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Pete Mickelson

TMV World Legacy Member
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Everything posted by Pete Mickelson

  1. Can one of you help me out? What are the "constrictors?" Where are they? How do you reach them to use them? I lived with a pet boa one time, years ago, but that surely isn't what you mean, right?
  2. Good grief! Have you guys never tried HearFones? Of course you can't hear yourself right -- your ears are stuck behind your mouth! <www.hearfones.com> People all over the world, most of who suffer from the same Ear-Behind-My-Mouth disease have been using them since -- let's see -- 1998? -- to cure this ailment. (In the interest of disclosure, I'm one of the inventors.)
  3. Listening to your audio, I was wondering if you'd ever tried working with HearFones? They let you hear yourself as a listener would, and often folks who practice with them automatically sing more like what they want. <www.hearfones.com> The little book that comes with them gives a lot of good ideas to try.
  4. If you'll pardon an engineer stepping in here, there is one other point regarding what you see on a video of the vocal folds: Almost all of these videos have been made with a stroboscope -- a brief-flashing very-bright white light (like the MCs use for dances!) that is such a short pulse that it "stops" the folds in their tracks -- like a flash photo of a football quarterback kicking the ball into play. The difference is that the stroboscope flashes over and over again, at a period that can be selected by the photographer. Doctors have been using strobes for years to examine the folds for polyps and nodules and other anomalies that would just be a blur if seen with continuous white light. If the VF are cycling at 220 Hz (A below Middle C), and if the doctor wants to "stop" the motion so she can carefully examine how a lesion behaves -- as if hard and dry, or as if floppy and wet -- then she would set the strobe to 220 pulses per second. Each time it flashed, the picture would show the folds in exactly the same position (assuming the singer isn't using any vibrato or tremolo) and the shape of the polyp would either remain the same or wobble around irregularly. To get an impression of how the folds operate through their entire cycle, she could set the strobe to 219 Hz, and that way each picture frame would be 1/219th of a second later, while the folds continued at 220. Each frame would be delayed by this slight interval, and over the period of one full second it would build up an apparent 'movie' of the entire open-close-open again cycle. It would look like the folds are oscillating at 1.0 Hz, even though they aren't -- as your ear could easily tell. Often these stop-action slow-motion videos are backed up with real-time audio on the recordings. Until very recently, it's been virtually impossible to use true high-speed cameras to actually take pictures so frequently that a true sequence of 220 frames could be recorded. You can do this on a jet engine, but not on a living set of vocal folds, because the amount of light, integrated (added up) over the full period would broil -- yes, broil! -- the vocal folds. (If you think smoking is bad . . . ) So, many of the videos we see are actually strobe images. If the strobe is set by the operator to reveal a particular motion pattern of interest, then -- for example -- we could see the folds appearing to "zip" or "unzip" -- to open only partially -- when in fact they may be opening fully but only during the dark cycle. An interim way to see VF behavior in real time is using the video kymograph (http://www.kymography.com/) but this device only shows the motion of a single point along the folds. If the point is chosen near where you're missing the open behavior, it will reveal that behavior in a measurable way. But it's just not the same as viewing the entire vocal fold area. In "whistle" register, the vocal folds aren't even cycling. This is a form of whispering, but with a single fixed opening at one end of the immobilized folds forming the jet of a whistle -- like blowing a stream of air between your two front teeth, or puckering your lips into a tiny "OO" shape and then blowing out through them. Try whispering a very loud "EE" sound, and you'll be in the right arena. The pitch results from shedding vortices spinning one after the other -- left and right -- up into your vocal tract. If I remember right, the epiglottis can be somewhat tuned to reinforce and filter these passages, creating its own formant at an abnormally high pitch.
