Ila Siliga- Exploring the shape of back vowels

"Now you get the chance to explore your back vowels. You make these vowels by arching or raising the back of your tongue behind your bottom front teeth and keeping your lips rounded" (Phillips 94).

This shows the basics of what a back vowel is, it is important because when your are singing you need to know how to transition between these vowels and how to pronounce them correctly in order for your audience to understand what words you are singing. Obviously words you're singing have to be enunciated differently than when you speak, but the first step into singing the word you need to know how to pronounce the word. I explored the shape of the back vowels by reading and speaking a variety of different words from my book Singing for Dummies with different back vowels. The different back vowels are ooh (as in moon), OOh (as in foot), oh (as in old), aw (as in walk), and ah (as in father). The picture from the book shows how high your tongue has to arch in order to produce the vowel sounds: "Tongue arching higher in the back of your tongue on the ooh vowel sound and arching only slightly for ah" (Phillips 95).


Not only is tongue position in your mouth important for vowels but the shape of your lips are too. Your lips either have to be rounded, slightly larger, or slightly smaller for different vowels and even though the transitions don't seem noticeable they are key factors to the sound that comes out of your mouth. After trying this exercise with back vowels was very helpful, it made me more aware of my pronunciation of   words and how to contribute it to my singing. I learned that the most difficult vowels to pronounce are the OOh vowel (as in foot), and the aw vowel (as in walk) because they are farther back in the mouth. The ah vowel (as in father) and the aw vowel (as in walk) are hard to differentiate, but I have learned how to do so with the exercises. In the exercises from my book there were more words and sentences but for video time sakes I only said a few in order to get my point across. Now I know how to pronounce back vowels and how to differentiate them. Do you think that maybe learning front vowels will be easier, considering they are more forward in the mouth.