Singing is between the ears!

I do not mean the same thing some teachers say when they advise to start the
tone in the diaphragm or in the front of your face. I am not saying to start the tone between the ears. We sing with the vocal mechanism, the tone begins in the throat and stays in the throat. The main resonators are the laryngeal and oral pharynx or, as I tell my students, what the doctor looks at when he asks you to say, “Ah.” The above is fact. That is how the body works as a sound maker. But………

But there is also no question that the brain runs the singing mechanism in the
same way it runs the rest of the body, so whatever the brain wants the vocal
mechanism to do, that is exactly what it will do. This is important to
understand as it is the basic fact that leads to improvement in the quality and ease
of singing.

So, what happens when the brain wants a certain sound? It directs the whole
mechanism to create that sound, adjusts the vocal cords for the pitch, makes
the vowel, creates the conditions for amplification. All this it learned how to
do when we learned how to talk, i.e., make different pitches, vowels, and
volume levels. (Of course, it also directs the making of consonants.) It is a
good thing our brains know how to do this so that we can communicate.
The problem is that these pesky brains of ours get used to making a certain
sound, they get familiar with the sound of us and tend to keep making that sound.
It fits like an old shoe. Our brains recognize the sound we make and identify it as
belonging to us. Your brain makes the sound of your voice that it knows and is very satisfied with that sound. But if there is something “wrong” with that sound, if the vowel is poorly pronounced, as in some regional or ethnic ways of talking, it the pitch is imperfect, not “in tune” when we sing, and so forth, then it makes it hard to change and get those things right as our dear brains want to keep on doing what is familiar and what makes them feel comfy-cosy.

Understand, please, there is nothing at all wrong with regional or ethnic speech. I would not want us all to talk just alike. What a bore! But for classical singing, we need consistency and vowels that have as little “accent” as possible. When we finish singing, we can go back to how we talk. I am from the Southwestern United States, I have an accent, and I use it.

If you are wondering how your brain arrives at the way it pronounces words, the sort of sound we make, (deep sounding, a bit nasal, whatever) it picks up its understanding of how to make sound from the environment we grow up in. You will make the same sorts of sounds as your family, the people in your part of the world. This includes not only pronunciation, but also what is called timbre, the French word meaning quality – the quality of your sound – a term familiar to all musicians and used to describe both voices and instruments.

There is also the additional complication that the vocal mechanism is largely an
involuntary one. It is involuntary because it works as I described. If it were
voluntary, then we would all sing perfectly – in theory, at least – because we would
make all the adjustments we need to make quite differently. We could stretch the vocal cords to a certain length for the pitch and order the cords to close on command.
All the muscles would do what we tell them in the same way as our muscles of
locomotion (legs) and lifting (arms and torso) do. But it isn’t that way with the vocal
mechanism. It responds to our concept of sound, that thing we get from having learned to talk. So our task in improving our singing is to change our concept. This is no mean feat. It is a process that takes time and focus, persuading our brains to direct a different sort of sound making than they have done for a long time.

That’s where the singing teacher comes in. Our task is to help our students arrive a
a different concept. This means setting up a condition where the student can hear
herself make a sound that is not what she is used to making. Then this new and, it is
to be hoped, improved sound will become the norm for her brain and it will continue
to direct the vocal mechanism toward this new sound. That is the process of learning
to sing. This is what voice teachers do, or at least should do. Sometimes they do not.
Sometimes they try to simply take the existing sound and build on it. But if the sound
is faulty to start with, then there is nothing to build on. The faulty sound has to go and
be replaced by a better sound.

The sound that a singer makes represents the current state of functionality of his voice. You cannot build on something which is poorly functioning. You have to
change the sound to one that represents better functioning. Otherwise, you are
“building your house on sand.” If an athlete, a runner, wants to go faster, his
coach must figure out what is right and wrong with the way he is using his muscles
It would not be acceptable to simply tell the athlete, “Keep doing what you are doing,
but run faster.” The coach must analyze the state of the muscular movement and teach
the runner to use the muscles differently to maximize his speed. That is what singing
teachers ought to do, and few do this. Instead, they say, in effect, “Keep doing what
you are doing, but make it prettier.” ( in whatever way the teacher considers prettier)
How the teacher describes pretty varies depending on what sort of sound the teacher
happens to like. So the student becomes the victim of the teacher’s aesthetic preference, which may or may not have anything to do with the sort of voice the student has.

More about how to go about changing concepts in the future.