabhati. Pa pa pi pi poo poo pay py po pow pa pum. The passage of air is momentarily being stopped for a split second before getting on to the next articulation. That's called unvoiced. [more sirens] The music of the streets. !Student: [….] !Leslie: You know, I used to think that that sound was universally annoying, and then I pictured how I would feel if I was in a burning building and I heard that sound. Not annoying at all. It means someone needs help, and they're hopefully getting it. [the sirens abruptly die down] [laughter] Wow. They're right across the street. I hope that came out on the soundtrack. Okay, was there a question somewhere? No. Okay. So this same pattern occurs all the way up. Now you may ask, 'Well, what are these characters I skipped over?' Those are the aspirate forms of each of those consonants. So ba also has bah. Pa also has pah. Why do we not chant the aspirate forms? Take a deep breath, as deep as you can, and do pah. Pah pah pih pih pooh pooh pah piy, because you run out of air. That's why. They're just not really easy to chant that way. So this is the lips, but listen to these sounds. Ma ma mi mi mo mo may mi mo mow ma mum. Ba ba bi bi boo boo bay by bo bow ba bum. Pa pa pi pi poo poo pay py po pow pa pum. What do these remind you of? ![timestamp 01:30:08] !Student: Baby sounds. !Leslie: Baby sounds, yes. All the important things in a baby's universe are encompassed by a lot of these labial combinations with vowel sounds. The basic sounds that we make to describe the most basic things in a baby's environment. Ma. Mama. Ahma. Matah. Eema. Iima. These are all words from different languages of mother. Papa. Bapu. Are words for father. !Student: Abba. !Leslie: What is it? !Student: Abba. !Leslie: Abba, so Hebrew. Abba for father. So it's not surprising that across a lot of languages these sounds are relating to the primal entities that the baby is surrounded by, because the lips are the first part of his vocal mechanism that we start getting some control over. We start getting some control over them the minute we start have to coordinate sucking and breathing and swallowing, right? So these are baby sounds. When we take the tip of the tongue to the back of the teeth, the nasalized sound at that


location is na. It's not ma. It's na. Na na ni ni noo noo nah ny no now na na. Na na ni ni noo noo nah ny no now na na. Now pinch your nose. Na na ni ni . . . !Students: . . . no no nah ni no now na na. !Leslie: You try to do nah but you can't. There's no air coming out of your nose. What sound happens? Da. Did anyone hear that? Da. That's of course going to be the voiced dental consonant. Da da di di doo doo day dy do dow da dun. In this chart I was giving you it actually lays the Sanskrit and the English is here as well at each location. We did the labials okay. Ma, ba, pa, and now we're doing the dentals. Na, da and pa. !Student: What do you mean? The day, not duh? !Leslie: Duh. Yeah. The tip of the tongue, back of the teeth. The dental. You see that little drawing there? That's where the tip of the tongue is. So it's da da di di doo doo day dy do dow da dun. We will do that and then we will shift to ta, and again feel the breath mechanics. Da da di di doo doo day dy do dow da dun. Ta ta ti ti too too tay ty to tow ta tun. You feel there's a little contraction there, right? Again, you're stopping the stream of air from leaving the body, and so the structure pauses for a moment. There's a little pulse. So sometimes if people are having trouble learning Kapalabhati I will give them an unvoiced sound to do. It could be pa or ta or any of the other unvoiced ones that I know is going to stop the stream of air, and I have them put their hands here to just see if they can feel that to get that feedback to see if they can sensitize themselves to how their breath mechanics are connected with what's coming out of their mouth. Cerebral. This is a fun location to explore, because we generally don't use this in the English language. But it's used all over in the Indian languages, Sanskrit