Re: Bumping into the top of my range
Hi, WolfDeca. It seems you're beginning to discover the little intricacies of your individual voice. First let me ask if you're male or female.
From my personal experience, I can go a bit higher in lip rolls than I can with tongue trill. However, I can go my absolute highest vocalizing on just plain old vowels. With tongue trills, I think I can get to maybe an A5 or so, but I haven't done them in a while, so I can't say for sure. On lip trills, I normally can get up to a C6 or C#6, but on occasion, I've reached an Eb6. On plain old vowels, I normally can get up to the A6, although I have gone higher than that by accident on several different occasions. For most purposes, I would consider that A6 to be the top of my range because everything above that isn't really dependable.
Tongue trills tire me out, particularly the back portion of the tongue, if I have to do them for an extended period of time. Using trilled R's in normal speech doesn't bother me, but I think due to the fact that you're using a muscle that you don't normally use in normal speech for such extended periods of time, you become tired. The muscles just aren't accustomed to that kind of rigorous use. It's kind of the same as if you don't normally run then all of a sudden decide you're going to run 5 miles today. It's going to tire you out since your body isn't used to it. However, if you ran daily, this wouldn't bother you quite as much.
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We have eyes, but cannot see; ears, but cannot hear.