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 Music is an artform that combines multiple modes of thinking. It is limitlessly both subtle and expressive while at the same time exact and mathematical. Today’s topic of rhythm comes from the mathematical side of music. Rhythms come from combining shorter notes into longer sounds and dividing longer notes into shorter divisions. If you remember from earlier posts, the beat is the underlying pulse of a piece of music. Fitting within that beat we can have longer notes that take up several beats or smaller divisions that are just a fraction of one beat. The easiest example (and most common time signature) is based around 4 beats per measure. The largest note would be the whole note that takes up all 4 beats. As one can understand, only one whole note can fit within a measure of 4. When we divide the whole note into two equal parts we get two half notes (notice the math connection). If the whole note is 4 beats, each half note gets 2 beats. Dividing each half note equally again provides 4 quarter notes. Each quarter note would then receive 1 beat. It is with these quarter notes that you can start to see how important these smaller divisions are to the overall sense of the beat. Counting each measure as 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4 is a lot easier to follow than counting as whole notes 1---, 1---. Without the divisions, it is very difficult to feel a steady pulse.  Of course, quarter notes can be divided into 8 eighth notes in a measure of 4 beats. Smaller still would be 16 sixteenth notes in a measure of 4 beats. With the possibility of these small divisions, comes the necessity to use them to keep the beat. If a measure includes eighth or sixteenth notes, simply counting 1-2-3-4 gives us less of a chance of playing a rhythm accurately than if we were to count 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and (eighth notes) or 1-e-and-a-2-e-and-a-3-e-and-a-4-e-and-a (sixteenth notes). When writing music, we find that smaller divisions of the overall beat can help to propel the music forward and give it a sense of movement. Even if a song is based upon 4 beats per measure, the drummer dividing the beat into 8 eighth notes or 16 sixteenth notes on the cymbal helps to keep the music exciting. Also think about how 8 eighth notes or 16 sixteenth notes in a measure allows the player that many more opportunities to vary the dynamics (volume) for each note. Next time you play or listen to music, I encourage you to try to hear and feel the divisions of the overall beats and think about how it changes your perception of the music. 
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 The recording of sound is as much an art as it is a technology and as with other media there is often a fine balance between the way the technology works and how the artform is captured through the medium. The technology sets the limits for how the art can be captured, and in turn the way the art is created may change to better fit the technology. Experiments with technology that allowed us to capture sound began in the middle of the 19th century. The oldest sound recording that we still have access to today comes from 1860 France. It is clear that someone is speaking, but no actual words can be made out. The tool used to capture the sound is called a phonoautograph- in a sense “writing sound”. But we see the origins of records in the sense of the phonoautograph scratching the soundwaves out.  Phonoautograph, 1860 In the early 1900s, we find a recording technology that has mostly gone away--player pianos. Like the phonoautograph, the player piano is completely mechanical and not electric. A talented pianist would record a song on the piano and this would punch notches in a paper scroll. Every open notch on the paper scroll would mean that key was pressed. After recording, the scroll would then allow the player piano to function without a person pressing the keys. For many of the earliest ragtime piano pieces, the player piano was how listeners would have heard how the composer would have interpreted their own piece.  Now we move on to electricity. To simplify an explanation of how sound is captured--think of microphones and speakers as doing similar yet opposite things. A microphone has a magnet, an electrical coil, and a spring-loaded, movable diaphragm. When soundwaves (air) hit the diaphragm the microphone captures the movement. The movement, or pulses, is read as electricity. Speakers have a magnet as well with an electrical coil. The coil is attached to a cone that receives the pulses and amplifies the signal. The earliest forms of recordings use physical media--meaning something we can touch. The first records were wax cylinders that would spin similar to the later discs. Eventually, it was discovered that flat disc records could spin faster than cylinders. The needle on a record player follows the grooves in the record and the record player converts the electric pulses into sound. Here we see a technology limitation that I highlighted in the first paragraph. Because of the RPM (revolutions per minute) or speed of the record player and the diameter of the discs, there was a limited amount of music that could fit on each side of a record. Because of this, songs that were created for and recorded on records would have to be short enough to fit on one side. Even older, classical compositions were recorded by orchestras at faster than usual tempos so that they could fit on a record.  Phonograph Cylinder, 1890s I do not think that we can overstate how this technology has influenced music. Even today, about 3 and a half minutes sounds normal for a song. Anything longer than that is often the exception for streaming and radio.