based languages, Hindi, all of that. One of the simplest ways to imitate an Indian accent is to stick your tongue up that location, keep it up there and just make your syntax a little crazy. You have an Indian accent. So right there we get, instead of the dental na we get the cerebral nah. It's softer. It's more muffled. Take a breath. Na na ni ni noo noo nay ny no now na nun. Na na ni ni noo noo nay ny no now na nun. Na na ni ni noo noo nay ny no now na nun. Na na ni ni noo noo nay ny no now na nun, and Da dun di di doo doo day dy do dow da dum. Da dun di di doo doo day dy do dow da dum. Da dun di di doo doo day dy do dow da dum. Da dun di di doo doo day dy do dow da dum. and ta ta ti ti too too tay ty to tow ta tum. Ta ta ti ti too too tay ty to tow ta tum. Ta ta ti ti too too tay ty to tow ta tum. Ta ta ti ti too too tay ty to tow ta tum. Now keep your tongue there and say 'chapati'. !Students: Chapati. !Leslie: There you go. That's it. Chapati. That's where it's coming from. Chapati is right there. So I would like you to notice something that happens as we go from nasalized to voiced to unvoiced. The


soound vibration becomes more and more distinct and formed, and less vibratory. Ma ma mi mi mo mo may my mo mow ma mum. Ba ba bi bi bo bo bay by bo bow ba bum. Pa pa pi pi poo poo pay py po pow pa pum. You hear the sound at that location coming gradually into form from formlessness. It's a very interesting evolution process that the sound goes through from nasalized to voiced to unvoiced. It's vibration coming into form. The idea that sound is behind the very process of creation lies at the root of so much of the mythology and so much of the cosmology that comes to us from India. Something is happening in the neighborhood with all those sirens, and it would happen on the day we're doing sound, wouldn't it? Very interesting. Although one thing I learned from my friend David Hikes was there is music in just about anything if you listen for it. If there's a sound that's really annoying you that you can't get away from, start listening for the overtones and the undertones. There's always music inside of sounds that we often don't hear, and it can be fascinating and beautiful. Even a leaf blower can have a whole symphony of . . . !Student: No, that's bad. !Leslie: That's a tough one to find it in a leaf blower, but it's there. Overtones, undertones, the whole symphony. Yes? !Student: I just saw this video where they recorded crickets and then slowed it down to the human speed and it sounded like choral singing. He could not tell that it wasn't people singing. !Leslie: Wow. Interesting. Yeah. !Student: Can I see that link? !Student: Yes, […] !Leslie: So if we move to the palatal location, okay, to go from a nasalized progression we went from ma to na to nuh, and if I used the center of my tongue pressed up against my palate I get Nuh. It's a little like the enye sound in Spanish. Nya. Na na ni ni no no nay ny no now nya num. Na na ni ni no no nay ny no now nya num. Na na ni ni no no nay ny no now nya num. Na na ni ni no no nay ny no now nya num. And if you cut off the air to your nose you get from na na na ja ja. Can you do that? !Students: Na na na ja ja. !Leslie: Did anyone get the ja? Na na na ja ja ja? It's there. Of course, I'll suggest you use your soft palate now instead of your fingers. Ja ja ji ji joo joo jay jy jo jow ja jum. Ja ja ji ji joo joo jay jy jo jow ja jum. Ja ja ji ji joo joo jay jy jo jow ja jum. Ja ja ji ji joo joo jay jy jo jow ja jum. !YogaAnatomy.net Principles: Class 1.8: The Vocal Diaphragm ! of 30 23

