Best English Accent - Speak Like A Native Speaker - PLACEMENT

This is a line from later in this video.

If you can improve your placement, you will immediately sound more natural every time you speak English.

I've been making videos on American English on YouTube for 11 years and this is probably

the most excited I’ve ever been about a video.

There's one thing that affects the sound of the voice when a non-native speaker is speaking

American English more than anything else. And it really affects whether or not someone sounds American.

It's placement. Maybe you've never even heard this word before.

Not many teachers talk about it and I will say it's one of the hardest things to teach.

But today, we're going to talk about it.

We're going to use a mixing engineer and a scientific paper to understand what is placement.

Here is a taste of what we'll explore.

Hi! Hi!

I had the mixing engineer change the placement. Thank you, Sendai Mike!

We're going to get to the details of all of this

but I want you to know that almost all of my students need to work on their placement.

It doesn't matter what your native language is. By the end of this video, you're going to understand

what placement is and be able to change your placement

to unlock a more natural American voice within yourself.

And please remember, if you like this video or learned something,

be sure to like it and subscribe with notifications. Thank you guys!

Several months ago, I asked you to send in videos of yourself saying a dialogue

so I could use your examples to teach here on YouTube. Thank you!

All of the examples in this video, including the one you already heard came from you guys.

And by the way, if you didn't see last week's video, that is a great one where

I used your videos to teach about American English pronunciation, be sure to check it out!

Placement affects the overall quality of the voice.

Almost all of my student’s placements are too high.

It doesn't matter the native language: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese,

Thai, Arabic, Hindi, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on.

The natural production of these languages is different than English.

So I found a mixing engineer here on YouTube who could play with the formants of the voice.

In a minute, we're going to talk about what that means.

But first, I just want you to hear the difference.

So he took the person we listened to, whose native language is Chinese, and changed the formants.

Hi, what do you want to do tonight?

Hi, what do you want to do tonight?

The first one is her voice as she recorded it.

The second one has a different quality because Mike played with the formants of the sound.

What do you want to do tonight?

What do you want to do tonight?

Then he took my voice and he did the opposite.

We'll call the student that we're working with here V.

He took V's voice and played with the formants for it to have a more American quality,

then he took my voice and did the same thing in reverse

to try to make the quality of my voice reflect the quality of her voice.

What do you want to do tonight?

What do you want to do tonight?

What do you want to do tonight?

What do you want to do tonight?

Changing the formants really changes the quality of the voice, doesn't it?

Listen to my whole mini conversation with that formant shift.

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

I don't know. I feel like just watching TV.

Sure!

So what is a formant and how does it change your voice so much? It's not the pitch.

The pitch or the fundamental frequency is the same.

The vocal cords vibrate at a pitch. Aaaahh. Uhhhh.

Those are two different vowels on the same pitch.

Why did they sound different? Because of the shape of my mouth,

my tongue position was different, my lip position.

Aaaahh. Uhhhh.

What the vocal cords were doing didn't change. The pitch was the same

but the quality of the sound was affected by the shape of the vocal tract,

which affected the sound, part of the sound called formants.

Formants are frequencies of sound above the fundamental frequency, that's the pitch.

If this feels kind of technical, stick with me, the payoff in this video,

what you're going to learn to do with your voice, is going to be huge.

Okay, so the vocal cords make the fundamental pitch and the shape of the vocal tract makes the formants.

The formants are what make different sounds like: ahh, uhhh, ohh, as my pitch stays the same.

But they can also affect the quality of the vowel.

So you can either sound very natural speaking American English, or not very natural,

depending on what's happening with your vocal tract.

So you may know exactly the tongue, lip and jaw position for an American vowel,

but if the rest of your vocal tract, your throat isn't shaped right,

you'll never be able to get the American quality of that vowel.

So we can change the formants of a sound by changing the shape of the vocal tract.

In a minute, we're going to tell you what you want to do to sound more American.

But we can also change the formants by recording a voice and having a sound mixer play with it.

I'm going to let Sendai Mike explain this more. He's a recording and mixing engineer in Seattle.

Then we're going to get into a lot more real life student examples

so you can start to find the right shape of your own vocal tract.

Most you all are probably familiar with pitch shifting.

Pitch shifting especially downwards has become really popular in hip hop and rap music.

So pitch shifting, uuhhh, is when you change the fundamental frequency of your voice.

And we will talk about using that to sound more natural in this video,

but at the moment, let's hear about formant shifting.