Later sound technologies do not seem to have had the staying power of records. The cassette tape was introduced to consumers in the 1960s. Tapes have the advantage of being more compact than records, but did not last as long. The science behind tapes is that the tape itself is magnetic. Another advantage of cassette tapes beyond the smaller size is that tape recorders allowed amateurs to record themselves without the cost of renting a recording studio. This enabled the creation and sharing of music to become more open. It also led to some of the first cases of music piracy, as people would record songs off the radio to share with others. The last physical media we explore are CDs or compact discs. Instead of electrical signals, the music is digital, meaning the information is saved as 0s and 1s. Another description of CDs is optical media, as a low-powered laser reads the digital information on the disc. CDs became available in the 1980s and were seen as the ultimate solution to music recording and storage. No one could foresee that within a couple decades, owning physical copies of music would become the exception to the rule. By the end of the 1990s, internet users began experimenting with the ability to upload audio files for others to download. Today, we remember sites like Napster and Limewire more for legal reasons instead of technology or music reasons. Within a brief time, large companies like Apple and Microsoft jumped at the chance to offer music downloads--this time with the legal permissions of the artists and/or publishers. iTunes and the iPod totally changed the way listeners consumed and stored recorded music. As I write this post, iPods have been replaced by phones that can serve multiple functions and iTunes now focuses on streaming music instead of downloads. Today, streaming is the way that we listen to most music. Streaming really began with YouTube in the 2010s. Music publishers began to notice that most people wanted to listen to music on demand, but did not necessarily want to own a recording of the music. Spotify is now the largest streaming music platform with Apple, Youtube, and Amazon competing for a market share of streaming revenue as well. Right now, streaming is a great deal for the platforms making the music available but a terrible deal for the musicians. Buying recordings directly from artists is still the best way to support artists. Right now Spotify pays an artist between $3 and $5 for 1,000 streams meaning that their music has been played on the platform 1,000 times. We can do the math and realize that if you listen to one song from an artist on Spotify, that artist will be paid between .3 cents and .5 cents for that song, or between ⅓ and ½ of a penny. A Spotify Premium subscription is currently $10/month. Clearly, not all of the membership fee is going to the musicians. Enough about streaming. Hopefully this article gives you a little insight into the development of recording technology and how that technology has shaped, and still shapes the music we listen to.  If you remember from an earlier post, rhythm is the way that sound is organized through time. A lot of people get the idea of beat and rhythm confused and often think they are synonyms. Once you get the idea of the difference, they are easy to tell apart. Beat is the strongest pulse in a piece of music. Often, they are felt in groups of 2, 3, or 4. How do we know how many are in a group? If you listen very carefully you will hear one beat that is the strongest and one or more slightly weaker beats. A great example of this is a waltz. Waltzes are in 3 with beat 1 being the strongest and 2 and 3 being weaker. The Viennese style of Waltz especially emphasizes this feeling, as the entire foot only touches the ground on 1 and it is just the toes touching the ground on 2 and 3.  If that is the beat, then what is the rhythm? It is how we organize the beat and the space between the beats. It is very rare for a waltz to only have 3 notes all on the beat over and over. We may have longer notes that last longer than 2 beats or shorter notes that move in between the larger beats. It sounds confusing but looking at rhythms and hearing the difference between the beat and the rhythm makes it a natural process.  Rhythms are completely mathematical. Every way that we organize the rhythms is measured. Splitting the overall beat into rhythms is the work of division. For an example, we will start with music based around 4 beats. If one note takes up all four beats, it is called a whole note. To help students remember its name I remind them that it takes up the whole measure. When we split the whole note in two equal parts, the result is two half notes. Again, we notice that these take up half a measure of 4, each getting 2 beats. Splitting the whole note further into 4 parts or 1 note for each beat, the name is quarter note and notice that it takes up ¼ of the measure. Further dividing the whole note into smaller parts, we end up with 8 eighth notes in a measure, 16 sixteenth notes and so forth.