And cha cha chi chi choo choo chay chy cho chow cha chum. Cha cha chi chi choo choo chay chy cho chow cha chum. Cha cha chi chi choo choo chay chy cho chow cha chum. Cha cha chi chi choo choo chay chy cho chow cha chum. There's only one place left to go after that, and that's the back of your throat, otherwise known as the guttural location. So the progression of . . . What, sorry? !Student: What is your tongue doing on these? On the palatal ones it's not the top of your tongue, right? !Leslie: It's the center of your tongue. !Student: The center of your tongue, thank you. !Leslie: Yeah. If you look at the drawing I had given you he shows actually that second location, the center of your tongue lifting up and back to get there. The tip of your tongue can't really do that. Anyone find they have a lazy tongue? Like you're having trouble articulating? You should be fairly, except for the cerebral location, which you don't usually use in English, these are sounds we make all the time, but isolating them and pulling them out can illuminate very interesting things about our vocal and breath mechanics. Guttural location in particular. We went from ma to na to nuh to nyuh. The only place left to go is mna. Mna, mna, mna Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. Can you go totally ventriloquist on that and not use your jaw or your lips or your facial muscles at all? ![timestamp 01:40:14] !Can you just open wide and go Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. Mna mna mnee mnee mnoo mnoo mnay mny mno mnow mna mnum. That's a workout, isn't it? It's not easy to do with a huge uvula. I always wondered why that was a tricky one for me. Now I have video evidence of what's going on in there. By the way, he said that it probably didn't start out that way; that that's often a sign of sleep apnea. That if you're getting blocked off and its just being succumbed to those constant changes of pressure, sudden shifts of pressure when it gets blocked off it gets stretched every time that happens. So over time it can get stretched out that way, so we're investigating that. My next presentation to you will be the sleep study that has been ordered up, which should be a fun report to give back to you. So now guttural location. The voiced is ga. Ga ga gee gee goo goo gay gy go gow ga gum. Ga ga gee gee goo goo gay gy go gow ga gum. Ga ga gee gee goo goo gay gy go gow ga gum. Ga ga gee gee goo goo gay gy go gow ga gum. and Kha kha khee khee khoo khoo khay khy kho khow kha khum.


Kha kha khee khee khoo khoo khay khy kho khow kha khum. Kha kha khee khee khoo khoo khay khy kho khow kha khum.. Kha kha khee khee khoo khoo khay khy kho khow kha khum, That's basically the periodic table of sound elements there. What's left here in the bottom line are the semi vowels. Two of them we explored. Ya and wah, or va. Okay. But that represents the two ends, the back and the front of where semi vowels occur, but there are two other locations in the middle. See, this is a palatal sound. Ya. Ya. It comes from the palatal location. Why is there no guttural semi vowel, by the way? Because a semi vowel is in between vowel locations. It's a semi vowel, right? You can't have a semi vowel at the starting point. It has to just be in the front of the starting point. !Student: So you couldn't have a labial one, either? !Leslie: Well you do, actually. That's va. !Student: That's at the other end, though. !Leslie: That's at the other end. Yeah. Va wuh. Va wuh. It's out here at the end. But there's no place at the back to get behind the guttural to have it started. So Vidra is the famous cerebral Vadra in Sanskrit, not Sanskrit. This is where you most often hear the mispronunciation of Sanskrit words. If you're being very accurate you're saying Sanskrit, not Sanskrit, and you'll say Harrerama not Harerama, right. So we don't have that cerebral r necessarily so much in English. In other languages there's the use of that cerebral sound. So it's ya, rra, and then the back of the teeth is la. That's the dental semi vowel, and then va. Ya rra la va. So we can do Ya ya yi yi yoo yoo yay yiy yo yow ya yun. Ya ya yi yi yoo yoo yay yiy yo yow ya yun. Ya ya yi yi yoo yoo yay yiy yo yow ya yun. Ya ya yi yi yoo yoo yay yiy yo yow ya yun. Rra rra rri rri rroo rroo rray rry rro rrow rra rrun. Rra rra rri rri rroo rroo rray rry rro rrow rra rrun. Rra rra rri rri rroo rroo rray rry rro rrow rra rrun. Rra rra rri rri rroo rroo rray rry rro rrow rra rrun. Now the back of your teeth. La la lee lee loo loo lay ly lo