Moving Larynx Up & Down With Vowels

Video Transcript

"JAMES MENY: If you swallow, remember there's a trachea, where basically you have an air pipe and the esophagus, where the food and water go down, okay. Over the air pipe there is a piece of flesh called an epiglottis, and if you swallow, the epiglottis closes off the air pipe so that food and water doesn't go down the air pipe, and it goes down the esophagus. So if that happens, when you swallow, and when you swallow the larynx comes up, and when you sing your larynx comes up. The epiglottis closes off the air pipe and you can get this choking sound, ah ah ah ah, that's the epiglottis closing off the air supply to your vocal cords, and that's why you get that sound. So the opposite, also tends to be true, which is when you yawn, your body is trying to inhale a lot of oxygen, and so when it does as it opens up the epiglottis as wide as possible so that the air can go straight into the lungs and you get that oxygen to survive or rejuvenate or whatever it is that your body is trying to do at that point. So how do you get the larynx to come up and down, again there are certain vowels, and what I use, E and A vowels pull the larynx up, O, AH, and UHH will bring the larynx down just because of the nature of the vowel. So something like, neigh, neigh, neigh, neigh, neigh, neigh, neigh, neigh, neigh, the larynx is up. If I do it on nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh, you can hear more chest in that song. Just because of the nature of the vowel. And I'll explain we want to have that later."