I know, I know what you’re going to say. “Learning about singing is all about making my voice sound better.” So let me ask you- how do you measure, or track, or be “better”? Not so easy to articulate. 

I believe four qualities make a “good singer” (if you’re into the good vs. bad binary, which I hope by the end of this blog you’re not). The attributes that describe exceptional singing are ease, freedom, choice, and power. Ease as in it feels easy to produce sound. Freedom as in freeing yourself from “type,” freeing yourself from pressure, freeing yourself from how you think others want you to sing. Freedom to express your own authentic voice. Choice as in the ability to choose from a bag of styles, placements, ranges, keys, instead of having to sing something one way because it’s the only way you can produce sound. Power as in, the power to be you. The unique THING that makes you different than every other person, and the vulnerability to stand in that power and letting your voice soar. 

So, how do we shift our focus, our mindset, away from sound and toward ease, freedom, choice, and power? First let’s explore why it’s important.

Learning to sing is a process that requires a deep awareness and relationship to the self, as well as an equal amount of listening and trusting that your body knows what to do. It can be beneficial to ‘parrot,’ or try to copy the sounds your favorite singers make. However, there are a ton of ways to produce a certain kind of sound, and not all of them are supportive to your entire system. Have you ever heard someone describe singing as a ‘whole body’ experience? I’d like to argue that everything is a whole body experience. Anytime we move a muscle, a ton of other muscles, bones, tissue, etc need to shift to make that happen. Same thing with singing: the jaw, tongue, palate, throat, larynx, lungs, and on and on and on, move and shift in one big symbiotic relationship. Therefore, trying to learn how to just raise the soft palate or flatten the tongue without including the rest of the system that shifts in relation to those parts can be really confusing and frustrating. If we gear our learning style toward sounding better, we’re likely to reduce our singing system to individual parts, like the vocal cords for example. Here’s where it gets even more nuanced: a lot of the parts in the system don’t respond to active brain signals. Putting it simply, we can’t just tell our singing system to operate differently, in the same way we might be able to tell our arm to move differently, to lift higher, or our leg to stretch straighter if we were learning to dance. Our singing system mainly operates passively, meaning automatically. We (fortunately) don’t have to tell our lungs to take a breath every time we need one. We don’t need to actively think about swallowing with every sip of water or food. So, the system isn’t largely in our conscious awareness, how are we supposed to approach learning to sing?!

Since we can’t tell our system to “sound better” and assume it knows what to do, we have to cultivate an exploratory mindset. We have to get curious about how our system moves, how it responds, how it compensates. We have to gain awareness of the way our system is moving, and then get curious about how it might react to different sounds, positions, stretches, small movements, and breath. We essentially have to show the system that it doesn’t have to operate in one way, that is has a lot of different choices, that we can change the placement or tonality or breath support, etc. And then as we explore, we can start to observe how each subtle shift changes the sounds we make, the ease in which we phonate, the freedom to sing higher. I argue that “sounding better” is an intangible goal, but discovering a variety of more easy, free movements gives us the power of choice. Right down to every word we sing. We can cultivate and explore a lot of options for sound, not just “good sounds” and “bad sounds.”