Exercise physiology

Welcome back! Let's get right to it.

Since singing is a physical activity, voice researchers are constantly looking for connections between vocal training and exercise physiology. The big question is: Do the same training principles used by athletes to become bigger, faster, and stronger work in building voices as well? The short answer seems to be: maybe.

While more research needs to be done, many voice pedagogues are encouraging structuring practices around the four basic principles of physical training. These principles were outlined by Professor John Nix in a recent article in the Journal of Singing called "Best Practices: Using Exercise Physiology and Motor Learning Principles in the Teaching Studio and Practice Room."

Exercise physiology at work.

Principle #1: Overloading is what happens when you ask a muscle to do more than it normally does, like in weight training when you use heavier weights with fewer reps. In singing, Nix says overloading would be like taking a difficult passage of music and singing it slower than you would in a performance. This would tax your breath management and how you handle the range in a way that, if you could master it, would make the normal tempo seem much easier.

Principle #2: Specificity means that your training regimen should match the skills you are trying to develop. For instance, if you're learning Amy's part in "Not getting married today" from COMPANY, you would want to practice vocal exercises that encourage freedom at the articulators (lips, tongue, jaw, etc.). If you're learning Paul's part in that same song, you'd want exercises that help build legato phrases.

Principle #3: Individuality calls for setting a training regimen that fits your unique capabilities and journey, which, as Nix says, can include your age, physical development, experience, health, and skill level. If you want to sing shimmering high Cs but right now you struggle with the G below it, it would be better if you worked to gradually increase your range rather than pushing for that C when it is beyond your current capabilities.

Principle #4: Reversibility is what some of you may be experiencing right now coming off break. It is essentially the "use it or lose it" principle that says the benefits you have gained through training are lost over time if you don't continue to train. In other words, be mindful when you are on a break that you aren't taking so much time off that you lose skills you have built.

As you are setting up your practice schedule for the semester, think about all the ways we train our bodies physically (dance, cardio, yoga, weight training, Pilates, etc.). Since the voice is a part of the body, there may be principles from this training that can be applicable to your vocal practice. Play around and see what you discover.

Let's have a great semester!

Now go practice.

All exercise must include periods of rest.

Your message

Actors have a uniquely important role in theater. While many elements come together to bring a script to life, it is actors who literally embody the text and give it voice in order to communicate its specific message to audiences.

Therefore, when you build your skills as an actor, you are better able to serve as the medium through which a playwright's message is communicated.

The way you live your life communicates a message as well. Just like theater, that message can have a powerful influence. The message of your life may inspire or denigrate, encourage or manipulate.

Consider for a moment what message you would like your life to send. What greater good are you hoping to serve? What quality would you like to see more of in the world as a result of your presence?

Now, can your life and your art send the same message? To the more immediate point, can your life message come through in the work you are presenting this semester?

Those may be difficult questions to answer but I suspect that if you can perform with these greater concerns in mind, you will not be so worried about vocal technique, you will bring more authentic intent to your performance, and you will find greater connection between your message as a singer and your message for the world.

After all, if Shakespeare is right and "All the world's a stage," the work we do in theater may just be an extended opportunity to hone our message for the everyday performance that exists beyond the footlights.

Keep practicing your message (in theater and in life). The world needs to hear it.

Putting "placement" in its place

[EDIT: A more thorough version of this post was published in the Journal of Singing in September/October 2018.]

One element of my teaching that is constantly changing and evolving is my choice of words. Knowing that the way I give directions or explain pedagogical concepts can either help or hinder learning, I have to be especially careful when using “loaded” words that often have vastly different meanings to different people. This includes words like “support,” “open throat,” and “head voice.” But, for me, the king of all loaded words is “placement.”

The book Master Singers: Advice from the Stage (which I reviewed here) highlights the disparity of views on placement in its interviews with prominent opera singers about vocal technique. In the book, Thomas Hampson unequivocally states, “I do not use the word placement,” whereas Alan Held says, “Placement is the most important aspect of my singing.” Kathleen Kim says, “I don’t try to place the sound. I just try to feel the sensation, which for me is more space in the back of my throat.” Eric Owens counters by saying, “...I never feel that this space is in the back. If anything, I’ll feel like the space is through the top of my head, in addition to the forward placement.” Owens also says, “I feel resonance and placement, mostly, in the front/mask area,” while Jonas Kaufmann flatly states, “I do not feel the voice in the mask.”

To help elucidate the issue, I look to Scott McCoy’s Singing and Voice Science chapter in the NATS-sponsored So You Want to Sing books. McCoy makes a distinction between forced resonance and free resonance. Forced resonance in singing refers to our "private" resonance, meaning the vibrations we feel in certain areas of the body, like the chest, the head, and in the mask (generally defined as the cheekbone area of the face). These vibrations impact the way we perceive our sound and, in my estimation, provide a reference point of sensation that can be used to make our sound more consistent. But those internal vibrations do not result in sound that our audience hears.

