Breathing and Managing your Breath for Voice Acting with Tessa Livingston

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hi there, and welcome to Vox Talk, your weekly review from the world of voice over. I'm your host. Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices. Are you breathing from your diaphragm? Voice talent and speech language pathologist Tessa Livingston from New Zealand will return and share such wisdom with us here on the podcast about breathing and how you can manage your breath, how to build vocal stamina, and so much more. Welcome back to the show. Hello, Tessa.

Tessa Livingston:

Hello. Thank you so much for having me a second time. This is so cool.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I know it is. It's great. I'm so happy you're here. There's just so much we have left to talk about and no doubt more even after today's conversation. So let's focus in on the breath. I know that's very important. It's very important to you. You've got a new course, which we'll get into later. But for now, Tessa, how do we become more aware of our breath? And why is that important?

Tessa Livingston:

It's so important because it is literally the thing that we do that keeps us functioning and alive. At its bare bones, it's the thing that determines how our body and our cells inside our body function. Like, even something as simple as knowing whether you breathe through your nose more or your mouth more is a really, really good step to understanding how you breathe and what your habits might be doing. You talk to anybody who works in breath and they'll tell you nose breathing is the way to go. And it's so fantastic for you because I know everybody's probably experienced at some point during their life, they start breathing through their mouth, and then their air gets caught in their chest and they start feeling a little bit uncomfortable and maybe a little bit anxious. So I know I've experienced that. I'll just be walking around breathing through my mouth, being unaware of what's happening, and I start getting these extra feelings creeping, and I'm like, ‘Oh, okay, back to nose. Back to nose.’ That way.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I know, it is very important. I couldn't believe just how different it was, but also it's just calming even to breathe through your nose because you're focusing on something else. It's not exactly the voluntary – usually your mouth is kind of the default, right? I don't know. Maybe you can answer this question. It just came to my mind. But for babies, isn't it more like at least they breathe more naturally when they're babies and somehow we learn how to breathe poorly when we grow up? There's something that happens with our breathing. I don't know.

Tessa Livingston:

There's a little bit that happens. I know a little bit about this, just a little bit. So if I'm wrong anybody, please correct me. I would love to be corrected about this, but babies, the body of their tongue is so big inside their mouth when they're small because their mouth is designed for suckling and just getting milk backwards and forward. So the bigger the tongue, the safer they are, so they have to breathe through their nose and they don't have the capacity to drop the jaw yet and make everything really big. I think, I think, and yeah, a lot of what happens is that we I don't know enough about this. I wish I knew more about it. My understanding is that social pressures and observing your parents, your peers, how they all breathe, you adopt it and you end up with it as well, which has led us to a lot of mouth breathing. I was reading a book by James Nestor the other day and he was saying that 90% of the Western population don't breathe in a way that's sustainable for their body.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh, my gosh. Did you say 90% of us don't breathe properly? Like

Tessa Livingston:

Yeah.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Have major issues. Oh, well, that is a problem. But I'm so glad we're talking about breath today. Wow. I know. I took a stand up bunny trail and it was fun, but we'll get back to where we were. But being aware of how we breathe, whether it's through our nose or through our mouth, and figuring out what actually is optimal, what should we be doing? And you're saying it's really the nasal passages we should be using to breathe for inhalation and exhalation or for one or the other?

Tessa Livingston:

For both. For both. And that's just like that's at risk. That's kind of like your everyday stock standard. Obviously when we're speaking and things like that, or when we're doing voiceover, I don't know about you, but if I close my mouth to breathe or I try and breathe in through my nose while I'm doing voiceover, I get confused. My body doesn't agree with it. It's like, no, take that in through your mouth, please. It's quicker, it's more efficient in that environment, but it's also knowing how to get it down to the right spot. So if you're doing a voice over and you take a quick breath in and you go into your chest and you've breathed in really heavy through your throat, that's not helpful. So you might need to do it through your nose. But what is helpful is learning how to get it all the way down to your diaphragm and keeping your throat nice and open so you won't be able to hear me do this because it'll be silent. (Pause) So getting that ear in without constricting anything and making it feel nice and nice and loose, this is a tiny, tiny bit of breath. There is so much about breath that people teach and work with, but for me, the difference of knowing when I'm using my mouth and when my nose is more optimal is very important.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

So the first step is to become aware even of what we're doing and then it's to actually okay, well, let's course correct. Let's do some nasal breathing. What should we be hearing or feeling if our breath is well supported? Like, what sort of reactions are we having or sensations to let us know that we're breathing correctly.

