Why telling a singer to open the pharynx often closes it, which tongue muscle is really working, and the red flags that mean your student cannot comply.

Barbara Sambor is an actor and speech-language pathologist who built her PhD around one structure: the tongue. In this dense lecture she treats the tongue as a hydrostat with sixteen muscles, separating the intrinsic muscles that change its shape from the extrinsic ones that drag its neighbours along, and shows how every tongue posture reaches the hyoid, larynx, soft palate and pharyngeal constrictors. You test your own tongue live throughout. You learn why the vowel EE gives the largest pharyngeal space and the lowest first formant, why a lowered tongue simply relocates its mass into the pharynx, and how compensation shows up as a stiff, narrowed or curled tongue. She closes with referral red flags.