Lessac Voice Training for Actors: The Consonant Orchestra, the Y-Buzz, and the Shape of Vowels

Your voice teacher says, “Play the N like a violin.” Or a classmate comes back from a summer intensive talking about buzzing, drums, and “NRG,” spelled like a text message. You nod along, and you have no idea what any of it means for the speech you have to deliver on Friday.

That’s Lessac work. It sounds strange from the outside because it uses music and physical sensation as its vocabulary, not rules about correct pronunciation. Once you know the three ideas underneath it, the strange words make sense, and some of the exercises are easy to try on your own.

The short version: Lessac Kinesensic Training asks you to feel your voice, using familiar sensations in your body as your instructions. It splits voice and speech into three vocal energies: consonants played like instruments, a vibrating tone you feel in your face, and vowels shaped by the space inside your mouth. You explore each one with curiosity, then carry what you found into text.

Who Arthur Lessac was, and what “Kinesensic” means for you

Arthur Lessac was born in 1909 and died in 2011, and he taught voice for most of that long life. His Wikipedia biography records his studies at the Eastman School of Music and New York University, a professorship at SUNY Binghamton from 1969, and two books that carry the method: The Use and Training of the Human Voice (first published in 1960, greatly expanded in 1967, and in a third edition in 1997) and Body Wisdom (1981).

According to the Lessac Institute’s biography, he began developing what he called “organic instruction” while studying voice in the 1930s, founded the National Academy of Vocal Arts in New York in 1945, and established the Lessac Institute for Voice and Speech in 1965. Wikipedia records that his teachers and students founded today’s Lessac Institute in 1998 to carry the work on; it now runs the workshops and certification.

The word to hold on to is organic. The Institute’s home page says the training uses “familiar behaviors of your body” as instructions. A yawn, a hum, the pleasure of biting into something crisp: you already know how those feel, so the work starts from them instead of from a diagram of the larynx. That’s also why you’ll hear so many words about sensation in a Lessac class, and so few about right and wrong.

The three vocal energies, in plain words

The Institute’s areas of study name the three vocal energies with musical subtitles: Consonant NRG, “The Music of the Consonants”; Structural Energy, “The Music of the Vowels”; and Tonal Energy, “The music of the Voice.” NRG is just Lessac’s spelling of energy. Alongside them sit body energy states, the movement side of the training.

Think of the three as three ways of paying attention while you speak. Consonant energy is about the rhythm and texture of the sounds that start and end your words. Tonal energy is about the vibration of the voice itself. Structural energy is about the space and shape of the mouth, which colors every vowel. You practice each one alone, then let them work together.

Consonant energy: play the consonant orchestra

This is the part most actors remember, because it’s fun. In Lessac’s system each consonant is an instrument. A patent assigned to Lessac Tech Inc., a company that built speech software on his system, lays out the idea in its description of Lessac theory: consonant energy is linked to the symphony orchestra, and each consonant carries both a sound and an image. A patent isn’t a teaching text, though. It’s an engineer’s summary of Lessac’s ideas, so check the details below against Lessac’s book or a trainer.

Some consonants are strings. The same patent gives the N as a violin, the M as a viola, the V as a cello, and the Z as a bass fiddle. Those are sounds you can sustain, so you can feel them hum and let them ring a little longer. Other consonants are drums: the T is a snare drum made by the tip of the tongue, the K a tom-tom made at the back, and the P, B, D, and G are drumbeats too. The CH is a cymbal, and the S is a sound effect.

Why bother with the metaphor? Because it changes how you make the sound. A drummer doesn’t smash the drum to be heard. A Lessac Institute article on using the work with singers says the D, the “d-tympany,” is better “tapped, not slapped.” That’s a useful note for any actor who gets the “I can’t hear your endings” note and responds by spitting every consonant at the back wall.

Try it: a consonant orchestra pass

• Take one sentence of your text and say it slowly, listening only to the consonants.
• Let the strings (N, M, V, Z) ring for a moment longer than usual, and feel the buzz on your lips or teeth.
• Tap the drums (T, D, K, P, B, G) lightly and cleanly, like a fingertip on a drumhead, with no extra push of breath.
• Say the sentence again at normal speed and notice whether the word endings now arrive without effort.

If you want more drills in this direction, our guide to diction exercises for actors has a full sequence for finishing words without sounding careful.

Tonal energy: find the Y-buzz

Tonal energy starts with a small sound called the Y-buzz. The patent describes it as the long “e” in “it’s easy,” held as a tone that you feel in the hard palate, the nasal bone, the sinuses, and the forehead, carried by bone conduction. In other words, you’re not listening to yourself so much as feeling the vibration in your face.

A gentle first taste: say “easy” quietly, then stretch the “ee” into a soft, easy hum, at a comfortable pitch and low volume. Notice where you feel the buzz. Then relax and let it go. Don’t push for loudness and don’t squeeze. If it tickles behind your front teeth or along the bridge of your nose, you’ve found the kind of sensation the work is built on.

From there the training goes further than you can go alone. The Institute’s online lessons in the vocal energies move from the Y-buzz to the “+Y buzz” (the patent links it to the second vowel in “away”) and then to the call, which gets several lessons of its own. That progression is best learned with a trainer who can hear you.

What the research says, and what it doesn’t

There’s a little evidence, and it’s worth knowing exactly how little. In a 2007 study in the Journal of Voice, nine newly graduated actors had one session of Y-buzz training. Voice-trained speech-language pathologists, comparing a held “ee” before training with a held Y-buzz after it, picked the Y-buzz as more resonant in 74% of comparisons, and some acoustic measures of roughness went down.