Tessa Livingston:

Well, for the first one hearing, you should be hearing nothing, which is something that confuses a lot of people, ‘Yeah, but breath is coming in and out.’ But if you're pulling it in, even to your nose oh, and that sounded horrible this morning, I apologize. That's part and parcel of the game, isn't it? It's a cavity, it has stuff in it. I don't know if we should cut that or not. No, that's fine.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh keep it, please. I think that it's morning where you are and absolutely, we all have that

Tessa Livingston:

We're still waking up. And I do that on my own podcast. I say that to my produce. I'm like, ‘oh, let's cut that,’ and he's like, ‘no, keep it in’ all the time. But breathing through these passages, if you try and draw air in really hard, it doesn't feel good. You can feel your body trying to pull air in and it feels really yucky. So that breathing and out through your nose again, unless you've got sinus issues or other things going on, this is assuming, like a healthy person, it should be quiet, it should be as silent as possible. And that's the same as breathing in through the mouth. If you're going, you're probably going to end up in hyperventilation, which isn't helpful either. So for hearing, you should be hearing nothing. It should be really light, really, really delicate, maybe a little bit. And when I say a little bit, like 10% of what it could be. And then for feeling, you should be feeling a small expansion in your diaphragm space. So the space just below your ribs. And we're not looking to because sometimes when people say, ‘oh, take a big breath,’ we go and we try and expand as much as we can. Whereas for your everyday breath, that's really not helpful. And even for breathing, for voice over, dependent on what you're doing, obviously, but if you're just doing something commercial or something conversational, we don't need these massive breaths that fill us all the way into our ribs and all the way into our belly space. We really just want these nice, controlled little bit of breath into the sides, into the diaphragm and just expanding that space. It shouldn't feel massive.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, because I think sometimes we're hoping that there's just some really obvious thing that happens, like, there it is. But what you're saying is, no, this is as natural as natural can be. If you're doing this, it shouldn't feel so foreign to you. Maybe it doesn't feel like you're doing it wrong. Obviously you're doing it wrong, you can have different feelings, but yeah, it's simpler than that. And I'm sure again, we'll cover more of this later, but I'm appreciative that with the senses as you've described, you don't hear it. It's very lightly felt even. And it shouldn't be hard, it shouldn't be laborious, I don't think, because it's what your body was designed to do. So as we're along this whole train of thought, you were using your nose for the inhalation process. How can you access your diaphragm through that? Is that something you can do outside of using your mouth to get there?

Tessa Livingston:

Yes, it is. And so just so that people don't kick up about this, when we say breathe into the diaphragm, we know that we cannot get oxygen into the diaphragm. Oxygen only goes into the lungs. It's a very contentious topic and people get very upset about it. So just so that people listening, we know that oxygen cannot go into the diaphragm. What we use that as a marker to go this is the space that is going to feel like it is expanding. Because if we go get oxygen into the lower third of your lungs, people are like, no, that doesn't make sense. So that's why we say breathe into the diaphragm. We're breathing into that space and allowing that space to expand. But a lot of what's helpful with diaphragmatic breathing is often that people have their diaphragms and their abdominals so tight all the time because of social pressure to look thin or the anxiety causes a lot of tension through that part of the body. Anger causes a lot of tension through that part of the body. So often what actually we have to do first is we have to figure out how to release that. And once you've figured out how to release that, it's easier for air to move to that part of the body because it's not feeling as tight. And a really fun way to do this is it's a little bit funny, but it's great. So if you think of it works with the pelvic floor muscles. So if you think everybody just close your eyes for a moment. We'll just, we'll just think about it and we'll just hoo. So you're just, you're sitting on the loo or the toilet, I don't know what everybody in every country calls it, but we'll go toilet. That makes sense. And you're just casually sitting there and you've decided to go for a wee. This is great, this is fine. And then all of a sudden someone knocks on the door and you have to stop midstream. What would you do?