On the other hand, free resonance is what occurs when sound travels through the open spaces of our vocal tract. Some of these sound waves reflect back on our vocal folds and boost certain frequencies of tone. This sound does reach outside listeners and is what gives each of us our unique vocal quality.

I believe that when most people talk about “placing” the voice, they are referring to the internal vibrations they feel through forced resonance. I encourage all of you to identify and explore these vibrations by placing a hand on your chest or throat or cheekbones while vocalizing. Then remove your hand and see if you can still feel those vibrations using only your internal awareness (proprioception).

Once you can acknowledge all the areas where you feel vibrations, you are able to choose which of those areas will receive the focus of your attention while singing. In this sense, the only thing you are “placing” is your attention, not your sound. By mentally highlighting an area where you have already identified you feel some sort of vibration or sensation, your “placement” is a result of a freely produced sound rather than your initial intention in singing.

Is all of this merely semantics? As long as it brings results, does it matter if you are feeling, focusing, or placing your sound? Perhaps not. But just as the words “attack” and “cut off” imply a degree of activity that “onset” and “release” do not, I find that when many singers try to place their sound it often involves additional activity that manifests itself through scrunched noses, furrowed brows, and overly-engaged tongues.

What are your thoughts on vocal placement? How has your singing been this week?

Now go practice.

My happy "place" (at least one of them)

Body lies

I recently had a long series of email conversations with the authors of a book about “Body Mapping” called What Every Singer Needs to Know About the Body. As the book describes, a body map is “your mental representation of your body’s size, structure, location, and function.” Therefore, Body Mapping is “the process of refining, correcting, and embodying individual body maps.”

Singing elicits sensations. These sensations can give us false notions about what is actually happening in the body when we sing (an idea explored by author Kenneth Bozeman in Kinesthetic Voice Pedagogy). For example, when I sing, I often feel sensations in my head that make me feel like sound is ringing throughout my open skull. The problem is that my brain is (supposedly) in that space and sound can’t resonate in a space that is filled with brains (or any other matter, for that matter).

I asked What Every Singer Needs to Know… co-author Kurt-Alexander Zeller about some of the misconceptions, or “mis-mappings,” he encounters the most in his interactions with singers. He said,

"I think the broad areas of respiration and resonance are where the largest number of mis-mappings cluster. Every year I still am astonished by the number of amazing fantasies about breathing I hear from new students. Many of them truly don’t even know where their lungs are—somebody once told them to “breathe low” and now they think their lungs are in their intestines. Or they think that ribs are stationary or immovable. Or that the diaphragm is a vertical structure. And they will do their darnedest to move as if that faulty body map were reality.   

Don't head out on the trail without a good map!

Another common mis-mapping that drives me crazy is the idea that the muscles of facial expression on the outside of the skull are directly connected to laryngeal or pharyngeal muscles—of which the old 'lifting your eyebrows will keep the pitch from sagging' myth is one notorious manifestation. These are almost stereotypical singer myths—but one does encounter them fairly often."

Plain and simple, our bodies sometimes lie to us. It happens fairly often since most of the working parts for singing are inside of us and not that easy to see or feel.

That’s what makes Body Mapping so important. When we have a false idea of how the body works, we try to make it work that way. When we have an accurate understanding of function, our bodies tend to work more efficiently.

And since, as singers, our bodies are our instruments, this tends to lead to more effective, more expressive singing.

Have you had to confront “mis-mappings” of your body and voice? Did anything change when you had a better understanding of actual function?

How has your singing been this week?

Now go practice.

Sight reading

A few weeks ago I posted this video on the MTP facebook page with testimonials from current Broadway singers about the importance of sight reading and musicianship skills.

Music is odd in that we have the ability to learn it by ear. That's probably how most of us learned most of the music we know, just by hearing it so many times that it started to stick. While that can be a good way to learn things at times, it can also be slower and more inefficient than being able to read the score itself.

Imagine trying to learn a monologue just by having someone read it to you repeatedly. How much longer it would take you to learn and memorize that monologue if you didn't have the ability to simply read the words on the page?

It's essentially the same with music. Not only can sight reading skills help you learn music faster and more thoroughly, you will be certain to learn the notes and rhythms the composer intended and not someone else's variation from those notes.

These thoughts came up in an article I recently read in Classical Singer magazine by Peter Thoresen called "Thriving (Not Just Surviving) in Music Theory." In the article, he interviews one of my former professors from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, Mary Ann Hart. Besides being an outstanding instructor and a wonderful human being, Hart's performance career includes several definitive recordings of classical song and lieder AND singing one of the voices in the original Beauty and the Beast animated movie.

When that job came up, Hart was living in NYC and working as a singer. She recalls,

"The Disney thing—that came through my church job...half Broadway [singers], half legit singers...The Broadway people that came in were pretty good readers, and anything they didn't get the first time through, they had perfectly the next day. So the ability to learn on your own—really fast—was crucial for that gig." 

