Monday, January 14, 2008

How do I then use psychology to the advantage of singing better?

Unlike other instruments like the piano or guitar, your voice is inside you. Ironically, what's inside you is more difficult to feel than what's outside you. For what's outside you can feel with your skin, through pressing, through feeling pressure, through looking at what to press and even through hearing the sound you produce on the guitar and piano.

You noticed I mentioned "hearing". With your voice as your instrument, what you hear and you think you are producing is not actually what your audicence hears, unless you sing into a mic and hear from the monitor speakers which then again only mean 50% of what you hear is what the audience hears.

Try this - if you have not done this before try this out. Find some way to record your speaking and singing voice onto a casette tape or a MD or into your computer through a mic and then play it back. What do you notice? I'm sure you may even be freaked out at first. What you recorded and played back seems so different from what you have been hearing. Is there scientific evidence for this? The answer is yes! Your body has many resonating chambers of which includes your phraynx, cheeck bones, mask of the face, nasal and oral cavity and even your chest. The sound that your vocal chords produce will be resonated in these chambers.

(In fact, a proper way to sing loudly is to channel all the sounds into the these chambers so that you sound louder rather than only using your oral cavity) Sound travels at different speeds through solid, liquid and gas (3 states of matter and yes sound does travel through solid, that is why soundproof studio rooms have double glazed vacuum glass doors)

Therefore what you hear comes directly from yourself to your ears through the vibration of your body and skin while what others hear is transmitted through the air from the vibration coming from your body. Simply but what others hear is body >> air >> ear and what YOU hear is body >> air >> ear AND body >> ear.

I'm sure that you have realised from the previous article that you are able to control a few things in the singing mechanism, that is the lowering of the tongue, the pressurising of the area where your 2 halfs of the rib cage meet and the opening of your jaw. But how do these relate to your larynx, your diaphragm and your throat? Indirectly they do. e.g. lowering of the tongue is controlling the tongue muscle but not your larynx, yet if done correctly it helps to lower your larynx (place a finger at your adam's apple, that's the position of your larynx)

Therefore Singing IS psychological

How do I then use psychology to the advantage of singing better?

Have you experienced a time when you felt sad and spoke to your friend over the phone and your friend could tell without looking at your face. Or have your conductor or coach ever told you to smile when you sing so that you produce a bright and happy sound? Indeed how you feel translates into how you sound.

Therefore to produce a bright forward, ringing, inspiring sound means you have to smile, raise your eyebrows and your cheekbones. However, wouldn't it be weird to do such actions on stage. Yes. Therefore there must come a point after sufficient training where such techniques become second nature and internalised. Meaning you only have to smile slightly on stage without looking weird with an over exaggerated smile to produce just the same extremely bright and cheery sound. How do you do that? Here comes the psychological part. For psychology in itself is too hollow and intangible you need to do all those exaggerated smiling as mentioned previously first! Then you start to think of your body producing sound waves that emit like a rainbow from the tip of your nosebridge (this is where your sound should focus at) and flowing out with ease like a set of notes. Imagine the colour and beauty of these notes just like you are watching a cartoon with birds chirping and animations of musical notes emitting from their cute tiny beaks. This imagination translate to sending the vibration up there. Since you have no buttons to press and no internal anatomy, then this is the only way to send the sound up and out, into a heaven-like lightness and beauty. So putting into perspective what do I mean when I mentioned about not being able to feel tangibly like playing a piano and yet having to smile excessively which is obviously a very concious feelable thing. The smiling is only to aid in your imagination and feeling because the smiling in itself is so indirect. Using muscles to smile does not specially activate certain muscles in your body that move sounds upwards or change the quality of sounds as if your body is such a straight forward instruement where there is a spring, valve and string to everything. No there isn't! Its about feeling and things insides your body that happen but are hard to explain. If fact as a singer, there is not really much need to know all these. To sing a happy sound just look and think happy. =)

IN conclusion
Therefore singing is a mix of things you can feel tangibly and things that are just emotions are imaginations. Of the things that you can feel tangibly, they do not have a direct and straightforward cause and effect on your anatomy that leads to you producing that sound, rather that kind of sound is the side effect of the cause (your doing of the tangible actions like smilling excessively)

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