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I guess you would clench up.

Tessa Livingston:

You clench up. So you can feel now that all of your abdominals and everything there is feeling really tight and you've sort of pulled up through the middle of the body. Now

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Pelvic floor, yup

Tessa Livingston:

Pelvic floor, then we do is we release then to its fullest extent. So we tighten it as much as you can and then you release it as much as you can. And you should feel as you're doing that, the lower part of your belly starts to relax as well. So everybody try that one more time. So just sitting on the toilet, nice and calm, someone knocks and goes to come in and you squeeze and then you let go of that part of the body again. So that's the part of the body that we need to start releasing to allow the diaphragm to have the space that it needs. Then once this is released, and it does take a little bit of practice because we're walking tension balls, human beings, we walk around squeezing everything all the time. Once we've done that, what we can do is we can start tricking the diaphragm into moving so that we can go, ‘oh, I can feel that.’ And an excellent way to do it, an excellent way to do it is to use an ‘sh’ sound. So ‘shh.’ And you're going to do it quite forcefully, so it sort of sounds like this, and you'll be able to see me, but my body is going and it's kind of like pulsing up and down and it's being completely caused by that contraction in my diaphragm. And you should be able to feel it. So if everybody at home, you just do five. We'll do it all at the same time, five Shh sound. So here we go. You can feel all of that contraction happening from your ribs down. There's something that's just moving so much. And that's what we're talking about when we're going ‘breathe into that space,’ we want that space moving.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

That's a great illustration. I think anyone who has ever been in a choir is probably familiar with an exercise that had an element of the “sh sh sh sh” because I was like, ‘oh yeah, I totally know what you're talking about.’ Because in Amabile, a choir I was in, we had the “puh tuh kuh fuh sh sh” you have your plosives and everything and all the hard sounds coming out, but then the and everything was hard, but it was using those muscles in a way that was really, really helpful. Thank you, Jen Moir, thank you for that. There's so many great warm ups and exercises that we can do that I really think that your examples are just so practical and something we can all relate to as well. So okay, that's how we know the breath is well supported. We know where a diaphragm is because presumably we've just done these exercises here with you. Now we know where the diaphragm is and kind of roughly so now that we can breathe, we know where it is or kind of breathe around that area, the lower third of our lungs, as you were saying. How do we then project from the diaphragm?

Tessa Livingston:

Yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of things going on here. So the first one that we talk from our throats constantly, and I'm feeling a little bit like that right now, even like it's first thing in the morning, my body's like, ‘what is going on? I've been asleep like half an hour ago and now I'm awake and I'm doing things.’ It's very confused. But there's a really good way to assess this. And just like we did the sh a moment ago. We're going to change it to a Z and I'll demonstrate it for you so you can hear it because we're still using that pulsation. Is that a word? I'm going to go with it. Pulsation. No, false. It is a word. Thank you. We're pulsing the body using a sound. So if I use all of those muscles on a z and I go z z z z z, it sounds pretty clear, right? Like there's nothing in your ear goes, oh, that sounds weird. If I use none of my diaphragm support and none of my abdominals and none of my ribs or anything like that, and I put it straight onto my throat, it sounds like this. Yeah, horrific.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh wow!

Tessa Livingston:

It's really bad. And the thing that people need to understand is that when you're talking, it might not sound like this and that's horrible. Please, nobody do that at home. It's not good for you.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I hope you did not hurt yourself just now.