A later study of eight actors before and after an intensive Lessac workshop had one voice expert rate the recordings, and most post-workshop samples were rated more resonant. One of its authors is affiliated with the Lessac Institute. And a 2013 University of Iowa thesis found that listeners rated Lessac-based over-articulation as louder and better projected, even though the measured volume was not significantly different.

So: small groups, short training, and mostly listener judgments. The studies suggest the work changes how a voice is heard. They don’t prove it’s better than other training, and they don’t measure what happens in a two-hour show. Treat the method as a skill you test in your own body, not a guarantee.

Structural energy: the shape of the vowels

Structural energy is about space. The singers’ article describes it as “a yawning space in the mouth,” made by facial muscles that move with flexibility and awareness. It suggests noticing what your mouth and throat feel like at the start of a yawn, the pre-yawn, and keeping about a thumb-sized space between the side molars for open vowels like OO, AW, AH, and OH.

Lessac numbers the vowels. The patent’s summary puts them on a scale tied to how far apart the lips are: 6 is the widest opening, as in “bad,” and 1 is the smallest, as in “booze.” You don’t need to memorize the chart to start. The useful habit is noticing that every vowel has a shape, and that a cramped mouth makes a cramped sound.

The two ideas measure different things: the yawning space is inside the mouth, while the numbers track how far apart the lips are, so OO can have an open inside and small lips.

Here’s a quick exploration. Begin a yawn, stop before it takes over, and notice the lift and width inside your mouth. Then say “who,” “awe,” “ah,” and “oh” with that space in place, slowly, without forcing the jaw down. Finally, say a line of your text twice, once with your usual mouth and once with the yawning space, and listen for the difference in warmth.

Put the three energies on a speech

Hamlet’s advice to the players is a good place to try this, because it’s about speaking well and it’s full of drums and strings. Here’s the start, from the Project Gutenberg text of Hamlet:

Hamlet: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;

“Trippingly on the tongue” is almost a drum solo: the T and the P tap, and the N, with the “ng” hum after it, keeps ringing underneath. “Mouth it” is a warning about the exact thing the consonant orchestra fixes, chewing the words instead of playing them. And “use all gently” is close to the spirit of the whole method. You can find the full scene in our Hamlet page.

A 15-minute daily routine

1. Two minutes: stand easily, yawn once or twice, and let the jaw and tongue soften.
2. Three minutes: play with the Y-buzz on “easy,” quietly, feeling for vibration in your face, and stop if anything strains.
3. Three minutes: explore the open vowels with the pre-yawn space, then contrast a wide-lipped vowel (as in “bad”) with a small-lipped one (as in “booze”), keeping the inner space for both.
4. Three minutes: do a consonant orchestra pass on the first sentence of your speech, strings ringing and drums tapped.
5. Four minutes: speak the whole speech for meaning, thinking only about the person you’re talking to, and let the work stay in the background.

That last step matters most. The exercises are a rehearsal tool. In performance your attention belongs to the scene, and the hope is that the feeling of ringing strings and an easy tone comes along without you steering it.

Keep it when the scene starts

A voice that sounds lovely in a warm-up can tighten the moment you have to listen and answer. So test the work with your cues, not just alone. Run the scene with a partner, or in Offbook, which reads the other parts and waits for your line, and notice whether your consonants and tone survive the back-and-forth.

It also helps to have the words solid first, because it’s hard to feel the inside of your mouth while you’re hunting for the next phrase. Our free first-letter memorizer turns a speech into first-letter cues, and our collection of Shakespeare monologues gives you plenty of text to explore with. For the breath side of voice work, try our guides to Linklater voice work and Fitzmaurice voicework.

How to study Lessac properly

The Institute’s main workshop format is the Lessac Intensive. The Institute’s intensive workshops page says most run in retreat-like settings over one, two, or three weeks, led by Master Teachers and Certified Trainers. The Institute’s biography says many universities adopted the training, so your school’s voice and speech class may already use it.

If you want to go further, the certification overview describes the path: a candidate typically completes two Lessac Intensives plus further training before an assessment. Reaching Certified Trainer takes at least 295 hours of training, 80% of it in person. A Master Teacher needs at least eight years as an active Certified Trainer.

For reading, start with Lessac’s own The Use and Training of the Human Voice, which sets out the three energies in detail. For a modern view, Melissa Hurt’s Arthur Lessac’s Embodied Actor Training (Routledge, 2014), written by a Lessac Certified Trainer, connects the work to acting and ends with explorations you can try yourself.

Questions actors ask

What is Lessac voice training?

It’s a voice, speech, and movement training developed by Arthur Lessac, officially called Lessac Kinesensic Training. It works through three vocal energies (consonant, tonal, and structural) and body energy states, and it asks you to discover good use of the voice by feeling familiar physical sensations.

What is the consonant orchestra?

It’s Lessac’s way of treating each consonant as a musical instrument. Sustainable sounds like N, M, and V are strings you can let ring; short sounds like T, D, and K are drums you tap. Thinking of them as instruments helps you make consonants clear without pushing extra force.

How do actors use the Lessac energies on a role?

Mostly in rehearsal, not in the moment. You warm up with the Y-buzz, the yawning space, and a consonant pass, then work through the text for meaning and let the energies stay in the background. You can also play with the balance as a character choice: try a character who hits the drums hard, or one whose vowels stay small, and see what it tells you.

Is Lessac work the same as learning a stage accent?

Not really. Lessac work trains clear, resonant speech through physical sensation rather than teaching a particular accent, though Wikipedia notes that early on Lessac used it with a 1939 Broadway cast of European refugees who needed to drop their accents. If you need to learn a new accent, our guide to Knight-Thompson Speechwork covers a skills-based approach to that.