If the number of beats in a measure is constant, then we can use addition or subtraction to figure out which beat we are on. If we are looking at a measure of 4 quarter notes, the third beat is the third quarter note. Either we count to three from the left or we can subtract 1 from the right. In combinations of eighth notes and quarters we simply count each eighth note as half of one beat, so that it takes two eighth notes to fill one beat. It is the opposite for a 2 beat note or half note, there would only be two remaining beats when one half note is present. I’m going to stop here before you get overwhelmed, but be comforted by the fact that rhythms work in an organized system with rules and definite answers. Simple knowledge of fractions and division can go a long way to understanding and organizing rhythms. 1/18/2021 0 Comments Music- What Are Clefs? If you remember from an earlier post about how to read pitch and rhythm, when the notes move up the page, the pitch gets higher and the letter names go in alphabetical order (A, B, C, D, E, F, G). When the notes move down the page, the pitch gets lower and the letter names go in reverse alphabetical order (G, F, E, D, C, B, A). If you remember, no matter the letter name of the first note, the names of the lines and spaces are constant; they do not change, but what tells us that the lowest line is always E and the top line is always F is the clef symbol.  The most common clef symbol is the treble clef. It is also called the G clef because the line inside the circle part of the symbol is the note G. This clef works best for higher notes. This is the clef read by the right hand of keyboard players, flute, clarinet, oboe, saxophone, trumpet, horn, violin, guitar, xylophone, glockenspiel, and many other higher pitched instruments. When you see this treble clef symbol, the bottom line is always E and the top line is always F. That’s why it is important to check the symbol, but once you do, you know the names of the lines and spaces will not change.  The next most common clef is the bass clef. This clef is also called the F clef because the name of the line between the two dots is F. For bass clef, the name of the lowest line is G and the highest line is A. But the notes going up the page still move in alphabetical order and notes going down move in reverse alphabetical order. As long as there is a bass clef at the beginning of the piece, the names of the lines and spaces stay the same. The lowest instruments read bass clef including bassoon, bass clarinet, trombone, tuba, cello, bass, and timpani. Other instruments go across treble and bass clefs depending on the range of the instrument they are playing. These include many keyboard instruments like piano, organ, harpsichord, and pitched percussion like marimba.  Beyond the two most common clefs, we have the movable C clef. The name comes from the fact that the arrow looking part indicates that line is C. When the middle line is C, it is called the alto clef. This is what viola players read exclusively. Same idea- letters move up alphabetically and down in reverse alphabetically.  If the C clef moves up so that the second line down is C, it is now the Tenor clef. But you guessed it, once you know where C is, the notes move up alphabetically and down reverse alphabetically. I am not aware of any instrument that only reads tenor clef, but if playing for prolonged periods in the upper range cello, bassoon, and trombone will use tenor clef.