Later in the article she makes another point about the importance of good sight-reading skills:

"It just makes everything so much easier," she says, "and coaching is great, but coaching is another expense—and when you're starting out, everything adds up. So the more you can do for yourself, the better off you are."

I had another professor in grad school who said, "When you get a new piece of music to learn, if your first move is to run to a piano or—even worse—to go find a recording of the piece, SHAME ON YOU! You should ALWAYS sit down and try to figure it out yourself first. Only go to those other tools when you have gone as far as you can with your own skills."

Once you get through your music theory classes, if you aren't forced to continue with the skill, it will eventually fade away (like most skills). Of the many, many skills we are asking you to build and develop during your time here, don't forget about sight reading. Consider taking 2-5 minutes at the beginning or the end of your practice session to read some melodies. There are lots of free sight singing guides on the internet. Print some out and give them a shot.

How has your singing been the last couple of weeks? Now that we're on the other side of fall break, give an honest evaluation of your practicing. Have you been doing enough? Do you need to come up with a new practice schedule for the second half of the semester?

Now go practice (your sight reading).

Vision vs. Action

For as long as I can remember, I assumed the process for setting and accomplishing goals was pretty straight forward:

1. Develop a vision of what you want.
2. Set up an action plan for getting the thing you want.
3. Get to work on that plan.

That always seemed pretty logical.

And yet, I recently read something in a new book by Melissa Mills that has me reevaluating this process. In a chapter written by choral conductor Doreen Rao, she says, "Vision comes from action, not vice versa." She goes on to quote Spanish poet Antonio Machado, who wrote, "Roads are made by walking."

These ideas seem to be completely contradictory to my belief in "have a vision and then put it into action." How can you act if you don't have a vision? Wouldn't you just be floundering around aimlessly unless you had a clear goal or path forward?

But when I really stopped to think about it, I could see how this philosophy has been at work in my own life.

While my childhood career aspiration was to be a first baseman and left-handed relief pitcher for the Chicago Cubs (a goal I never reached, sadly), once my passion for singing began to emerge, my career goals vacillated from Broadway star to high school choir director to college voice professor (two out of three ain't bad). When I went to college I honestly didn't know what I wanted to do with my life; I just knew that it had to involve music. So I started doing the things that seemed like they would allow that to happen. I didn't always have a set vision of where I wanted to "end up," but I kept working to improve my skills, pursued the opportunities that came my way, and was willing to see where things would lead.

I just had to put myself into action to see what vision would emerge.

Looking back, it's funny to see how some of the opportunities that were seemingly unrelated to my current work allowed me to develop skills that I now use on a daily basis—skills I would not have been able to hone if I had been too focused on one specific career goal to entertain those opportunities in the first place.

So, while it is not at all a bad thing to have explicit and specific goals of what you'd like to do with your life, you have to be careful not to fall into a tunnel-visioned approach that could close you off to the opportunities that could lead to your true calling (assuming there is such a thing as one "true" calling, but I'll leave that discussion for another day!).

How has your singing been this week? How can you set yourself into action while still leaving yourself open to opportunities that come up along the way?

Now go practice.

"Not all those who wander are lost." -J.R.R. Tolkien

Titze's vocal warmups

There are some names in the voice world that you should just know. Ingo Titze is one of those names.

A Distinguished Professor at the University of Iowa (where he spends each fall semester), Dr. Titze is also the Executive Director of the National Center for Voice and Speech, which is part of the University of Utah.

One of the world’s leading voice scientists, he has published more than 400 articles on voice and has written several books. And he is an alum of the University of Utah, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Dr. Titze essentially invented the field of Vocology, which he defines as “the science and practice of voice habilitation.” We are familiar with rehabilitation as the process of rebuilding strength after an injury. In that sense, I like to think of voice habilitation as regularly practicing healthy voice use so that we hopefully don’t ever need rehabilitation.

Besides being one of the great minds in voice science, Dr. Titze is also well known among singers for a couple of widely-shared resources.

The first resource is his tutorial video on straw phonation. Since, to my knowledge, he is the person who first started promoting the benefits of straw phonation, it is worth hearing him describe in his own words the impact it has on the voice and how to execute his preferred straw phonation exercises.

The second resource is the list of his top five vocal warmups for singers. Originally published as an article in the Journal of Singing in 2001, it is featured in blogs and websites all over the internet (like here and here) so I figured putting it out there once more wouldn't hurt!

As singers, it is important for us to vary our vocal routines to keep our voices agile and responsive. That means we should always be on the lookout for new and innovative exercises, especially when they have the backing of those in the voice science community.

So watch the video if you haven’t seen it before and read through the article. We’ll be experimenting with these exercises this week in lessons and in class. Maybe some of them will make their way into your top five!

How has your singing been going this week?

Now go practice.