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There are a few basic goals all practitioners of singing can actually agree on: good breath flow promoting efficient phonation: an awareness of and respect for registration: and clear vowel sounds that match each other in richness and loudness. My favorite way to promote good breath and resonance is the vowel tuning game, which I learned from reading and listening to folks like Johann Sundberg, Arden Hopkin, Barbara Doscher, Ingo Titze and other voice ped immortals. Sundberg lists the following benefits of vowel tuning: 1. Strong sounds at the lowest possible price in vocal effort. Every singer has their favorite vowels, the ones that ring out fully and without effort;. We also have vowels that we complain of as being "stuck in our throat," "Too dark," "too pinched," or "too spread." and even worse, flat. This stuck-ness may result from rigidities and old habits (Choral conductors told us to drop your jaw all the way down, "to let the sound out" so we might lock onto an unnatural gape) or the common practice of supporting our tone with a braced jaw or tongue. A popular strategy, but it seriously diminishes quality and fluency.) The vowel tuning game can un-stick our ears,jaws, tongues and voices. It provides an opportunity to really listen. It also promotes good breath management, minimizes end-gaining and its accompanying tensions, thereby increasing overall pleasure in the sound, for both singer and listener. Fear not! The game is not, like, technical. It doesn't matter whether we fully understand the incredibly complex principles of vocal acoustics. Just playing it by ear can make our voices are richer, more consistent, more in tune, more flexible and, yes- louder. The Vowel Tuning Tradition I did not make this idea up all by myself. The great teacher William Vennard experimented and wrote cogently about the mechanics of good vowel-making in the '60's. The venerable acoustician Johann Sundberg wrote about this idea in his famous 1977 article "The Acoustics of the Singing Voice," the one with those pictures of a soprano opening her mouth wider and wider to tune up the same vowel on successively higher pitches. Sounds self-evident, doesn't it? Berton Coffin went beyond the point of obsession and codified a system of mouth positions for all vowels on all pitches, completely color-coded for easy reading. He also discussed "tracking," an important concept for men. Coffin's disciple Barbara Doscher made the Coffin approach more viable, and wrote a nifty, comprehensive and readable little book "TheFunctional Unity of the Singing Voice," which I affectionately refer to as Voice Science for Dummies. It compresses everything Vennard, Coffin, Miller, Brown and others say about voice mechanics into 250 fun-packed illustrated pages, plus comprehensive bibliography. Those of you who have read Arden Hopkin's lucid article "Vowel Equalization" in the January/February 1997 of the Journal of Singing, will be aware that all sorts of relatively sane and indisputably successful teachers have espoused vowel tuning. The Disappearing Essay I contemplated writing a quickie essay on vocal acoustics and formant theory to occupy this space, but then I thought better of it. Nobody will read it anyhow, except MIT graduates and unrepentant voice geeks. The cartoon of the idea is to exploit sympathetic resonance, matching the native resonance frequencies of your vocal tract to the pitch, or a harmonic of the pitch, you happen to be singing. The science is complex. The practical idea is simple. Sing a long long tone. Wiggle your mouth parts around (sort of like twiddling a radio dial for the best signal?) until you find the sweet spot: the richest sound for any note and any vowel. Keep good breath support. Use a slow crescendo. Use your best vowel and match the rest to it. Technical part-over, done, finished. Vowel Tuning a la DivaLarson I start by asking my students to tune "closed" vowels (closed vowels are ones with your jaw closed, like "eeeee" or oooooh), becaus it is easier for us to feel strong sympathetic vibration, or "mouth-buzz" if their mouths are shut. Wherever the dorsum of your tongue arches close to the roof of your mouth, that's where you feel the strongest mouth buzz. In front for "eee", further back for "oooh" If you are one of those jaw-popping gapers, bite your little fingernail to get the idea of how closed a closed vowel can be. In your desperate search for space, you may open your throat, always a good idea; so you get a twofer here. .Go Slo-o-o-o-ow and Enjoy this! If you sustain an [i] and a low middle-voice pitch, with flow phonation, you should feel a pleasant little vibratory sensation or buzz, right behind your teeth around your hard palate. Of course if you are good and tuned-up you may feel vibration all over your body. May I state here I do not advocate singing with the jaw almost shut, or in any other fixed position. I advocate finding buzz at first with the jaw quite shut, and singing "eeeeee" on a low pitch. So there. Now we have honed in on a good buzzy [i] vowel, you can glide your tongue way over to an [u] vowel as slowly as possible, noticing what you move, how it feels, and how it sounds. If you purse your lips first you will be singing [ i ] , that's [y], the umlaut closed