After Estill, the problem with Tilting in Estill Voice Craft

Dr Gillyanne Kayes on why "tilting the thyroid" in Estill Voice Training can be problematic for singers.

Let's talk about "tilting"!
How many people are familiar with that term? OK, I think that's a show of a hand from every person in the room which is great. What does it mean really? Let's think about that.

Now the Estill Model proposes a tilted thyroid posture as a prerequisite for that Cry quality. Inside the larynx we have muscles that shorten the vocal folds and that is the TA or the Vocalis muscle. TA means Thyroarytenoid. I'm going to use the acronyms as we go through otherwise my talk would be even longer than planned.

And we have muscles that lengthen the vocal folds. These are the cricothyroid muscles or the CT muscles. So TA shortens and bulks the vocal folds, also stiffening them, and I'll be talking about what muscle stiffening is in due course. And CT elongates, thins and also tensions the vocal folds.

I want to show you a typical representation of how that might look in the larynx. What you've got here is the rest position, so this is the non-tilted position where there's actually a gap, it's a very small gap, between the thyroid and the cricoid cartilage. That's the muscle that been positioned there. And for the solid line you've got the tilted position. So this is a tilted forward position. If I represent it just with my hands it's very common that you see people describing it in this way.

But functionally this can also happen. This is a diagram - the diagram from Netter. The first one is from Ron Baken and the second one is from Netter. Now what's interesting about this is that it looks like it's the wrong way round doesn't it? OK, so now what we've got, in this case the tilted the elongation of the vocal folds, is the dotted line. So because of these muscle bands that we have and the articulation of the joint of the cricoid and the thyroid, we have two possibilities for the stretching and thinning the vocal folds. You can either do this, or we can do that. They both achieve exactly the same effect...


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 tilting in our ADVANCED Retreat here: http://store.vocalprocess.co.uk/TheAD...