Before we go any further, it's important that we get an idea of how the voice is made in the body. Now for most people, if I ask them the question, where is the voice made, they'll gesture a little around the throat area. That is part of how the voice is made, but it's not the full story.
What else happens? The first thing that happens when we go to speak is actually we have a thought. It's happening up here in the brain, and the thought the impulses that we want to communicate. There is something inside of us that we need to get outside of us through our voice. That thought is taken by the nervous system into the body to start moving the bits that need to move to make sound. The first place those nerves send that message is to a big muscle that lots of us don't know about, that's called the diaphragm. The diaphragm sits in the center of the body more or less. It separates the area where we have our lungs and our heart, and the area where all the rest of the organs are. This muscle is actually the most important muscle when it comes to breathing. The nerves send that message to the diaphragm and the diaphragm starts to contract. When it contracts, it moves lower in the body. Now it does this so that the lungs, which are above it and they're attached to the bottom of the lungs, attached to the top of the diaphragm. They increase the volume of the lungs, and what happens then is the body has to take air into the lungs to equalize pressure.
we just need to think about the fact that the lungs are passive and it's the diaphragm that does the hard work for breathing. We've had that message, it's gone through the nervous system is come to the diaphragm, that diaphragm has descended, air has filled up into the lungs. The diaphragm then starts to contract and come back up. As it does that, the air starts traveling up our wind pipe. Remember those nerves, as well as going to the diaphragm, they also come to the vocal chords. Now your vocal cords are tiny, they are about the length of a fingernail and you have two of them and they sit side-by-side within the larynx, which is this structure in the middle of our wind pipe. As the air comes up underneath them, the vocal cords close and the air pushes them apart, and they do this wonderful little wave motion. But actually hundreds of times a second. What that does is it starts to take that column of air and turn it into bounces of air or vibrations. After that, those vibrations start to bounce around within what we would call your vocal tract. The area at the back of the mouth, the top of the throat in the mouth, in these bony structures within your face. Those vibrations will increase in size. That's where we get the tone of the voice. Your tone of voice is really about the vibrations. What's happening with those bumps of air after they've come through the vocal cords. After that, there is one last piece of the puzzle, and that's what happens in the mouth. Your mouth, by that I mean the tongue, the lips, the jaw a little bit your pallets which is at the top of your mouth, they shape that sound. That's where we get language.
Realize why sometimes your voice doesn't work in the way you want it. Maybe you're really quiet. Actually what you may find is that you don't have enough space and some of your resonating chambers. Or maybe you have that moment where you almost lose your voice a little bit. Often that's happening because there's tension in this area here and it's making it harder for the