Got Voice?

I recently attended a performance a friend was in, and he asked me for some advice on singing from a voice teacher perspective. So I rather quickly hatched out an email and then I realized that (amazingly) what I had written communicated my philosophy on studying voice pretty clearly. So I decided to reprint parts of it here. I intend to improve on this in the future, but....




If you want to work on your singing, here's what I'd have to say: "don't WORK on your singing." Many people think in terms of "vocal problems" and such, and this is a very ruinous way of thinking. Don't try to fix anything or change anything, don't try to "project," and especially don't try to "sing forward"-- then you lose the special qualities that make your voice unique. Besides this, by over analyzing, we only get in our own way-- read "the inner game of tennis" or "a soprano on her head" by Elois Ristad-- Your Language Brain is quite separate from the parts of your brain that you want involved in your singing That is unless your trying to learn to conjugate "the hill are alive". A great singer will approach singing the same way a great athlete would-- with visualization. And the other parts of your brain will do quite well at improving your voice if you just get out of the way and let them.

Firstly, for this to happen, your voice has to have it's own natural balance, so always try to find the relaxed and easiest effortless way to sing. Listen to the tone of your voice and imagine it as beautiful as you can. Listen to good singing and let it have an imagined visual footprint in your head-- what does a good voice "look" like? By doing this, you're allowing all of your brains resources to get involved in your voice progress. And most importantly, sing often-- and sing with a vivid imagination. Learn to visualize your own voice the way you visualize other voices.... Slowly, your voice will start to look like the voices you consider beautiful (and sound like them too) without loosing the characteristics that make it unique.

But you should also pick good models for you to listen to.... Right now I'm doing research with spectral analysis and voice types.... You know that every sound we hear is actually a composite of different pitches... well these pitches are different for different voice types. And some of these things are unchangable. This is at least my future thesis, and my research thus far bears it out. You can imitate a different voice type, but from the stage, it will always sound like your voice, because you can't get the right harmonic response....

Male voices have four formants (or main pitches that make up the sound). The first is the actual pitch you are singing. The second has to do with making different vowel sounds. The third adds a feeling of space in the voice. The fourth formant is called "the singers formant" and it is really a combination of the fourth fifth sixth and seventh formants. This is ring in the voice, but it's different for tenors, baritones and bases. Tenors for example have a lot of ring in the fifth sixth and seventh formants, whereas bases have all of the energy concentrated in the fourth formant, with almost no energy in the fifth and above this is what makes a voice dark and bassy. This is my voice. I can try to sound like a tenor, and it works up close, but I can not generate energy above the Fourth formant, so from the stage I always sound like a bass-- a bass doing a bad imitation of a tenor!

So basically, just relax and sing, and don't worry too much (at this point) about changing anything. Just build your ear and your imagination. And enjoy singing.