Now, format shifting is similar to pitch shifting, but the difference is when you format shift audio,

the note, and I mean the note like the note you would play on a keyboard,

stays the same but the tone gets deeper or higher depending on which direction you're formant shifting.

So if you're formant shifting, you could sing a constant note

and it would stay in key as you format shift up and down.

Okay he did a lot of formant shifting and that's what he did earlier to V's voice and my voice,

so we could really see how it affected the sound,

and it either made the sound thinner or heavier.

And as we'll see in the students that we're going to study, most people have a sound that's too thin.

I've been in touch with a few students in my academy who've mentioned recently the idea that they had to

use a different voice, which I would say is a different shape to their vocal tract,

in order to speak American English.

One student said:

One of my American friends told me that my presence and my voice doesn't match for American people.

My natural Japanese voice is pretty high.

So the pitch of American English is often a little bit lower than what my students want to do.

And the placement, the quality of the sound affected by the formants is also lower.

Another student said:

Your advice to keep low placement in mind has helped me a lot.

My native language is Russian, we came to the US seven years ago and unlike me,

my son picked up the American accent very quickly.

Every time he heard me speaking English, he asked me why I was changing my voice to the higher pitch?

And I didn't. I just used my Russian voice coming from the front part of my mouth, and it didn't sound very good.

So she was making all the sounds of American English, tongue position, lip position, jaw drop,

but the rest of her vocal tract was in the shape of what she would use for Russian.

So that made her American English sound higher and thinner because in American English,

we have a lower placement.

So how can you get a lower placement?

Let's look at a scientific paper.

I'm going to put the full name of the paper and the authors in the video description.

To understand this paper, let's do a very quick anatomy lesson for the voice.

This will help you picture what you need to change in your throat in order to sound more American.

The vocal cords are here, they're what vibrate and make the fundamental frequency or

the pitch when your air comes up from your trachea.

Aaahhh. Aahhh.

Your pitch changes as your larynx, which is this bigger thing,

moves in ways that make the vocal cords change in tension or thickness, this kind of thing.

Think of it as a guitar string, it makes a different sound depending on where you put your finger on it

when you pluck it, as you affect the length of the string.

So the air comes up from your lungs through your trachea, vibrates your vocal cords,

and creates your fundamental pitch.

But the key to changing your sound is knowing that your larynx here, also called voice box, can be moved

by the complex series of muscles in your neck that attach it to the bones.

It can be moved up or back down, it can be moved forward,

it can be moved backward,

and all of these things affect not the pitch, because that's the vocal cords,

but they affect the formants, the other sounds above that frequency, and those

formants are what will give you an American voice or not.

So in order to have the right shape of the vocal tract to sound more American,

you want a lower larynx or voice box.

Your native language may have your voice box in a slightly different place in your throat.

That will change the way you sound.

So if you think of a wide open neck,

I think that helps my students release the muscles in their neck

which then helps the larynx or the voice box drop down.

And that gives your vocal tract the right shape for the American placement.

Since we're here, let's just talk about a few other things that can affect your sound.

We have these open cavities in our mouth, and then our nasal cavity, and

an open cavity is where sound will vibrate and it will change the quality.

So in American English, none of our vowels are nasal vowels.

That means here's our hard palate, our roof of our mouth, there's also a soft palate,

and when that's raised, it prevents air from going up into the nasal cavity.

But when it's down, air can go up and it can change the sound. So aaaaa becomes aaaaaa.

So the soft palate being closed or lifted is also very important in where your voice vibrates,

where your placement is. We want to avoid nasal vowels in American English.

But the main takeaway of the paper is your larynx should be in a lowered relaxed position

in order to give your throat the right shape for American English.

You want to let go of the muscle tension in your neck to try to let your larynx lower and find that right placement.

With a raised larynx, a sound with the same fundamental frequency will sound thinner and less resonant,

and that's not what we want. To match the American quality, we want it warmer and more resonant.

The main reason for this perceptual effect is that larynx raising can cause a rise in the frequency of the formants,

which gives the sound a different quality.

So in your own native language, you have the pitch, the fundamental frequency, that's natural for your language,

you have your articulators, tongue, teeth, lips that you use to shape and create the different sounds

of your native language. But then you also have the shape of your vocal tract that affects the formants

of the sound, and therefore the quality of the sound. And most people, when they're learning English,

learn about and think about just the articulators, tongue position, lip position, for a sound.

But if you don't change the shape of your vocal tract, of your throat,

and you use the shape that's natural for your own native language, then you'll never have a truly American quality

to your voice, and that's why we work on placement right away in Rachel’s English Academy

because why work on all the sounds if you haven't first worked on the overall quality of the voice?

