r/Showerthoughts • u/LennyLennsen • 13d ago
Casual Thought A nasal voice is when all the air passes through the mouth.
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u/MagicMan5264 13d ago edited 12d ago
No, it’s not. A large amount of air through the nose is hypernasal voice; no air through the nose is hyponasal voice. It’s a distinct vocal quality, but it’s by definition not nasal.
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u/ElijahNSRose 13d ago
I wasn't aware of that distinction, and I'm willing to bet most of Reddit isn't either
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u/Able_Transition_5049 12d ago
TIL there’s way more to nasal voices than I thought lol.
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u/xCoachHines 9d ago
Nasally voices*
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u/Dialent 8d ago
You’ve corrected several people in this thread which is funny because you’re actually completely incorrect. Nasal is an adjective, so nasal voice is perfectly valid, and is way, way more common than nasally, so much so that the Wikipedia article for it is called nasal voice and not “nasally voice.” In fact “nasally” as an adjective (the way you’re falsely proscribing its usage) is pretty obscure, so much so that if you look up in the Cambridge dictionary, your usage is only the second definition (the first being “nasally” as an adverb, e.g. “he said nasally.”
So in short, you chose the wrong hill to die on.
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u/xCoachHines 7d ago
Nasally voice*
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u/dance_rattle_shake 6d ago
I think OP has a point - I've noticed many ppl describe singers as nasal when I nfact the sound they're getting is from letting zero air through their nose. Like you said it's the opposite, but ppl don't know any better.
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u/Vynik 12d ago edited 12d ago
I don't really understand this one. A nasal voice is when a large amount of your air passes into and through the nasal cavity.
For singing, as you get higher, you tend to utilize more of your nasal cavity and adjust your soft palate / pharynx positioning to control air flow between your nasal cavity and mouth. An extreme nasal voice, like in the Nanny, is when you are lifting your nasopharynx and allowing most of your air to travel through your nasal passage. In general, when singing or speaking in a nasal tone, very little air escapes the nose. So, I guess in that sense, yes air is going through your mouth.
That being said, some air is escaping your nose when you are being extremely forward and nasal which is why you can pinch your nose to alter your sound.
But the vast majority is going through your mouth just like you making any noise, nasal resonance or not.
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u/SubstantialBelly6 12d ago
I’m guessing what they mean by “nasal voice” is not phonemes or musical tone, but simply what happens when you plug your nose to make it sound more nasally. In this case, they are correct, all the air is coming out your mouth, but the nasal sound still comes from the air resonating in your nasal cavity. If you make a non-nasal sound and plug your nose nothing changes, but an already nasal sound will sound more nasal.
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u/Heatwave40 7d ago
The Nanny has a lot of “twang” and professionally (for Speech Pathologists) is not referred to as hyper nasal.
Twang is a squeezing of the aryepiglottic sphincter which changes the acoustic signal coming from the vocal cords to make that sound quality.
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u/Dennis_TITsler 6d ago
To the people saying this is wrong. If someone plugs their nose and talks, is that not nasally? Cause that's how I've always heard it used
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u/Chirpy_Harbor6109 7d ago
Apparently, a nasal voice is just an airflow problem. The air’s taking the wrong exit.
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u/nefasto23 6d ago
yeah it's technically hyponasality, your nose just turns into a closed acoustic dead-end instead of an exhaust. funny how we named the voice after the exact bottleneck the air can't actually pass through
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u/ShowerSentinel 13d ago
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