How To: Make Strange Vocalizations, Guttural and Other Sounds

How to produce strange noises using your mouth and throat.

Step 1 Guttural Noises

Guttural noises are a staple of making people avoid you by imitating animals, aliens, and other such things.  The main idea here is to use your throat and lots of mucus to produce variations of a sort of rumbling, gargling noise. 

To get started:

1. Drink plenty of milk, thick juice, or even straight up corn syrup. (Personally, I recommend the first two.) This will coat your throat in thick juices and gooey sucrose-stuffs.
2. Try gargling with saliva. Avoid swallowing, as this will deplete your mucus ammunition, so to speak. 
3. If you have managed to make any variety of growling, phlegmy noises, you're well on your way to mastering the art of guttural vocalizations.

Okay, now that you've scared off your cat, it's time to move on to some advanced sounds.  The key is to start with the basic grumbling and adventure from there.  Try opening your trachea as if to yawn, but don't yawn. Instead, repeat the action, this will help strengthen your muscles, and open up new doors to a variety of different noises.  Try breathing in with your throat open, use different amounts of air and aperture until you produce a rather subhuman, breathy grumble. Now, experiment. 

Tips

• Just experiment with the amount of mucus, air flow, and throat aperture. Either try to imitate a specific sound, or just troll around different noises until you find something you like.
• Don't drink water. This clears the throat of all that nasty goop you need to make these sounds!

Step 2 Noises with Your Mouth

Okay, here's the harder part, making noises with your mouth.  For this, you will need a glass of water.

Supplies:

• Water.
• More water.
• Probably like, a gallon of it, or maybe one of those big plastic jugs.

To start, you'll need a basic outline of how the noises will be made.  There are 2 ways:

1. With the lips.
2. With the tongue.

Now, these may seem simple, and simple sounds are, but to get a good collection of freakish noises under your belt, it will take some practice.  Let's start with lip noises. Begin by buzzing your lips, loosely at first, just make a typical horse sound. Once you can do that on command, go tighter, try going for a buzzing sound. Once you can do both of those fairly easily, you'll want to keep practicing.  These buzzing and flapping noises are the basics of lip vocalizations, and you won't get very far from there, but experiment, move from a horse to a splat sound perhaps, or from a bee buzzing, to a car starting. Try everything!

The next part is using your tongue. This is simple to do, yet very difficult to understand.  You'll need the same supplies as above, a moist tongue is a happy tongue!

Start by exercising.  Click your tongue, stick it out as far as you can, try to see how much of the inner surface of your mouth you can touch with the tip of your tongue, you want it strong and flexible!  Once you're all ready, try a few basic sounds:

• Clicking 
• Rolling (as in the spanish "r", both with pitch and without).

The rolling is where it's at, really...

So, roll your tongue. Once you can do that, try varying your airflow to produce different intensities of the sound.  You'll soon find you can imitate the purr of a cat fairly well, and have probably run off to see how soon your family will realize that it's you and not Mr. Kitty, there.

Now that you're back, try some new tongue positions, loosening and tightening the muscles. This will make even more varied sounds.

Everything together.

Once you have these various techniques all down well enough, combine them and use them together. And always keep practicing!