vowel. Then move your tongue arch to the [u] position. Your jaw is not going to move much if at all. What happened to the buzz? Are the three vowels equally rich and intense? If not, can you match them so that they are? Do it all again. Just notice the sound and the buzz. Now we progress to the [e] and [oe] and [o], which demand a slightly more open jaw, but as before, each has about the same degree of opening, and it shouldn't change much. Tongue and lip movements predominate when you move on the horizontal axis of the vowel chart. You've seen the vowel chart, yes? Notice your mouth buzz moving around. It will more or less go where the hump of your tongue is highest. Keep track of it. Keep track of your personal buzzes too, sinuses, teeth, chest, eyebrows, fingernails, wherever you feel sympathetic resonance. The more relaxed you are, the more vibration you will feel. Try the same transition between Eh, OE and Aw. Same, slightly wider jaw opening, move tongue/lips only On the x or vertical or open-closed axis of the vowel chart, jaw movement predominates, and your tongue may groove somewhat. What your tongue doesn't have to do is make a big move downward or into the back of your mouth as you slide from [i] to [A]. It stays arched and fronted. Try eeeeeeEEEEEhAAA. That's YEAH, done slowly. Reverse, AEei If, however your tongue does make a big move down and backward while you are opening and closing, you may notice that you lose mouth buzz and have to make more vocal effort to keep the sound at the same volume. Teachers call this loss of vowel tuning swallowing your tone. I call this swallowing your tongue. Same difference. Keeping your tongue fronted is difficult. If it gives you backtalk about fronting, put in on your lower lip and sing your eee-family vowels that way. For the ooo's fold it behind your lower teeth. If it's really stubborn, hold the tip of it on your lip (no, not all the way out!) with a hankie. This is a stretching exercise to prove to your tongue that you can do your vowels just fine without retro-flexing it. That is, pulling it down and back. Tongue-root tensing is often a sign of unsteady or insufficient breath flow. Fix it by stretching forwards and broadening your tongue base, a move you can find from laughing or pretending to sob. Start on a closed vowel or the vowel you love best and see what mouth parts you need to slowly smoothly move to get to the others. Tongue, lips, jaw. Small gradual moves please. Teachers can teach this game without referring to formant theory, acoustics, or whatever. You can teach it without mentioning jaws or tongues or lips even. Or, God Forbid, without mentioning the vowel chart. Just tell yourself or your student to listen quietly, match vowels on long swelling notes in mid-range, and blend as you move from one to another like colors in a rainbow (yellow blends into green, into blue, etc). Keep that airflow going in a slow gradual crescendo. Later when you are really hot stuff, you can add a decrescendo and have the complete messa di voce. Most untrained and (sadly) many trained people make a decrescendo by stopping their airflow and shutting their throats. A decrescendo is the mirror image of the swell! So I don't let anybody indulge in a sensitive fade-out until they can do a smooth swell. Singing Rep with Vowel Tuning .How we apply tuning to a song or aria is personal of course. I like tuning all the vowels of a piece, on long tones first ( my favorite low or middle pitches), at a good mezzo-forte to forte, running one vowel into the next. Then I move those nice tuned vowels onto the song's melodic line, doing some fine-tuning to accomodate high or low pitches, sliding (glissando!) slowly not only from vowel to vowel but from pitch to pitch, to help smooth over any too-much, too-little, spasmodic moves, and to make sure that I am buzzing merrily and equally away. Consonants also require breath support, and there are of course consonants that are sung on pitches as well. They are not as loud as vowels,and require good breath-flow to be heard at all. The buzzed-and-sung ones, th,v,zh,z, are especially good to jump-start the old abdominals into delivering a sufficiency of air for the upcoming vowel. A Meditation on Sound The increased sensitivity to sound and vibratory sensation can only lead to a growing flexibility of the articulators which might even spread to the rest of the body, which derives increasing pleasure from vibration the more relaxed it is. This delight is immediately shared with an audience, both aurally, visually and perhaps through other subliminal means. I do not make this up either. Ingo Titze is going all mystical and talking about this a lot these days. If a singer spends time searching around for their own personal sound and gets to know their own personal resonances, the next big step is to play around with them! This play will reveal a huge palette of vocal colors and shadings to chose from. A singer who is always seeking and listening will continually add more color, richness and sensual pleasure to the act of singing. Once mind, ears, breath, and articulators are not stuck, but tuned in to the possibilities, our singing just keeps getting better and more expressive. Go ahead and listen to your beautiful sound! |
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