Tongue Tension
What's the deal with tongue tension?
March 10, 2024
If you came to this link from the Proprioception blog, you know that the tongue has very little proprioception. In other words, we can't really feel the way the tongue is moving in the mouth when we are speaking.
I work with actors to build proprioceptive ability in the tongue muscle so that they can adapt new vocal resonances and new vowel and consonants sounds to create character.
Besides building proprioceptive ability in the tongue muscles, actors/speakers can also work on releasing tongue tension to increase vocal range, decrease vocal fatigue and find a more fully released larynx position.
If you look at the picture here, you will see that the roots of the tongue attach to the hyoid bone, and the hyoid bone attaches to the larynx. So a tight tongue will pull the larynx to a higher position creating a tense and easily fatiguing voice.
Let's look a little more closely at the voice to understand this better. . .
The vibrations of your voice exit through one of two passageways to create your voice—your mouth or your nose. You can try a little experiment to understand this. To do this experiment, don't push your voice or overpower your sound. Just start by humming gently. Now as you are humming, use your fingers to pinch your nose. Notice that the sound completely stops. That is because you are using your 'nose' to speak this sound. There are three completely nasals sounds in English (m, n and "ng"). You can do this with any of these sounds and you will get the same result. The minute you pinch your nose, the sound will stop. With these sounds, your nose is doing the talking!
You can understand how much nasal resonance you use on any particular sound by doing a similar experiment. Sing a nice open "ah" sound on a regular speaking pitch. Pinch your nose as you sing the sound. Did the sound change? If it changed a lot, you send a lot of vibrations through the nose on that sound.
If your tongue is really tense, you may end up using excessive nasal resonance because your tongue arches toward the top of the mouth blocking the exit of vibrations through the mouth and channeling them up the nasal cavities.
Tongue tension can also pull or push the larynx and limit your pitch ranges.
When there is excessive tension in the tongue, it can also impede the overall agility and speed of the tongue to shape sounds and create vibrant nuances in your sounding of words.
Having a choice in how you want to make sounds on behalf of a character's truth is powerful.
There are key exercises you can do to release the tongue and then also to build your sense of its movement through space. These are things you can work on with a vocal/dialect coach.