So that's what we're going to do here today. We're going to work on the overall quality of your voice.

It affects your sound every time you speak English.

If you can improve your placement, you will immediately sound more natural every time you speak.

When I work with a student on placement, what I do is this:

I have them say something in English, anything, and then I try to imitate them.

I imitate their placement, and I alternate between that and a more American placement,

and I talk about what I'm changing.

What you need to do as a student is this: use your ears to notice the different qualities of the sounds,

and then play with your own voice, tense in places, relax in places, think of being wide and low,

try to find as many different kinds of voices as you can.

Okay, let's jump in with a student. We're going to go back to V.

We're actually going to come to the desk so that we can watch these students together.

I feel like just watching TV.

I feel like--

I feel like--

I, I, I, I feel like

One thing I want to say is we should all be imitating together.

Try to imitate the students and try to imitate me imitating the students, and try to imitate me when I am

putting in a more American placement. Imitating and playing with our voices and trying to match things

is the best way to find a new placement I think.

I feel like just watching TV.

I feel like—

I feel like—

I'm trying to place that really high here. I feel like— I feel like—

To do that, one of the things I do is I bring a little bit of extra pressure here to the front of my throat.

I feel like— it helps me throw it into this part of my face more.

I feel like— I feel like— and if I let that go there, then it lets me lower my placement. I feel like—

Now I do want to say I think her pitch is a little bit higher than what would be more natural for American English.

I feel like— can instead be: I feel like— I feel like just watching TV.

So my pitch is lower now it used to be when I was working with students I would say:

don't worry about your pitch, it's placement, it's the sound, the formants.

But then I realized that yes, they're two separate things but often lowering their pitch,

their fundamental frequency, helped with the overall tone because all of those frequencies were also lower,

gave them a warmer tone and that's really what we want.

Also I do think in general, a lot of people's natural pitch for American English is a little bit high,

so lowering the pitch can bring the fundamental frequency somewhere that is a little bit more natural,

but then it also has that nice effect of warming the voice more.

So try that, try recording yourself saying something, just listen to the phrase, and listen to it so many times

that you have the melody in your head, and then try to bring the pitch down a little bit.

I feel like— —

You can do a sliding thing down to try to find a lower pitch and you know, go as low as you can.

I feel like— I feel like—

You're probably not going to speak from there but the more range you find,

the more you're going to be able to play with your voice and find something that's comfortable.

Okay so for Vivian, I had to try to release some tension in the front of my neck.

I can't say that that's exactly how she's producing that sound, but I do know that if she thinks of a

wide open neck, and lets things sort of sink down, that that will probably help.

Okay our next student's native language is Hindi.

I feel like just watching TV.

Just watching TV.

Just watching TV. Just watching-- just watching-- To me, the place where this can resonate is very narrow.

Just watching—just— just— just— just watching— just watching—

It's all here, and if I let my throat and neck relax, it opens up this part down here and it

allows the voice to come down, and it just lets there be more room for resonance.

So again, a lowering, a releasing of tension higher up in the throat.

I feel like just watching TV. That lets the placement lower.

Another thing that I tell my students in the academy is a couple things:

you can actually think of your mouth being here,

or I have one exercise where I have them feel like their chest is actually a speaker where the voice comes out,

and that they don't have a mouth, but by lowering in your mind with your imagination

where your voice is coming out, can also help let go of the tension above that point.

So that could be an exercise for you to try, lay down, close your eyes, visualize that mouth there

take a breath in and then speak, and really in your mind's eye, see that happening from this mouth.

You may find that it helps you release some tension that you didn't even know that you had in your neck.

Our next student's native language is Russian.

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey, hey, hey.

Again, it feels very narrow all of the places in my body and my throat that could vibrate,

it feels like I’ve squished that down. Hey--

And it feels forward in the face, in the nose, hey, and just really small that way.

We want to open that up. Hey. Hey. One thing that I tell my students sometimes to do this:

hey, hey, opening up is... Really think of releasing the muscles in the back of the neck.

Huhh--

Sometimes I almost, I’ll tell them to almost even think of there being like a heavy weighted blanket sort of

pulling things down, anything to counteract tension and pulling things up. Huh. Hey--

Are you practicing along out loud? Try to find both of those sounds. Hey hey.

It's not just about the jaw drop but you might be noticing that I am dropping my jaw. Try it. Try whatever you can.