Tessa Livingston:

Just then, that was pretty light, but that was mimicking what I did with that Z. What people don't understand is that if there's even like 20 or 30% of that in your natural speaking voice, over time, that's going to accumulate to something feeling difficult. So this is why we want to make sure that we practice those, getting them all up in order, so that when we go to use the voice, that strain isn't there. So we're using that part of the body. So that's what's happening with activation, making sure that that diaphragm is doing the right thing. The other thing we need to be cautious of is it's great to have support inside your body and that can feel like this. So if I do an sh, and I'm going to do it in a short, short, long, this is the way that I like to teach it. I do a pulse pulse and then a hold so it sounds like this sh. And if you do that at home, what you'll feel is that on the hold, the long sh, your body holds and it grabs. So we can try it all together, so you can feel it. So we're going to go put it all together shh. You can feel that part of the body grips and then holds. That's fabulous. So we know that we're feeling supported from, I like to call it like from underneath. Being supported from underneath. What happens then is that as we put it onto vibratory sound, as we start to phonate, we need to make sure that the coordination of our vocal cords is doing the right thing. Because I can support for days and days and days, but if I support on this voice, my chords are pressing too hard to give, it's not going to work. If I support on this voice, it's not going to work either. And obviously those are the extremes of those two things. But we can have versions of breathy and versions of constricted in anything. So having the support isn't quite enough. It's good to know that it's there, but then we have to start working with cord activation as well. So rather than having Ah or Ah, we end up with a something in the middle, making sure the chords are doing the right thing. I hope I answered your question.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, you did, absolutely. And I was just thinking of those two extremes that you just showed us. Those extremes are definitely not voices you want to audition with, because if you get booked doing those ouch. Bad call.

Tessa Livingston:

Yes. Oh my goodness. And just as a side note, if you're doing a voice and you cannot sustain it for longer than a few minutes, maybe like five or after you've been doing it, you start going,
“Ahem, ahem, ahem,” stop, something's gone wrong. It's not being produced in a way that is safe and you need to step back off of it because it's going to be awful. I know a few voice actors who have auditioned with these grunty heavy voices because it sounded cool in the audition, and then they book it and they can't do it and it's really devastating for them. It's really devastating.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, characters, like being a troll or something that has a voice that is kind of a little kind of looks like what they'd sound like kind of thing. Just being careful with creating characters, especially when you go about doing that. So anyway, but very good explanation and very good. Now, Tessa, honestly, I was practicing this morning with a straw. I was like, I'm going to talk to Tessa today, I'm going to do my exercises. And what are those exercises with straws called and how do they add value to our vocal health routine?

Tessa Livingston:

Absolutely. So they're called SOVTs. So that's what if you talk to a speech path or anyone, we'll just say the SOVTs. But they stand for semi-occluded vocal tract. So semi occluded, just meaning that rather than breathing heavily or breathing through the nose or through your mouth, we're occluding that space and making it really, really narrow. And then what it's helping is that it's helping the space inside the vocal tract to widen. Because we've got that we can no longer get so much air out through our mouth. We start to create back pressure and it helps lower the larynx or the voice box, and it helps to widen the space in there and allows muscles that might have been active, that don't need to be active to back off. Particularly talking about like your false vocal folds, the big muscles that live next to your true vocal folds, we want to get them out of the way, so that's kind of what we're activating. It also activates your diaphragmatic support because I don't know about you, but if you purse your lips and try and breathe all of your air out, your body will go and it'll feel like it blows up like a balloon. It can't do it because it can't get that air out as fast, but that's actually a really fun way to go. Or is my diaphragm activated? Is it expanding just by going as quick as you can? Yeah, you do you feel like you blow up like a balloon. It's really cool. But what these exercises are also doing is that they are allowing the cords to vibrate at their optimal shape and their optimal vibratory cycle. So it allows them to vibrate along their full edge rather than them sort of just, like, touching at points. And it is a beautiful massage for the voice that is absolutely fantastic.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wow. A massage for the voice. That is so great because you could spend all day massaging your face and kind of like but you can't get inside. You have to do it differently. So if you're saying that using the straw is actually, like, giving your voice your vocal folds a massage, like, man, that's awesome.