low la lun. La la lee lee loo loo lay ly lo low la lun. La la lee lee loo loo lay ly lo low la lun. La la lee lee loo loo lay ly lo low la lun. And Va va vee vee voo voo vay vy vo vow va vum. Va va vee vee voo voo vay vy vo vow va vum. Va va vee vee voo voo vay vy vo vow va vum. Va va vee vee voo voo vay vy vo vow va vum. Good. I heard some of you doing the labial closure when you were at the dental location. That's not the most efficient thing to do. In Sanskrit when you put a dot by something it just means close the sound after every location you're at. So if you're doing La la lee lee loo loo lay ly lo low la lun. See you just leave the tongue there. Lun is the way you would end that sentence. Not lum. See what I mean? Sanskrit is spelled in a way that reflects the most efficient pronunciation of where your location is. We do this all the time in spoken language, whether it's written that way or not. I mean, for example, in English, an example of where spelling in English has changed because of a phonetic rule is you don't


say, 'A apple.' An apple, right? You put that intermediate sound in there. This rule is all over Sanskrit. It's called the rule of Sandhi, which changes the spelling of things depending on the proximity of certain sounds at the beginning or end of a word, which is why, if you're saying this Sutra Yoga Chitta Vritti Nirodha as one long phrase it sounds like that, but if you're breaking the words up it's Yogaha Chitta Vritti Nirodha. But Yoga Chitta doesn't work so well. Yoga Chitta, you see? It changes the pronunciation and the spelling based on the proximity. Same thing with Tapas. Tapas svadhyaya. The word is actually Tapa ha, but Tapas svadhyaya, the next sound is svadhyaya. Because of its proximity to svadhyaya everyone calls it Tapas. Tapa ha is the actual word if you pull it out and just spell it separately, so that's the rule of Sandhi. At the bottom line here we have the sibilants. Sha, she, sa, and then the pure aspirate, which is the last letter, is ha, sha. Sha Sa. Sa is more of a dental sssss. You press the air out there where your teeth are. Sssss. Then if you go back a little bit, like where the Rra is, Rra Sha, Rha Sha, Rha Sha, and then if you do Ya, Ya Sha. Notice how that Sha is a little further back? So this Sha is where the Yuh is. See how it's right under it? Ya Sha. This is Rra. That's where you can find that. Sha. This is Tsa. So find your Yuh, find your Sha that's in the same location. Sha sha shi shi shoo shoo shay shy sho show sha shum. Sha sha shi shi shoo shoo shay shy sho show sha shum. Sha sha shi shi shoo shoo shay shy sho show sha shum. Sha sha shi shi shoo shoo shay shy sho show sha shum. Rra. Just one. Rra Sha. Sha sha shi shi shoo shoo shay shy sho show sha shum.. Sha sha shi shi shoo shoo shay shy sho show sha shum. Sha sha shi shi shoo shoo shay shy sho show sha shum. Saa saa see see soo soo say sy so sow sah sum. Saa saa see see soo soo say sy so sow sah sum. Saa saa see see soo soo say sy so sow sah sum. Saa saa see see soo soo say sy so sow sah sum. Okay. Take a deep breath here. This is an aspirate. You can use a lot of air. Ha ha he he hoo hoo hay hy ho how ha hum. Ha ha he he hoo hoo hay hy ho how ha hum. Ha ha he he hoo hoo hay hy ho how ha hum. Ha ha he he hoo hoo hay hy ho how ha hum. Yay, you did the whole thing. So all the language really is just a combination of everything you have just chanted in various ways. But again, it was a tour through your five locations. Guttural, palatal, cerebral, dental, labial. !Student: Can I ask you a quick question about the guttural? !Leslie: Sure. !Student: I used to take singing lessons. My teacher would have me do this thing where I would take a tissue and I would hold my tongue out and do scales in ga, because the ga would make my tongue want to go back, but I would deliberately pull it out and keep doing the scales. What he was saying, what he was doing, and these were his words, depending your trachea, strengthening the muscles down there, and it felt like it was really doing that. !


