Step together now

As the semester moves towards the end, I need to move towards wrapping up. To that end I started working on combining two aspects of concentration for each recording. This one for example: combines my voice quality practice and my aspiration practice. Interestingly, I found that concentrating on both at once solved the distraction problem, albeit with the addition of a rather ridiculous looking mnemonic gesture where I closed my spread fingers into the shape of a talking hand continuously as I spoke. This gesture reminded me to produce less breath, to round my lips a bit more and to draw my vowels out more fluidly rather than kind of spittting or snapping them out as I do in English. Thankfully, in later attempts I was able to drop the ridiculous looking gesture, but it really helped during the earlier combination practices.