In this episode, we talk about sibilance, what it is, why some people sound more sibilant than others, and why it gets people annoyed. We will also focus on a few practical ways of controlling our voice’s features, so we can reduce sibilance.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Is sibilance a speaker or a listener issue?
- What is sibilance in phonetic terms
- The sibilance and its relationship with different accents
- The effects of the various articulation contacts
- The benefits of exploring the alveolar and post-alveolar area
Next time when someone tells us we sound sibilant, we have two choices – we either ignore them, or we can observe which part of our tongue we use to make the “s” sound, we pay attention to the airflow we produce, and work on it. The only rule is to keep our voice exploration fun, curious, and free of judgement.
Resources:
- The Voice & Accent Hub https://www.facebook.com/groups/thevoiceandaccenthub
- Finding Your Voice by Barbara Houseman https://amzn.to/2NOdtgW
- Vocal Arts Workbook by David & Rebecca Carey (pg 174 & 175 for extensive consonant cluster practise) https://amzn.to/2NSC1VW
