Sound Synergy: The Voice Professional and the Alexander Technique. The vocal tract — the lips of the glottis to the lips of the mouth — is some pretty important real estate. Over the course of a career, a voice professional might spend enough on its care and maintenance to purchase some more tangible real estate, say, a very large house… in Hawaii… on the beach. You can make that necessary investment in your vocal health, many do, and still wind up neglecting a constituency that conditions the function of the whole, namely, the way the head that houses the vocal tract rests on its fulcrum atop the spine, on the atlanto-occipital joint. It can have a profound effect on your singing or speaking voice. How? The atlanto-occipital joint sits higher than you might imagine. It sits just above and behind the oropharynx, that area of your throat — visible from the front of the mouth — where the throat begins its plunge toward the laryngopharynx beneath, and still deeper, the larynx itself where the vocal folds reside. The oropharynx is largely responsible for the formation and purity of vowels, for the harmony of the vibrator — your vocal folds — with its primary resonator, the throat itself. The oropharynx is, according to the great master of singing, Manuel Garcia, the true mouth of the singer. A slight imbalance of the head upon the atlanto-occiptal joint — the head’s being pulled back and down for instance — can profoundly affect the shape of your oropharynx and adversely impact your sound, make your otherwise fine voice sound narrow, pinched, and resonanceless.