Hey, y’all want some singing teacher nerdiness right now?

Yeah you do.

Applies to anyone who uses their voice, not just singers.

How’s your tongue tension these days?

That’s right. Tension. In your tongue.

It’s probably affecting your voice.

Stick your thumb up under the meaty part of your chin, right up in there and say “eeee”.

If you feel something rock-hard pushing down against your thumb, that’s your tongue.

There are four steps where the tension can set in.

1. Keeping your thumb right up in there, try opening and closing your mouth, does your tongue lead the movement? If so, work on that until your tongue can relax while you open your mouth.

2. If you can open and close your mouth without tongue tension, can you breathe in without tongue tension? If not, work on that for a while.

3. If you can do 1 & 2 without tension, think of saying “Ah” but don’t say it yet, just think it. If there’s tension, work here for a bit.

4. Now that you can do 1-3 without tension, say “Ah”. You may have tension at the onset of sound, if so that’s okay, work here for a bit.

You can also stretch your tongue. Just stick it out as far as you can til you feel a stretch.

For reference, the position your tongue is in for whistling or sucking through a straw/blowing on hot food to cool it down is pretty close to an ideal tongue position for singing and speaking. It’s a bit of an over correction but should give a good ballpark.

You can also play around with different vowel sounds and see which ones hold more tension. The tongue is connected to the hyoid bone, which is connected to the larynx, so you might be manipulating your voice by depressing your tongue.

For the singers in the room, if you have tongue tension and you start start working really consciously on it a few things will happen:

- Your voice will not be ringing in your head as much and will not sound as good to you.
- Your technique will fail for a bit. That’s okay!

For the first one, record yourself. You can’t trust your ears while you’re singing, what you hear in your head is not the full picture.

For the second one, give it time, you’re undoing some habits. You’ll figure it out fast. Like a week or two with daily practice type fast.

If your voice sounds slightly muffled, muddy, Kermit-like, swallowed, etc. and you can’t seem to figure it out-it’s probably tongue tension.

You can work on this on Zoom calls and no one notices cause it looks like you’re thinking hard when you’ve got your thumb under your chin!

As with most vocal things, tongue tension is not inherently bad, and may be useful in some cases, it’s just restrictive if it’s the default rather than an option.

PS: choir and musical theatre kids, depending on the level of tongue tension you’re dealing with, you might... actually be a different voice type.

It’s okay though, voice types don’t really matter. Just sing what you like.