After Estill: the problem with cricoid tilt for belting in Estill Voice Craft

Dr Gillyanne Kayes on why cricoid tilt for belting in Estill Voice Training can be problematic for singers.

OK, now I'm going to talk about tilting the cricoid for belting. Again, lots of you will have heard about belting and you may even have read my book [Singing and the Actor] and in the first edition of my book I had cricoid tilting for belting. In the second edition of my book I sort of said well, we don't actually know how that happens so it could be something else. Moved on a bit since then!

People often ask me about this in masterclasses because they've read my book or maybe they've done their Estill courses and they see that I don't use it when I'm teaching people belt. So of course, their hand goes up: why, why aren't you doing it? Well the short answer is I don't do it because we can't do it. There are no muscles positioned in the larynx to pull the cricoid downwards in that way as Jo originally thought. I'll explain why she may have thought that.

Of course, if we had a cricosternoid muscle for those of you who are used to thinking about muscles and attachments, we could do it. But we don't have one of those.

So what I want to show is a fairly complicated diagram but it gives an idea of a more likely scenario. Given what is known about the intrinsic and the extrinsic muscles of the larynx, and this diagram has been very kindly supplied by Tom Harris. I did warn you it's quite complicated. Tom loves his vectors and this is actually a summary of what is known currently about the muscles that hold the larynx in position, what we call the extrinsic muscles, and the intrinsic muscles that move the vocal folds and the arytenoids and those that also stretch the vocal folds in tilting. And this is derived from Vilkman et al 1996, External Laryngeal Frame Function I think.

OK, right. What I want you to notice... let's see if I can get this going again... is that red arrow at the top. So this is the thyrohyoid muscle and it attaches to the hyoid. Now the hyoid bone is actually very moveable but there are lots of muscle attachments to it that can hold it steady. And if you just look down here - cricopharyngeus - this is the muscle that is the bottom of the three... they're called the constrictors of the pharynx. Sorry, they're called constrictors, that's what they do. We use them in swallowing. And there are two bands to that muscle so you've got two arrows going in different directions, but the sum of the pull is that dotted line there. And this is tracheal pull which is to do with the link between the... there's a lining that comes up from the trachea whose name has suddenly escaped me which someone can shout out if they remember it, which goes through the larynx [Ed. conus elasticus].

So if we can engage that thyrohyoid muscle can you see where the thyroid cartilage would go? It would actually open up so we've got a slightly up and back movement. Now if we did that, it would allow us to shorten the vocal folds somewhat for belting which is what Jo Estill suggested, and I actually don't disagree with that because otherwise the sound wouldn't be as loud and as heavy as we hear. Because normally when we do belting it's above comfortable chest register, ok, so we want to keep a relatively thick vocal fold in that action.

And for those of us who teach a slight head-tip up, and I'm not talking about chin-forward or any of that stuff, I'm talking about nodding up. For those of us who do that it makes even more sense that we would actually be able to keep a slightly thicker vocal fold.


You can now watch Dr Gillyanne Kayes' entire speech on her experiences after Estill, on the Vocal Process website here:
http://vocalprocess.co.uk/after-estil...
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Gillyanne goes into more detail about belting (without cricoid tilting) on the Belting Explained double DVD here: https://store.vocalprocess.co.uk/howt...