Dear Bianca, Think about all the ways you use your voice: talking, singing, whispering, shouting, yodeling. Humans make so many sounds with just their voices. I talked about how it works with Alisa Toy.
She’s a professional singer who teaches in the School of Music at Washington State University. She told me that the human voice is the smallest instrument in the world. The parts that make the sound—called the vocal folds or vocal cords—are about as long as your thumbnail.
So, where are those tiny vocal folds and how do they do it? Inside your throat you have two tubes. The esophagus is the food tube. That’s how food travels from your mouth to your stomach.
The trachea is the air tube. It’s how air moves between your mouth and lungs. Your larynx—also called the voice box—sits right on top of your trachea.
The larynx’s job is to close off that air tube while you’re eating. That keeps your food from accidentally going down the wrong tube. The larynx also houses the vocal folds that make sound.
“The vocal folds are in the middle of the larynx,” Toy said. “Air that’s pumped up from the lungs causes them to vibrate—and that’s where the sound comes from.” The vocal folds are tiny, but they’re also incredibly thin.
Try gently pinching your eyelid. Your vocal folds are even thinner than that. The vocal folds sit next to each other.
When you breathe, the space between the vocal folds is slightly open. The air whooshes from your lungs and up through the.