  5. OHMIGOD! What cool terminology! "classic rock kind of distortion and not a death metal extreme scream distortion (ESD)" and "pulling stuff up from your throat!" As a newcomer to all this, I'd love to see a Glossary or a Dictionary of what each of you means, and what the other one reads into it. Jonpall, here's another way to look at it: a truly "pure" tone -- with no distortion -- is a so-called sine wave: a smoothly undulating high and low pressure fluctuation in air pressure. It is charcterized entirely by its frequency -- how often it goes through its cycle. A beautiful "OO" sound comes close. Adding distortion introduces other, more frequent fluctuations, warping the pure sine wave into a contorted shape. The sound "EE" is a great example, but as Robert points out, there are many more. Human hearing peaks at a frequency above a soprano's high range, and drops to nearly zero at 20 cycles per second, so each of these added frequencies of distortion is closer and closer to the "sweet spot" of hearing, and so they sound louder. But creating these higher frequencies calls on your vocal folds to slap together more and more abruptly, too. You don't want to turn them into hamburger meat, so as Robert so rightly cautions "If it hurts, it's not right and stop." I could only add that "If it hurts, it has done damage already and stop!" Pete
  6. I don't think that VAM or HearFones is advocating against using a teacher; certainly the "Singing Secrets" booklet advocates FOR a teacher -- "use them with your vocal coach or teacher." Over the last eleven years, most of our customers in singing have been teachers, a number of whom later outfitted their entire choir with HearFones when they picked up on what was going on. Ask Lisa Popeil if she heard a difference between "choir without" and "choir with." According to her, it was like day and night. Learning comes in many forms: First, there is the beginner process, where an individual tries to sing, on their own and in a particular style or 'genre' of singing, most often by copying or singing along with a professional recording. Here, you want a coach or teacher who listens to you and offers his or her valuable suggestions. Later, there is the learning process, where you mentally store the overview of the music but still rely on the sheet music for reference. Here a director is often the best helper, or a lot of self-study. Finally, there's the honing stage, where you learn the song so well that you don't rely on the printed music and where -- especially for the professional (who earns money) -- you want every sound to be perfect, or at least under your full control, so that you can make each live performance unique unto the individual audience you meet. At this stage, master-class level teachers are very helpful. Every master class I've monitored has brought new insight to the singer and tried the skills of the instructor. The most recent was with Marvin Keenze in Philadelphia. Along the way, even at stage one, there's the matter of building muscle-neuron 'subroutines' (a computer programmer term, but very apt for this task). These are the short but connected brief actions that you perform subconsciously, drawn from a library of learnings inside your body -- part brain, part action neurons and part muscles who have learned how to respond to the signals they're sent -- and who even have built the strength and stamina to do it. These function all the way from your knees to your nose -- literally -- and "getting the feeling" of all that complexity is virtually impossible. In a performance venue -- which can range from a one-person audience's soft attentive breathing to the megawatt splat music that engages even fireworks to thrill the audience -- these 'muscle memories' are what we call on for performance. Rarely can Julius Caesar sing a fortissimo aria on his way riding a horse through fighting soldiers to Cleopatra's death scene, while he's calling on "how his body feels." He has other things to think about. What we know from research is that HearFones (and perhaps VAM too, although it's for a different purpose) work through intuitive neural pathways to effect a better sound and a more efficient production of it. Exactly what path, and how they do this is a subject for further work, but the fact is that simply by singing -- or speaking -- with them on results in better practice routines that build better muscle memories. That's not all bad. People who are learning a new (to them) language tend to hang onto what we call "an accent" -- the vestiges of muscle memories they developed when they were less than a year old. These people -- without feedback -- think they're doing a great job, but those sneaky subroutines get subconsciously called up and the 'native listener' thinks, "Aha! This guy is from away!" A famous example is the folks who grew up speaking Chinese or Japanese and have never developed a clearly separate subroutine or memory for the difference between R ("ARE") and L ("ELL") as we use them in daily English. This muscle learning is what feedback encourages. Not verbal (or "the hairy eyeball") feedback that comes from a teacher, but rather the memorized learning of a physiological practice -- that may, or may not, be suggested by a teacher. Here on TMV we have any number of singing teachers who are emphasizing "learning your own true voice." If you are three years old, sitting in the back seat of your Mom's car, on the way to see Santa Claus at the mall, you will sing "Silent Night" with a beautiful, properly pitched and sweet voice that truly is your very own. These teachers respect that voice, and they know it will never be used by Julius Caesar to order his legions around. Therefore, they know that practicing this voice with HearFones is harmless and beneficial and will help you build excellent intonation skills (jumping quickly and precisely from one pitch to another) and articulation skills (shaping your physiology to produce the exact sound pattern (vowel sound) that you want). HearFones are for skill building -- not necessarily for skill critique.
