Do you know that when you use your voice, you are really acting like a musical virtuoso? You are performing on one of the most difficult and complicated musical instruments known to man. And the reason you can do it is that you learned when you were young and have been practicing it.

Consider just the vocal cords, which are only part of the apparatus which produces our voice. Controlling them is a matter of the utmost precision. Sixteen muscles, the most delicate muscles in the body, move our vocal cords. They can assume about 170 different positions! Just the right amount of air has to be blown upward to make them vibrate in a certain way.

If the vocal cords are tensed in a certain way so they vibrate about 80 times per second, the vibration of the air which we hear as sound has deep tones. If the cords are tensed and vibrate as much as 1,000 times per second, we hear high tones The general pitch of our voice is determined by the length of our vocal cords.

But the human vocal apparatus is a complicated mechanism, an instrument with walls consisting of bones, muscles, mucous membranes, and with resonating spaces which are like the wooden sounding board of the violin. Among these resonating spaces are the windpipe, the lungs, the oral and nasal cavities, the nasal sinuses, and the thorax.

The range and quality of a voice depend on the form and the size of the resonating spaces. Persons who have beautiful voices have resonating spaces that are shaped in such a way that they may be considered perfect musical instruments. But having these resonating spaces is not enough. They must know how to control them artistically. A singer uses the entire vocal apparatus when he sings—from the diaphragm to the frontal sinuses.