The best way to get used to reading in different clefs is just repetition. I recommend getting confident with treble and bass clefs before you explore alto clef, unless you play viola. The reason that we use different clefs is so that instruments of different pitch ranges can most often play notes that fit within the staff and are not always playing notes above or below the staff. It would be difficult for a trombone or an instrument in a similar range to read notes that were all below the treble clef, they would go so far below the staff that they would really not be readable, not to mention that they would be printed over the next staff down on the page. All of this may seem complicated, but be thankful that each instrument doesn’t have it’s own clef!  “Standard” music notation, as we know it today, arrived at its current form, more or less, during Bach’s lifetime (early 1700s). One big reason for this was that before the 1700s, keyboard instruments were not tuned in even or equal temperament meaning that not all half steps sounded the same. Before this, the difference between C and C# did not sound the same as the difference between F and F#. Once keyboards were tuned so that every half step was equal, a player could play a piece in any key and the scale degrees in relation to each other would be the same. This means that music could be transposed, or moved up and down to different keys in order to better accommodate a singer’s or instrument’s range. Soon after, we see horns that have valves and woodwinds with more keys to be able to play chromatically, or by half steps in every key. Our symbols of music notation tell us the pitch of each note (the letter name), the length of each note (which we call rhythm), changes in dynamics over time, how notes should be “attacked” with articulations, and the key of the music (flats and sharps that result from the starting note of the scale). For other information we rely on numbers (time signature), letters (dynamics for sections, chords) or a combination of words and numbers (expression descriptions, tempo, etc). Without understanding the system, someone familiar with the style of music being written would be able to see the basic beat structure in each measure and whether the notes are moving higher or lower, regardless of knowing the letter names or specifically what the rhythmic symbols mean. Notice how a knowledge of what sound the symbols represent is a prerequisite. Without knowing the sound, the symbols are meaningless. It’s like trying to understand symbols that represent a forgotten language, if you are not sure how the spoken language sounded, the symbols would not help.  Try singing this song! Immediately, one can see how written notation can be a barrier to someone who never learned to read it. Even with knowing the definition of each symbol, the style of the music will change it. For example, eighth notes in jazz may be written as eighth notes, but intended to be played as a “long-short” swing pattern. Knowing how the eighth notes should sound in other styles would not help unless the reader were familiar with the style of jazz. Another rule-breaker is the entire concept of rubato, very common in many styles since the 19th century. Rubato describes the subtle slowing and quickening of the tempo regardless of what the overall pulse of the piece is. Often this is indicated with the word rubato and not any change in the symbols used. Another shortfall of our notation system is it really only works for Western music. If, like me, you have ever tried to transcribe a traditional Indian piece, you will soon notice that their rhythms and pitches do not fit into our symbols, or rather, our notation system was not made for Indian music. Traditional Indian scales use quarter steps (between the space of two half steps). Western listeners have a very difficult time identifying these and not hearing them as wrong notes. The Indian rhythmic system is actually based on ragas. A piece may use Raga A, Raga C, and Raga M (I made up these labels). In other words, each rhythm pattern is a different idea, not made of smaller divisions or larger combinations of the beat. Many traditional styles of African music are very difficult to reproduce rhythmically in Western notation. The issue one runs into is the Western idea of a time signature. When music is more or less steady, it helps to have beats grouped by measures with time signatures. Of course, later Western classical music did use changing meters or changing time signatures, but it still does not capture the pulse of multilayered rhythms that we find in many African styles. Just like any language, written notation has its shortcomings. As musicians, we need to remember that written notation is a tool--a wonderful tool that can open many doors to explore other styles of music, but the symbols on the page are not music in themselves. The music comes from a person interpreting those symbols. When I introduce composition to my youngest students, I do not require them to write in standard notation. Some of them choose to follow it fairly closely, others create their own, equally valid, system, and others use a hybrid of familiar notes and their own way of interpreting them. The only requirement I use is that the student should be able to explain their system and teach it to a classmate. I even had a student once write rhythms for bongos. Not only did the student have a way to know the pattern he was playing but also a way to identify which bongo he was playing, something that is more difficult in standard notation unless the first measure has high bongo and low bongo labelled using text. I write this article simply to encourage us to reconsider what many of us grow up learning may not be the only legitimate way to record sound on paper. We also must reconsider that reading standard notation may not be the only correct way to learn and to understand music. In many music schools, students are not accepted into the program if they cannot read standard Western notation. Once I completed music school and began to make music with musicians that learned in ways other than myself, I had the privilege to make music with many people that learn music by ear.  Two ways to notate the same music. Learning music by ear is not a deficiency as many would lead students to believe. Music is an aural art form and I have found that those that rely more on their ear than their eye can often respond and react more quickly.