Leslie: Oh yeah. You can do the same thing just by keeping the tip of the tongue at the back of your teeth and doing guttural sounds. ![timestamp 01:50:13] !Gha gha ghi ghi ghoo ghoo ghay ghy gho ghow gha ghun. Or if you want to make it harder, stick it out, clamp it between your teeth. Gha gha ghi ghi ghoo ghoo ghay ghy gho ghow gha ghun. Gha gha ghi ghi ghoo ghoo ghay ghy gho ghow gha ghun. Gha gha ghi ghi ghoo ghoo ghay ghy gho ghow gha ghun. Gha gha ghi ghi ghoo ghoo ghay ghy gho ghow gha ghun. There are all sorts of fun things you can do. For example, sometimes people that have sleep apnea, that have snoring issues, their tone in the soft palate is off. It's not toned. It's too floppy. It seems to sit there like mine was doing in that video. So because we know that the soft palate has to move to transition you from a nasalized to a voiced or an unvoiced sound, you can just have someone do sounds. It doesn't have to be complicated like this. It can just be ah. You can have them move from na na na na na to kah kha kha kha kha. Na kha na khi no coo, or na kha na khan na khan. What's the difference between na and kha? It's that soft palate. Just do na kha na kha na kha. It gets boring after awhile. You can do other sounds if you want like na kha ni khi no khong nay khang no khong na khan if you want, but that's moving the soft palate intentionally and giving it some exercise. You can do it at any location. You can do ma pa ma pa ma pa ma pa. The gutturals gets more of the throat muscles in the back, but you can target different areas of your vocal mechanism if you understand which sounds live at each location. You can pinpoint people's potential weak spots. Sometimes you run into someone and they just can't find a location. They can't get that articulation, you know? It's very useful not just if something has gone wrong, but let's say an actor wants to be able to break down an accent that they have to learn. Well, the first thing you have to do to learn a new accent is to basically unlearn your existing accent. You can't get to one without the other. You have to be able to undo whatever habitual way you have learned to use this mechanism to produce language, which is an accent, whether it's a regional accent or one that is specific to a particular kind of a language. These are very difficult patterns to overcome, you know? I implicitly figured some of this out in the early '80s when I moved to Los Angeles as a young Swami running this Sivananda community in West Hollywood, and everyone I met said, 'Oh, you're from New York?’ I was like, 'What do you mean I'm from New York? I don't have a New York accent?' I lived in basically New York my whole life and I didn't hear it. They heard it. I was talking like this. They were, like, 'Oh, you're from New York?’ I was, like, 'No, I'm not from New York. What are you talking about? How can you tell?' I didn't want to be pegged as New Yorker. I wasn't denying my heritage. It just annoyed me that people would tell from my voice where I was from, and so in about three months I learned how to basically talk like this without the New York accent. Yeah, well, it's a lot less. It comes out in unguarded moments around family or whatever, or if a lot of people have a heavy accent. Do you find yourself picking up people's accents when you're around them, regardless of where they're from? You can just be in the moment. If I pull in somewhere and I have some trouble with my car, 'Yep, think you may want to look at the carburetor. What do you think?' Well you were down South for a long time. It's, like, 'How are you all doing?' You just kind of blend in. We instinctively do these things, sometimes without even knowing how we're doing it, but doing it intentionally for a particular purpose, whether it's acting or singing or whatever, or just for fun, this is a very helpful framework, because being able to hear these locations and hear these articulations is a big,


big part of it. So having practiced this for many years myself I have become pretty sensitive to the way people are using their vocal mechanism, and it can often eliminate certain things that are going on with their breath or even with their minds. It's very interesting. Because you can't really pronounce something you can't hear, just like you can't move your body without proprioception. It doesn't matter how well your muscles are working. Without proprioception you can't control it. It's the same thing with your voice. Unless you can hear accurately you can't necessarily speak accurately, and I find that learning how to speak accurately helps with being able to hear accurately. They go together. It's a very interesting interplay. So any final questions? Was this fun stuff? Yeah? Yeah? Sure. !Student: At the very beginning when you were talking about the vowels, I'm a little confused about what you called a ee cerebral. I study other languages, and I studied Sanskrit about 20 years ago. I have forgotten about it, but I'm thinking about the tongue, what it does when you say the ee. It's not a .