Tessa Livingston:

Yes, it is. Honestly, it's absolute magic. And we have Ingo Titze to thank for that. So if you want to read up on his works, it's very complex, but my goodness, it is amazing. And it's just this is it's something that everybody I know that works in voice or speech pathology or vocal therapy, we just we love SOVTs, we're such a fan of them.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh, my gosh. Perfect. Well, you've got your water bottle there. I know. It's got a straw. And you've also got a couple with a straw, so my goodness. Is that a metal straw, Tessa?

Tessa Livingston:

If you're just starting out, you probably want, like a regular size. If you think about the size straw that you get from, like, McDonald's or like, a fast food place, kind of that sort of thickness and that sort of length. What we don't want is a straw with a bend in it because it changes the way that the air moves. So we want a nice straight straw. I don't know if people see this or not, but I've got a tall glass of water and I've got about five or 6 CM or maybe like two inches of water in the bottom of my glass. And all that does is just provides a little bit of pressure, because if you try and blow through a bigger straw, all of your ear just sort of goes. But when we put it through a bit of water, we've got some pressure to work against, which is really helpful. You can also see how well your airflow is going because the bubbles are going at a certain pace. If I did it really slow, doesn't really work. If I did it really fast, actually, I'm not going to do it really fast because it'll go all over me. That's not a good idea. So that's what we're using. You can also use lots of singers use quite thin, shorter straws because it changes the amount of back pressure that you get. So basically the straw determines how much back pressure and it changes the workout for you. But that's basically what that is. So a straight straw in a tall glass of water with about five or 6 CM or about two inches.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Good tip. And I'm especially grateful that you mentioned that it is a straight straw, not one with a bend in it, because I'm actually glad I didn't bring my straw because I might have embarrassed myself today. But it has a bend in it. It's a good learning opportunity. But now I'll be like, ‘oh, my gosh, I can't use that one. I better go dig around and see what else I have in the house.’ Or invest in a better straw. So to start out, to use one that's kind of more like a McDonald's type straw, like a soft drink straw, and then work your way up to it sounds like rolling. It sounds like, oh, just get the easy rollers without any kind of ornamentation on them. And then when you progress with your back, I roll up my thoracic spine. Then maybe you would get a slightly tougher one or something. There's a progression here. I appreciate that. So don't just run out and get yourself a metal straw, everybody. That might be like university level straw.

Tessa Livingston:

The material of the straw doesn't matter particularly much. From what I understand. We like metal because environmentally friendly, you can carry it around with you, all of those sorts of things, but the bend is probably the biggest component. But in saying that, if you only have a bendy straw, use your bendy straw.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Okay, so we're not shunning bendy straw.

Tessa Livingston:

No, we're not shunning bendy straw. Bendy straws are less efficient than a straight straw. But if you only have a bendy straw, I would rather you used your bendy straw to do some exercises than to do no exercises.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right. So, Tessa, what if we have no straw at all? We are strawless. What shall we do?

Tessa Livingston:

Strawless. No. Oh, no. Okay. Well, for my strawless, human beings, we did use this one briefly last time. So it's called the puffer fish. Well, that's what I know it as. I don't actually know what its official name is. I'm going to have to find out. So you take two fingers and place them across the fronts of your lips and just blow. You just want a little bit of air to come out. Can you feel that same puffing pressure that you had before? Like, the body kind of blows up like a balloon, and it goes whoop out like that, and then you can humb through it. What you can sometimes feel. If you take your thumb and your forefinger and just sort of place them lightly either side of your voice box, maybe just a slight bit higher, you should be able to feel a slight drop in the voice box and a slight widening just sort of on the underside of I'm pointing, but the underside of your jaw. So in the soft squishy bits just there. So if you try that again, it's not huge. It's very micro, but there's a slight drop in the larynx and a slight widening of the fringe space. Everything that's happening in the back of the throat, which is really, really cool. So that's a really good one. If you don't have anything, you go (siren sound scale) you can move up and down in your glides. The other ones that people tend to use a lot are trills. So with your lips or with your tongue. Now, not everybody can do those, and also, not everybody feels. I've had a few people mention to me in the past that trills just don't do it for them. They don't feel enough with them, which is really interesting, which is why I think that back pressure with straws or with the puffer fish exercise is really helpful because it gives you that immediate indication you can do trills with barely any breath support and get away with it. It's really easy. It's really, really easy. So that's why I like puffer fish, and that's why I like stores. So if you don't have a store, I would go with puffer fish. It's really helpful.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

