Six research-backed benefits of semi-occluded vocal tract work, the exact straw and water pressures that produce them, and a live workshop you can copy.

Everyone hands their students a straw. Almost nobody can say what it is doing. Karin Titze Cox can. Drawing on her own CT scans, lab work and published straw studies, she walks you through the six benefits of SOVT - airway widening, squared-up fold closure, lower phonation threshold pressure, increased inertance and MFDR, impedance matching, and a lowered first resonance - then shows the charts that tell you which straw diameter, length and water depth deliver which pressure. She runs volunteers through a full protocol: range, loud-soft coordination, messa di voce, endurance and carry-over to speech. Closes on registers, belt vowels and spectrograms of working Broadway singers.