Musicians that do not read standard Western notation are not musically illiterate. They may in fact be reading something, just written a different way. There have been many very successful musicians that solely read chord symbols. If you are not familiar with chord symbols- with just a couple of letters or note names, the experienced player knows which notes to play and based on the alignment of the chord symbols over the lyrics, when to change chords. By only showing the changes, this can often give players much input for the rhythm of the chord repetitions between changes. Although the letter system of chords comes from Jazz. Even in the 1600s-1700s, there was a system of chord shorthand known as figured bass. The bassline would be written out in standard notation and the harmonies would be implied by the figured bass symbols. Other forms of notation work especially well for string instruments like bass, guitar, and ukulele. Fretboard diagrams show the player where to put their fingers on the strings and sometimes even number the dots to show which finger to use. Similar to this, tablature shows the strings of the instrument themselves and which fret of the instrument (no fingers down would be 0) to press on that string. Fretboards and tablature are most helpful when the player already has an idea of the beat or rhythm of the piece. As you can see, standard Western notation has been well developed for very specific instructions and helps musicians to share ideas without hearing something first, but it is not the only way to write and to share musical ideas. If we can expand our thinking on how we share music, we open the experience of playing and creating music to more people. Please share your thoughts in the comments.  I have written this article to serve two purposes, either to get you more confident with understanding standard notation, if you are not yet confident, or as a way in which notation can be taught to others. I will start with very broad concepts and then address more specifics or exceptions to rules. Two of the most basic elements of music that can be represented through notation are pitch --how high and low the notes are; which can also be thought of as letter names, keys on a keyboard, finger position on a string instrument, etc-- and rhythm-- the organization of sound through time. We will start with pitch. Pitch In our Western system of music, there are only 12 letter names. Each of these 12 notes is the same amount of space apart (we call this a half step). Since the letter names are only A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, the other notes in between would have the same letter name with a half step higher called a sharp (#) and a half step lower called a flat (b). These 12 pitches can be read on the music staff, a background of 5 lines and 4 spaces. On a typical note, when the circle part of the note moves higher up on the page, the pitch goes higher, and the next letter name up would move forward in alphabetical order. From line to the next space and space to the next line, we move up by one letter. So if our bottom line is E, the rest of the spaces and lines would be F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F at the top line. It is exactly the opposite situation moving down the page, the lower the circle, the lower the pitch and we go in reverse alphabetical order. The nice thing is that the names of the lines of the spaces stay the same no matter where the notes move.  That is the basics of pitches! Knowing this, you can follow the up and down contour of a melody even if you do not know the exact letter name in the moment, you can see whether each note is higher or lower than the note before it. Now, on to rhythm. Rhythm As I said above, rhythm is the way we organize sound through time. No matter how high or low the circle part of the note is, that does not affect how the rhythm is written. You have probably noticed that when looking at music, some notes have circles that are colored in, some have a single line attached, some appear to be two notes attached together, and there are even notes with no lines. That’s a lot to remember. Over time, you will be able to recognize and remember how each note looks, but there is another way to figure out the basic rhythm of a phrase. When you look at a piece of music you will notice that there are lines that go down through the staff and seem to separate groups of notes. This is no accident. Depending on how many beats are in a measure of music (the space between two lines), every group of beats will be separated by one of these barlines.  But how do we know how many beats are supposed to be in a measure? Look at the very beginning of the music, the top left. You will see two numbers, that look like a fraction. For now, we will just worry about the top number. If you see a 4 on the top, it means that the quarter note gets the one beat.  If you see 4 of these in a measure, it means the counting is simply 1 2 3 4 and the next measure begins again with 1. In this way, it doesn’t matter how many notes are in the piece total, each measure starts again with 1.