So this massages your vocal folds. I imagine it helps to strengthen them to build up some kind of agility and just stamina. And we were talking a little bit about stamina here, and I know that you have a new course that people can take to learn more about the breathing and the vocal stamina. And we're getting closer to the end of the episode. So I want to make sure that we talk about this before we go. And we've talked about some of it today. Definitely the breathing side, but the stamina not so much. We haven't really touched that quite yet, and maybe that's a future episode, but so far as the course is concerned, Tessa, can you please tell us a bit more about it and who it's meant to be used for?

Tessa Livingston:

Yeah, absolutely. So it's predominantly for voice over artists and actors because those are my people. I love them to bits. They're so great. The thing is that if you're like a teacher or a lawyer, this stuff will actually work for you as well. Teachers and lawyers, at no point during their jobs are taught how to vocalize, and it's the thing they spend 90% of their time doing. So it would also work for them, but specifically, it's for your voice over artists and actors. Now, what it is is a one month bootcamp, essentially. So I take you through week by week, and I teach you how to extend your exhalation, get your body relaxed, because that's half of the problem. It's great to be able to be like, ‘yeah, I can activate my diaphragm. Yeah, no problem.’ But if we're doing it from a tense state, that activation is not as valuable. We want to be doing it from a relaxed state. So we go through extending the exhalation, making sure the body is relaxed, and we extend the exhalation, because if you think about the way that we talk, we talk on exhalation, we want to make sure that we can sustain that. And as a voice over artist, that is a golden, golden gift, being able to use your exhalation as efficiently as possible. So we work on extending that. We work on relaxing the body, and then we start working on activating the body, and we just do this bit by bit. There's straw exercises involved to make sure that when you start using these exercises, you're not focusing on the sound. And this is something that I work with frequently whenever I work with voice. Initially, in the beginning stages, I want you to feel your voice. Your voice lives inside your body, not inside your ears. So that's why I want you to feel it first. So we do really gentle, like, this is what it feels like when your diaphragm expands. This is what it feels like when it completely contracts. Knowing the extremes of both of those helps us find a really beautiful middle ground. And so, essentially, I give you full exercises that you do five times a week, and we build on your breath support, which also starts to build your vocal stamina, being able to use your voice for longer periods of time without experiencing fatigue. And I also take you through vocal health and vocal management, how to look after the voice, drinking water, reducing inhalence all of that sort of stuff to then going, okay, you're in a session. What do I do over this two hour session to make sure that I don't get tight over time? So that's that's what it is, and I'm so passionate about it because my feelings on it is that people become voice actors because they were actors, not because they practiced in voice. And that's what so many people are missing. The acting component is amazing. And as a caveat to that, because I came from voice, I've done some acting, but because I came from voice, sometimes I miss the acting components. People will be like, ‘we can hear that you've got the voice for this. Where's the emotion?’ So I understand both sides of that, but I just think there are so many voice artists out there who don't know how to use it, don't know the basics or the fundamentals, and they run into trouble when they shouldn't, and it just feels so unfair. So I want to help.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And that's the best possible place for all of this to come from. So thank you again, Tessa, for being on the show. And we will have you back on to talk about something else that we all should be doing.

Tessa Livingston:

Yay. Perfect. Thank you.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And that's the way we saw the world through the lens of voiceover this week. Thank you for joining us today and for lending your ears. Thank you to our very special guest, Tessa Livingston, voice artist and speech language pathologist from her studio in New Zealand. If you'd like to learn more about Tessa, you can visit her website at TessaLivingstonVoice.com. For Voices, I'm Stephanie Ciccarelli. Vox talk is produced by Geoff Bremner. Thank you again for listening and we'll see you next week.