The Flexiflow

See, hear and feel what happens to your airflow while you breathe and use your voice.

The Flexiflow is a patented biofeedback tool that makes airflow through the vocal tract something you can see, hear and feel. It allows singers, speakers and voice professionals to explore the relationship between airflow, pressure and phonation in ways that are difficult to perceive directly.

WHY IS THIS USEFUL?

Airflow is central to voice production – but it is surprisingly difficult to perceive directly.

We can hear the voice it helps to produce, and we can feel aspects of our breathing and vocal effort, but the airflow itself – and its relationship to phonation – is largely outside our direct sensory perception. This is one reason concepts such as breath support, pressure regulation and vocal fold coordination can be so difficult to explain, learn and reproduce.

The Flexiflow gives you a unique kind of insight. It makes changes in airflow perceptible through sound, touch and sight, allowing you to explore what happens as you change your breathing, pressure or vocal production.

Instead of having to rely entirely on instructions, sensations or imagery, you can experiment, observe the result in real time and build your own, individual understanding or the relationship between airflow and voice.

WHAT CAN YOU EXPLORE WITH THE FLEXIFLOW?

Breathing

Explore different breathing strategies and observe how they affect airflow and muscle coordination.

Pressure regulation

Investigate how changes in pressure influence airflow – and how airflow and sound change in response.

Phonation

Explore the relationship between airflow and vocal fold activity, including what changes when you start, stop or modify phonation.

Vocal coordination

Experiment with the coordination of breathing, airflow and voice across different vocal tasks and range.

SOVT exercises

Use the Flexiflow with semi-occluded vocal tract exercises to explore how changes in the vocal tract affect airflow.

Teaching & learning

Turn abstract concepts into something learners can investigate for themselves – making it easier to connect explanation, sensation and actual experience.

The Flexiflow isn’t about finding one “correct” way to use your voice. It’s a tool for exploring what changes, what stays the same and what works best for you.

FROM BALLOONS TO THE FLEXIFLOW

In 2018, I began using balloons in my teaching to help singers explore the effects of changing pressure and airflow. The balloon made something abstract a little more tangible – but I soon wanted to take the idea further.

I started experimenting with different-sized openings in the balloons, looking for ways to use it not only for breathing and pressure awareness exercises but also during vocal work. It worked – up to a point. The flexibility of the material and the difficulty of creating a consistently shaped opening meant that every balloon behaved slightly differently.

During the COVID lockdown, when much of my teaching had moved online, I met Oren Boder, the creator of the SOVT straw. I told him about my experiments with balloons, and together we began looking for a way to make the idea more stable and repeatable.

That collaboration led to the Flexiflow.

Since then, the design has gone through numerous rounds of development and refinement. The Flexiflow was patented in Slovenia in 2021 and is now available to singers, speakers, voice teachers and other voice professionals worldwide.*

What began as a simple teaching experiment has become a tool for exploring something that is normally difficult to perceive: the relationship between airflow and voice.

*Unfortunately, we are currently unable to ship the Flexiflow to the US due to the shipping and customs complications arising from the current tariff conditions. We hope to make the Flexiflow available to US customers again as soon as possible, and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like to discuss alternative shipping options.

EXPLORE THE FLEXIFLOW

There are several ways to explore the Flexiflow and find out how it could fit into your own work.