Just see if you can find those two different sounds. The pitch is the same, the sounds are the same.

It's the formants in the throat, in the rest of the vocal tract that is making them sound so different.

Our next student's native language is Ukrainian.

I feel like just watching TV.

I feel like just watching TV.

I feel like just watching TV.

I feel like just watching TV.

I feel like just watching TV.

I feel like just watching TV.

TV.

For that, I’ve sort of got a little pocket of resonance here, and then also one in my nose. TV. TV.

I want this column of connection through everything. TV. TV.

I want to always feel like everything is connected down to this anchor root here. Aaaah.

This is what is, where the voice is being produced. I mean, it's being produced in the vocal,

in the vocal cords here, the voice box, but we want to use our imagination to bring in more of the body.

Lower it down. Get that warmer residence, resonance. TV.

You know, when I imitate other students I often have to tense things visibly in a way that they don't,

to try to get the tension inside.

And so this can be something that you can play with even just, you know just trying to loosen things up.

Find that things are really relaxed.

TV. TV. Because what is causing the attention mostly is internal things that we can't see,

not external things like the articulators. And I found that when we're talking about relaxing these things

that we can't see, and that we don't know very much about, it just works well to use your imagination.

Like I said, the mind's eye of the mouth here, I have a couple exercises in the academy where

I walk my students through a guided relaxation exercise just to sort of try to find that place where you can reset.

You know, sometimes when students are practicing on something, they'll get tense

and the more tense things are, the more the placement gets out of whack.

And so just to take a moment and to relax, and release, and think low and open,

and sort of reset to that spot can really help with their placement.

Our next student's native language is Mandarin Chinese, and her placement is nothing like Mandarin Chinese.

She's obviously done a lot of work on finding something new, but it's still not quite right

but let's listen to it and talk about it.

I don't know I felt like just watching TV.

I don't know I felt like just watching TV.

I don't know I felt like just watching TV.

I felt like-- I felt like just watching-- Ah, ah, ah--

Okay so I think her pitch is lower than it would have been and she's bringing in this breathiness

in an effort to change the quality of her voice and bravo, she has done it!

You really do not sound like a typical Mandarin speaker speaking American English.

However, it feels to me like it's gone a little bit in a husky direction, and that is also not completely natural

for speaking American English. So let me listen to it again.

I don't know I felt like just watching TV.

I don't know-- I don't know-- uh, uh--

So for me to try to get that sound, uh, uh, I am sort of pressing forward here in a way that's trying to cause

more opening higher up in the throat. I don't know. But really what we want is thinking down,

low and open, not high and open. I don't know. So instead of thinking that you're finding something here,

what would happen if in your mind you let that go,

and you brought it down and you like imagined some well or some lake here in your chest.

I don't know. And then think: oh, my voice is attached to that and that's what's coming out.

That might help release and find that low open placement.

But the thing I love about what this student has done is they've found something completely different.

She's really played with it, and tried different qualities of the voice and that's so important as you work.

Play with it. Find new things, find new sounds. Because often, students will try to change something

and they'll need to change it this much, and they're comfortable changing it this much, or this much,

and I try to get them, no, you got to do it more. And so playing with a wide range can help you find the right spot,

where you want to be, the right place for your voice.

You know here's a tip, if you can find a video of an American speaking your native language,

and hopefully with a very thick American accent.

Watch that person and think about why does it sound so strange, or look so strange.

And then think whatever that sound quality is, is what I need to do when I’m speaking American English. Right?

So maybe by hearing an American speak Chinese, for example, and with a thick American accent

maybe you can identify the sound by hearing it in your own native language,

that you need to try to find in American English.

So it could be interesting if you can find a native speaker of American English speaking your native language

to imitate the way they speak your language.

That might help you find a new placement.

And you know what? If you find a good video, a good example of someone, of an American speaking

your native language with a thick American accent, please put it in the comments below,

with the time code to the best part of that video, so other students can watch that,

and can imitate that and find another way to use their voice.

Let's look at a few more examples, next we have Brazilian Portuguese.

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Okay, so to me, this is a little bit less pinched than some of the others, but it still feels like

where the voice lives and is vibrating is maybe here: hey, hey, hey,

what do you want to-- what do you want to-- boom! And we want to bring it down.

Hey, hey, what do you want to do tonight? Hey. We want to open it up and lower it down.

All right, let's listen to another student her native language is Korean.

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

Okay, a couple things. First, I would say do try lowering the pitch.

Hey---, what do you want to do tonight?

