Mouth Exploration - A Journey Into Sound.

When a baby is learning to speak, there’s a period of babbling and sound exploration that is cute, normal, and part of the process. Babies make a ton of sounds, babble nonsensically, and do so in a variety of ways.

They do so with food in their mouth, fingers in the mouth, toys in their mouth.

They do so with their tongue out, while drooling.

And we accept it, love it, treat it as a stage in their growth and development.

Infants use mouthing as an exploratory means to identify and characterize objects. They feel the textures, taste the items, and do so with new objects more than old and familiar items. They’re engaging in exploratory play.

What you get from that is them figuring out how to make sounds, make the sounds natively heard and used in their communities, and an understanding of the grammar or syntax of that language.

When you an adult learning a language, you get none of that. You get none of the exploratory experimental sound production, you get none of the subconscious learning of syntax, and instead you get the crippling performance anxiety and fear of judgment from native communicators.

When you think about mouth sounds, there are so many things that the human vocal tract is capable of.

Mouth sounds occur due to the passing of airflow through muscles in the vocal tract. Specifically in English, these sounds are powered by the lungs, producing audible vibrations. Sound waves are modified by the pharynx, larynx, mouth, nasal cavity, and paranasal sinuses. These chambers impact the resonance quality of the final sound. Sound is also modified by the constriction and relaxation of the muscles in the wall of the pharynx and the movement of muscles of the face, tongue, and lips. Only by learning to control and explore these muscle groups can you expect to match a native speaker’s resonance and sound production.

This requires exploratory work to figure out what your current sounds are like and what your target sounds are like.

If you don’t give yourself the runway to explore and trial these experimental sounds, then how do imagine yourself eventually achieving them for functional use?

So let’s review some of the sounds in general terms that we can make with our vocal tract.

Mouth Sounds

Speech

Human speech production is the most common type of sound that humans make. By adjusting the stiffness of tissues by the contraction of muscles, we can control the pitch, the fundamental frequency, and the timbre. We manipulate the articulators in our mouth to further shape the sound into specific and distinct sounds.

Singing

By an extension of speech, people can sing. Whereas speech is precise as it pertains to the articulators in our mouth to get the specific speech sounds, singing takes that level of control and extends it to everything else. The pitch, the breath control, the resonance, the timbre. All the rest of it is deliberate, masterfully controlled, and precise because it is all intention.

Babbling

It’s the baby’s test-drive. Unintelligible speech-like sounds present in the prelinguistic vocalization stages of babies. They’re testing out what they’re working with.

Whistling

Human whistling is resonance caused by compressed air entering or exiting the mouth. The smaller area in the oral cavity is related to a higher pitch in whistling, while a greater area is related to low frequencies. If you can whistle, you know certain mouth shapes that change the pitch of the whistle. This required you to experiment.

Breathing Sounds

You can make noise when you are breathing hard or catching your breath. You are engaging in turbulent air flow and it’s because of the effort involved. Think gasping for air after a sprint. Think breathing with your nose congested or crackles in your lungs due to a lung infection.

Coughing

Coughing, either voluntary or involuntary, is a defense mechanism of the body forcing exhalation to prevent foreign bodies or substances from entering the cavities of the respiratory tract. Food wants to go down the wrong way? Your body automatically engages in a cough response to get it back out. The sound you produce when you cough is the build up of pressure by the slamming of your vocal cords together and the subsequent release.

Snoring

Snoring is a respiratory sound event caused by air turbulence passing through the pharyngeal structure, causing soft tissue vibration in the vocal tract. When you’re tired, have had alcohol or overweight, the reduced tone in your pharyngeal muscles causes these floppy tissues to flap as you breathe.

Crying

Crying is a form of communication caused by air pressure exiting the mouth with additional resonances from the oral cavity. It can be accompanied by sobbing, respiratory spasms, and accelerated inhalation and exhalation.

Humans Make a Ton of Noise

And I think it’s overlooked and taken for granted how we accomplish all these sounds. But it is a skill and an art form with complexity and intricacy.

It can be easy to watch a video of a beatboxer and completely be awe-struck. Without an understanding of how all these different sounds are made, we can dismiss the whole performance as something beyond our comprehension. But beatboxing is simply an extension of the same muscles and anatomy that every human has, just with better and more precise control.

It is something that can be achieved with time and practice.

When we think about learning a new language, or learning to change our pronunciation, it’s important to give ourselves the space and time to explore those mouth shapes, to test out those sounds in a safe space. To practice.

You don’t expect someone to learn how to whistle in 1 day. But because we maybe know some of the basics and foundations of the language we are learning, we don’t often allow ourselves the space to practice the sounds. Nor do we necessarily know the differences in the sounds.

One particular skill that is challenging for people is tongue placement. Whether that’s sticking the tip of your tongue between your teeth so you can actually see it in a mirror like for the TH-sounds, curling your tongue up, narrowing your tongue so only the tip makes contact, these minute movements and changes in movements have a direct impact on your eventual produced sound.

And the only way you can feel comfortable doing these movements is by finding a time and space to safely do so.

You cannot be trying to explore these sounds in high-stakes situations. You can’t do it in meetings, presentations or business phone calls.

You need to be trying them out at home, by yourself, in front of a mirror. Now if that’s the case and I’ve convinced you of the benefits of exploring these sounds privately, the next question is how long are you going to allow yourself to do so?

You allow infants to learn to speak 2-3 years to articulate sounds clearly and they’re babbling at home as soon as they wake up.

Will you practice these sounds regularly? 15 minutes a day? 1 hour a day? 2 hours a day? Do you listen to your own enunciation on a 30 minute drive to work? There are a variety of private and safe spaces for you to practice these sounds, but I challenge you to do it regularly and to put yourself out there in your pronunciation exploration because it will pay dividends to your pronunciation skills for a lifetime.