… !Leslie: It's not a what? !Student: I wrote cerebral, so I don't know if I understood what was wrong at the beginning. !Leslie: Well, where do you feel your ee? Don't take my word for it. !Student: Yeah, that's why I'm asking. !Leslie: Let's put it this way. It's somewhere in between ah and oo. !Student: Ah and oo. !Leslie: Ahh ee oo. Where do you feel the vibration of ee happening in your structure? I think some people feel it further back, I think some people feel it further forward. !Student: Maybe because I'm Italian. !Leslie: It could be. The basic is that you've got ah all the way back. You've got oo all the way forward. You've got ee somewhere in the middle between those two, so just starting with that and sort of fine tuning where you feel it and where can you maybe move it if you choose to before it's not ee anymore, how far can you move it until it's a different sound? These are all fun little experiments that we can do. Yes? !Student: Do we actually define a consonant in this context? !Leslie: A consonant, yes. A consonant is what happens when you narrow, cut off or basically make contact between something and something else. Think of consonant as contact. When you have vowels and diphthongs it's a free flow of air coming out. AA ĀĀ EE ĒĒ OO ŌŌ EYAI OWOW AHAM. As soon as you start interfering with, pinching, cutting or in other ways contouring that sound, you've got a consonant. The three ways of doing that are nasal, voiced and unvoiced. Those are three ways of basically making contact somewhere in there to that flowing stream of air and interfering with it in some way or other to shape it. That's what a consonant is. The semi vowels, again, they are like the


vinyasas between the asanas. They are the connecting movements in between the sounds. They are very powerful. If you look at some of the sacred languages in chanting and liturgy around the world, some of the most powerful sounds are root vowel semi vowel combinations. Aaheeeoooeeow You know. You have a lot of vibratory business going on in a sound like that. Yeah. !Student: Why do you think Vyaas would not like what you're doing? !Leslie: Well, because it's non-traditional. I'm switching it around. I basically start from the nasalized and go to the voiced when we're chanting rather than the other way around. I tend to start at the lips and go back. It's kind of backwards. I have mantracized it in a certain way that makes it easier to teach about the structure of what's going on. I'll have to ask him what he thinks. I will send him this video. So Vyaas, it's coming your way. So have fun with this. Yes? !Student: Is this … The only sound that I'm really confused by is the ja. That b in palatable. I don't understand how it's palatal. !Leslie: Ja? Okay, well, can you find your palatal nasal, which is nya nya nya nya nya? And then pinch your nose. Nya nya nya nya nya. Ja ja ja. I mean, you have to let the air out somehow when your nose is pinched. When it comes out from that space you have created between your tongue and the palate, that's what they say, anyway. ![timestamp 02:00:11] !If you can get another sound to happen, more power to you. You've discovered a new consonant. !Student: …. !Leslie: Okay. Well, maybe you just have to pinch your nose a little bit. Yes? !Student: It helped me to learn palatable to think of your widening and spreading. So you notice ee or cha, you kind of . . . !Leslie: You have to flatten your tongue a little bit. !Student: I feel mine is kind of widening and spreading and so cerebral. That helped me make the distinction. !Leslie: Yeah. This is just a very, very broad overview of this focusing on the structure of what we've got and how we use it. It's just intended to maybe make you excited about exploring your own anatomy that goes into the production of sound, and just playing. That's all I have been doing with it. Just get in the shower and play with it. See what happens. These locations are there. We use them all the time. Some of them we use more than others, and it's just how we communicate. It's how we use our anatomy to take this amazing breathing mechanism that can vibrate the stream of air as it's leaving our cords and form it into communication and art and music, and so much of what we makes us, us, and human. So it's a really powerful thing to get a deeper awareness and connection to. So have fun


with it. Play with it. And see you next time. Okay. ![applause]


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