Without memorizing the names of eighth notes, half notes, whole notes and more, for well formatted music we can think of the amount of space that each note or group of notes takes up. If you see two notes in the space of one quarter note, it means they are each half the value of the quarter note (1 2 and 3 4). If you see a note that seems to be taking up more of the measure than one quarter note, it could be a 2 beat note (1 2 3 -) or if there is only 1 other quarter note left in the measure of 4, then it would be a 3 beat note (1 - - 4). You don’t have to know the exact definition of each rhythm symbol, just see how many beats should be in a measure and how many notes are written in a measure. If there are very few notes in a measure, the music will sound slower. If there are quite a lot of notes in a measure, the music will sound faster. You do not have to know everything about pitch and rhythm to be able to follow the basic structure of written notation. Hopefully these few tips can help. Please let me know if you have questions! 10/26/2020 0 Comments Music- Henry Mancini Henry Mancini was one of the most prolific film and television composers of all time. By the time of his death in 1994, he had received more Grammy award nominations than any other artist (this has later been surpassed by Quincy Jones). He is also one of the few film composers to have one of his arrangements become a #1 hit when his version of the “Theme from Romeo and Juliet” knocked the Beatles off the top spot in 1970. Mancini was equally respected among film critics, audiences, and popular music listeners. Of the great film composers, he stands with the top few whose music is a terrific listening experience outside of the context of the film.
However, much of Mancini’s impact seems to have been forgotten in the post-Star Wars era when big, symphonic scores returned to popularity. Film music, like any artform, has cycles, the symphonic (I daresay, classical) scores of the 1930s and 1940s gave way to rock and roll inspired scores in the late 1950s and 1960s. Disco music reigned in the soundtracks of the 1970s, until Star Wars returned the style to symphonic music. One could argue that, depending on the film genre, symphonic scores are still the norm (with added electronic elements). Mancini, like many great composers, stands out because his music often stood out as contrary to the prevailing style of the time. What the general public remembers about Mancini are the Pink Panther and Peter Gunn scores, which are incredible, yet only a fraction of Mancini’s output. By examining Mancini’s work, we see he was quite versatile. Mancini got his start in Hollywood working at Universal Studios as part of a composing team or music department that would write music for giant monster movies. Often in situations like this, members of a music department would be uncredited and the title of music supervisor would be the sole credit. It was not until the end of the 1950s with the Peter Gunn television show that Mancini’s work was noticed. Also, Peter Gunn was his first collaboration with producer-director Blake Edwards, a composer-director partnership that would serve Mancini for the rest of his career. Today, listening to the Peter Gunn theme often reminds the listener of the James Bond sound. However, the influence actually went the other way. Peter Gunn premiered in 1958 and the James Bond series did not start until 1962. We could say that Mancini’s sound influenced the sound of the 1960s spy movies. Many times, Mancini’s score would complement the films by providing a contrasting counterpoint to the comic action on screen. Consider cues like “Nothing To Lose” from The Party and “Piano and Strings” from The Pink Panther occur during outrageous comedies. Like subtext for dialogue, his music would highlight the underlying emotions amidst all the chaos. Mancini was a master of jazz and pop orchestration. He actually wrote one of the few texts on the subject, Sounds and Scores, which I highly recommend. His use of string counterpoint and jazz harmonies were imitated heavily by other composers, especially in television. Despite his ability to layer sounds, his music never had to rely on complicated textures to evoke feelings. Often, a piece could be a piano melody with simple string pad beneath. A great example of this is “Hilly’s Theme” from Silver Streak. Some of his most notable melodies are recognizable within 5 notes. Consider “Moon River” takes about 3, “Pink Panther Theme” about 2, “Crazy World” about 3, etc. In terms of Academy Awards, 1961-1962 were quite special for Mancini. He won best score and best song (“Moon River”) from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and then best song for “The Days of Wine and Roses” the following year. His