/ẽ/ – Mid Front Unrounded Nasal Vowel

Of course, we do all these things without ever thinking about it. That's why it's important to develop an awareness of the velum and its movement. Even though you use the velum without thinking about it, it is a 100% controllable muscle.Developing awareness is not as challenging as it is mentally. Your mission is to identify a feeling, then turn that feeling into voluntary movement.

English Examples

We actually make nasal vowels in English quite often without ever realizing it. We'll sometimes do it when we have a vowel followed by an /n/ or /m/. This should make sense when you think about it. 

A nasal vowel is the oral vowel sound AND the "humming" sound of air resonating in your nasal cavity.  

You create this humming sound whenever you make an /n/ or /m/ consonant (say "hmmm?"). This is the feeling of air resonating in your nasal cavity. The point when you switch from a oral vowel to a nasal /n/ or /m/ is blurry, causing you to perceive two sounds. As a result, you will sometimes nasalize the vowel since it sounds pretty much the same. 

You can hear this phenomenon in the English word examples below.  Fool around with these words yourself and see if you can develop an awareness of the effect the /n/ or /m/ is having on your vowels.

Velar "Humming" Drills

Humming is the act of passing voiced air ONLY through your nose. We do this by closing our lips so that air cannot leave out mouths. You can achieve this same oral-passage by closing just the velum.  

To develop an awareness of this, do the following:

1. Hum a note to yourself and sustain that note.
2. While sustaining the note, part your lips and open your jaw WITHOUT altering the sound AT ALL

If you don't alter the humming sound when going from closed to open, that means you are maintaining a complete block of the oral passage with your velum. To further develop your awareness of this muscle, do the following: 

1. Start with the same open mouth humming sound.
2. Without stopping your breath and voice, switch to an oral /a/ vowel sound.
3. Go back to the humming sound and continue to alternate back and forth between humming and the oral /ɐ/ vowel (what we think of as "uh" in English).

The only thing moving here to change the sound is the velum. 

So whatever you are "feeling" here is the "feeling" that you want to control when making nasal vowels. Now to be clear, humming and nasal vowels are NOT the same thing.  In the audio file above, airflow is alternating between my mouth and and nose. For a nasal vowel to occur, I need air to pass through BOTH my mouth and my nose. 

In other words, I need the two sounds above to occur at the same time to make a nasal vowel.

This is what you are trying to accomplish with your nasal vowel articulation - a complete relaxation of the velum to allow air to pass through. Now that you know what you need to do physiologically, let's train your ear to be sensitive to nasalization.

Nasal Vowel Perception

In this exercise, you are going to practice perceiving, producing and distinguishing the following three sounds:

• The oral vowel
• The pure nasal humming sound
• The Nasal vowel (i.e. oral vowel + humming)

Listen to the audio and follow the directions below:

1. Start with the oral vowel
2. Adjust to the nasal vowel (oral + humming)
3. Adjust to the humming sound
4. Adjust back to the nasal vowel
5. Adjust back to the oral vowel
6. Repeat the whole process

Do not move on to the next section until you are comfortable both hearing and producing the differences between these three sounds. Once you have mastered nasal awareness, you can move on to the real challenge - developing Nasal Control.