See what you can find by lowering it. Hey, what do you want to do tonight?

But again, it feels like it's, the resonance is really high, up in my cheekbones.

Hey, hey, hey, it's almost like I’ve drawn things up with this tension here in my neck, hey,

and then I have the opposite shape, it's like in my mind the shape when I’m imitating you is sort of like a triangle

with the, with the wide part up top. But then when I want my own American placement the triangle flips.

So that the narrow part is on top and the wider part is on the bottom. Hey. Hey.

And just imagining that helps me find a lower placement. Another thing I wanted to say is

sometimes when I imitate students with a higher placement, I feel like something

in my neck that I’m holding here opens up and folds down and relaxes like that.

You know, it's like we have to use imagery here to try to guide you.

Playing with things but also imagery, playing with sounds, but also using imagery to try to find

different sounds. So maybe you can feel like there's something up here in your throat,

and you just picture it opening and relaxing out and down,

and see if that helps you open your throat in a way that changes the vocal tract in a way,

that brings in a more American placement.

We're going to listen to another student now whose native language is Spanish.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know. Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Again, it just feels like I’m not utilizing any of this space for the vibration. Know. Know.

And it's just brought on by a little bit of tension here. I think it has to do with the base of the tongue

where that attaches to the throat, and just really letting that go.

Another thing that you could picture is you know, we talked about

thinking about releasing the back of your neck by kind of imagining something really heavy on it,

like your skin gets this really thick heavy paste on it.

You could also think of that happening with the front of your throat.

Like the outer kind of just gets this, the outer part of your neck just gets this sort of heavy,

not strangling feeling, but just like a nice downward tug.

They can help you find that kind of quality in your voice.

Now we're going to look at a couple of examples of students that I think did a nice job

finding a low placement, and um, we're going to talk about something called the vocal fry.

So this is something that actually just happened in my voice as I said that. The vocal fry, fry, fry.

That quality of the voice at the end of a phrase as the energy of the voice is starting to diminish,

the breath is starting to diminish, and as the pitch comes down, it will happen that at the end,

you may find a word or two that ends up having that kind of quality.

Quality, quality, quality, you would never want to talk like this all the time.

That actually hurts to do that. So you would never want to do that all the time. But Americans,

men and women do it all the time towards the end of a phrase without thinking of it.

Um, and I think it is a side effect of the placement being solo, and the starting pitch maybe being lower

than what you're used to. So if you notice that that's happening to your voice at the end of phrases,

that can be to you a good sign that you are lowering things.

All right let's listen to a student his native language is Brazilian Portuguese.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Know. Know. There was a little bit of a popcorn quality in his voice, and I just felt like it was resonating down here.

All right, we have another person to listen to this guy speaks Dutch.

Sure.

Sure. Sure. Again, do you notice a little bit of that popcorn quality?

The pitch is low, that is the fundamental frequency. The resonance feels low and warm,

which means the formants are not higher and thinner, I like it.

Okay, so you have lots of different ways you can play.

Play with different placements. Play with imitating as many of these students as you can.

You know, try to find what they're doing. Try to place the voice where they're placing it,

and then try to find something else.

See how wide you can get with your range of what you can do.

You could take any vowel.

So there, I changed the way it sounded not by changing my articulators, they stayed in exactly the same place,

not by changing the pitch, the fundamental frequency, that was the same in all of them,

but they were three dramatically different sounds because of what I was doing with my vocal tract.

Try that. Take a vowel. Try to get as many different sounds as you can without changing the pitch.

These are the things that you can do, and the ways that you can play to figure out what in your neck

makes what sound, and to keep in mind that the American sound is low, wide, open, vibrating in the chest,

it's not really up here, it's not narrow, but it's deep.

What did you think of this video? Was it super confusing?

I hope there was at least one thing that helped you think about placement in a new way.

Thank you so much to all of the students who submitted a video for me to use.

Again, check out the video from last week if you haven't already.

That shows all of the student videos in full.

Now, the next thing I think you should watch is this Learn English with Movies playlist.

Really keep in mind placement and this idea of low and open as you are listening to the American speaker,

and then trying to do it yourself. Imitate them, pause the video, imitate them, focus on placement,

see what happens.

Guys, we make new videos here every Tuesday, please subscribe with notifications if you haven't already,

and do come back. I would love to see you here.

And also please share this video, this is a different kind of video for me, we got a little bit more technical,

but I hope that it helped you out. I hope it meant something to you, and if so, please share it.

Okay guys, that's it, and thanks so much for using Rachel’s English.