final academy award was in 1982 for the Best Song Score for Victor/Victoria. In between, he was nominated for an award practically every single year. He won a best song Golden Globe for “Whistling Away The Dark” from Darling Lili in 1971 and was nominated for 9 others. Including one posthumous award, he earned 9 Grammy Awards out of 33 nominations. Although his background was jazz, his classical sound could be quite evocative, many times having an Italian quality, which makes sense considering his heritage. A notable example of this is the Italian film Sunflower--no traces of jazz harmony or instrumentation, but unmistakably Mancini. Another outlier in his canon of films is Lifeforce from 1985. He jumped at the chance to work on a science fiction-horror movie when asked. The exciting title march fits well within the John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, and James Horner scores of the era. Beyond his composing work, Mancini was also an accomplished performer, playing piano on most of his albums and soundtracks. His playing style is unlike that of any other pianist I have heard. When most pianists would play louder into the keys for a crescendo, he would back off with a lighter touch for the climaxes, as if he wanted the listener to be drawn in and listen closer. If you have not listened to a Mancini score before, or if it has been some time, I highly recommend it. Almost all of them can be found on Youtube and most of them are available on CD if you prefer the old-fashioned way :)  I like to break vocal tone production into 3 categories--air, space, and resonance. Each of these categories, of course, is broken down into further steps and sensations.  Air For air, I covered most of it in an earlier post. The biggest idea is to keep everything very relaxed and tension free. This includes not obstructing your breathing by leaning back or hunching over. You have much more control over the inhalation and how much air you take in than you do by pushing on the exhale. If you can remember to breathe to the bottom of your lungs, and let your belly pop out, you will be going in the right direction.  Space For space, you want everything as open as it can be. Starting with the jaw, we drop the jaw without forcing it down. If we think of the “aw” vowel shape, we can mostly keep the jaw dropped even when our lips are forming other vowel shapes like “eh”, “oh”, “oo”, etc. For “ee”, we simply raise our tongue. This small adjustment with the jaw can make a dramatic change in your sound. Try practicing it in the mirror to be sure your jaw stays down. A good exercise to practice this feeling is to say “yaw, yaw, yaw, yaw, yaw” but keep the jaw in the low position and only use your tongue to say the word. It will sound silly, but the sensation will be there. Going further into the mouth, we can use our tongue to feel the roof of our mouth. At the front of the mouth is the hard palate, which does not move. About halfway back is the soft palate. The soft palate naturally raises when we yawn. With practice, we can consciously raise our soft palate when we sing. Try exercises using words with the “ng” sound like sing, ming, etc. to feel the soft palate raise. This is where we get the “tall” tone that many singing teachers describe. Keeping the soft palate raised is one technique that I have struggled with for many years. What I have found helps me to check the position of my soft palate is to touch it with my tongue. Obviously I don’t do this while I am singing, but a brief tap right before I sing helps me to be sure it is raised. Eventually, it will become a habit to have it raised. The difficult part is that you cannot use a mirror to see this happening, so it all needs to be done through sensation and the evidence in your sound. With the jaw dropped and soft palate raised, the last step to creating space is to be sure to keep your throat open. I have a terrible habit of tightening my throat when I know higher notes are approaching in a song, when in reality the high notes would come out no problem if I just stayed relaxed and open. Practicing exercises with series of notes going down can help to relax the throat and lower the larynx.  Resonance For resonance, there are several ways to think about it. Every instrument produces sound through resonance. For a guitar, the strings vibrate as well as the body of the instrument. On a clarinet, the reed vibrates as well as the body of the instrument. A drum or cymbal is great to watch for resonance because you can see the drum head or cymbal moving. For singing, the vocal cords are vibrating but there is also vibration happening in tissues in the sinus cavities, mouth, lips, etc. Just like with your soft palate, you cannot see this in a mirror, but instead go by the feeling.
