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,