We can feel this vibration, or as I describe “buzzing on the front of the face” when we have closed consonants like “m” or “n”. When the lips touch you can really feel the vibration. To practice controlling resonance and use it to its fullest potential, it is good to start with these types of sounds before moving to other types of consonant and vowel combinations. Words like mom, marmalade, now, one, etc are good to use in exercises. During my second or third year of teaching, I began to have problems with vocal pain and fatigue. Since there was nothing physically wrong with my vocal mechanism, I was referred to speech therapy, which made a world of difference. It turns out, I had not been using much resonance in my teaching. When I wanted to speak louder I would try to push air or push from my throat. What I learned from the speech therapy is that more sound comes from more vibration--more resonance. Putting these three concepts together- air, space, and resonance, allows one to have a tall tone that stays consistent across the range from low notes to high notes. It also allows you to create a big sound with very little effort. If you are just starting out to explore vocal tone, I recommend that you work on just one category at a time, in the order I have presented them. Get your breathing working properly for you to start. Next, be sure you are providing the sound the space that it needs. Finally, work on producing some good resonance. Please let me know in the comments if you have questions or different tricks that work for you.  There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in terms of how breathing works when we need it in order to sing. I am not a doctor, but I can share the knowledge I have gained over time as a singer and working with other singers. The biggest misconception that many singers seem to have is that they can get a louder or more powerful sound by squeezing their abdominal muscles and pushing harder. Breathing is an automatic process and we really don’t have as much control over it as we think. Singing longer notes is really about the amount of air we inhale and nothing about pushing from our gut. One important thing to remember is that when we sing, we want as little tension as possible in every part of our body. Tension can actually be heard in your sound. One thing I always tell my singers is if a vocal sounds like it hurts, most likely it does. When you, as the singer, feel pain, you need to stop singing right away and rethink how you are creating your sound. Tightness in your throat leads to fatigue from overusing muscles that are not actually needed. It is very difficult to only tense your abdominal muscles and not react in other places in your body.  The process of breathing, as you know, has two parts--inhalation and exhalation. The major muscle at play is the diaphragm. Unlike many muscles that seem to get larger (think biceps) when contracted, the diaphragm actually collapses when active. By collapsing, it creates a vacuum in the lungs. In a sense, your body is not working hard to pull air in, the vacuum in your lungs is filled by nature. Think of scenes in a movie when a character is sucked out into the vacuum of space, except the vacuum is now your lungs. Other active muscles during inhalation are the intercostal muscles. These lift the rib cage, which gives the lungs space to expand. If you hear wheezing or a groaning sound when you inhale, it means that your throat is not as open as it should be. A moan or a groan means that the vocal cords are causing resistance against the air. For inhalation, the vocal cords should not be working at all. When it is time to exhale, the diaphragm then moves back up to its larger position. As you can see, pushing with your abdominal muscles will not make nonexistent air suddenly appear. All it will really do is make you uncomfortable. If you want to be able to sing a note longer, it really does you more good to focus on the full inhale and keeping an open chest and abdomen so that your lungs can fully expand. Instead of squeezing your abdomen, your stomach will actually appear to pop out when you inhale completely. Society tells us to always “suck in your gut” so you do not appear chubby, but proper, healthy singing requires us to pop out our belly. Besides, people will be too amazed by your incredible voice to watch your stomach move when you breathe. If you only notice your shoulders moving when you inhale, it means you are filling the top portion of your lungs. If you breathe like this normally, it is in your best interests for singing, exercise, and general health to retrain your body to breathe to the bottom of your lungs. If it’s easier for you to remember “breathe from your stomach” that is fine, as long as you remember that no air is entering your stomach. Hopefully this brief explanation has provided some clarity and useful things for you to focus on when singing.  |