  7. I like that, Hilary! I've heard many choir members who have stepped forward to sing solos -- several of them young teenagers -- who have offered their solo voice to special church services like Christmas, Easter or even funerals who have never, ever taken what passes for a voice lesson. Knowing them as I do, personally, what they tell me is that they "just love to sing" and sort of started out as junior-choir members or by quietly, tenderly singing along with the radio at first and gradually built up their own confidence to where they're willing to step forward -- gingerly. We even have a few who have migrated to the "gospel singing" level where their ad lib accompaniment to the choir is offered at such a level that it flies out over the other voices. You'll catch some of that in the choir video that's linked to my TMV page. This is "building on silence" -- singing to yourself in a quiet bedroom or (yes) the car. By carefully adding to the silence, and not overdriving your natural voice, you can learn some beautiful things. All alone. Pete
  8. This is an interesting discussion, and I really wish each of you could be at the voice conference coming up in a couple of weeks. TMV member Ron Scherer is the "subject matter expert" who best can tell you what's going on, but as he's absent I'll try to suggest a few things (from my 'engineering' background). First, the vocals cords/chords/whatever are properly called "folds" because they are, and act like, folds of flesh that flap together. So I'll use the word "folds" here, awaiting Steven's glossary project -- which is a huge but worthy task. Vocal folds are a bit like blubber, if you'll forgive the casual analogy: they behave like Jello, in that some parts of them can be moving forward while other parts of them are moving backwards and sideways at the same time. Inside them are muscles whose job is simply to make them more tense or more limber within themselves. This muscled flesh is surrounded -- especially on the striking surfaces -- by a softer, passive layer of unmuscled flesh whose outermost layer -- called the "mucosal" layer -- is kept wet and slippery and thus lubricated for its job of slapping against the opposite vocal fold 1,000 times a second. This mucosal layer and the comparative dryness or wetness of its underlaying fleshy layer take a horrible beating, and their condition depends on how sweetly you treat them. Gag them with cigarette smoke and coal tar and burnings acids, and they will reward you by creating raspy, unpredictable and unreliable sounds. Tired? You bet! There's a good reason that a young voice sounds prettier than a worn out voice. To keep the mucous layer wet and slimy, you need good blood supply and good blood flow within the tissue (flesh) of the vocal folds. That means good arterial blood supply, and relaxed muscle tension (think "squeezed sponge" vs. "relaxed sponge"). This calls -- up front -- for lots of water. Carry a water bottle with you, everywhere. Avoid singing in smoky bars. Take a rest when you can, because the air as you breathe in and out (no, don't stop that practice!) evaporates the water and dries the mucosal layer, leading to "clearing your throat" and coughing and 'rough' sounds and ultimately to surface damage to the cells behind the layer that takes time to heal (and may never heal to its former, youthful self). Good blood flow -- as in all exercise -- is helped along, especially in preparing for singing, by proper vocal warm-up -- just as a jogger needs to stretch and exercise a bit before taking off on a long run. Good warm-ups cause no harm, and they get the cellular matrix limbered up. The good blood flow is also helpful to feed the muscles as they come into play, but that's another story. A doctor in Finland -- Marketta Sihvo -- invented a so-called "LAX-VOX (relaxed voice) Tube" for healing and warming up the vocal apparatus. The idea is to hum or "ooh" into the tube, which holds your teeth and jaw open in a natural speaking position, while the tube restricts air flow so the drying effect is greatly lessened. The back-pressure from the tube also helps avoid slapping of the folds that would otherwise take place -- if the pressure drop was not reduced between your trachea and your open mouth -- because the air flow velocity is less and thus the Bernoulli effect is less. The LAX-VOX Tube was intended for helping to heal or recover from damage, but it also serves as a great warm-up tool. Those tiny straws that one can use as coffee stirrers also do this, but that's another story, too. The current research, which has benefited much from high-speed video movies and nMRI three-dimensional imaging, has shown that the Bernoulli effect plays a big role in making the vocal folds oscillate (jiggle back-and-forth), and that it interacts with distortion of the Jello-like layer of the vocal folds' surface and sub-surface. If you've ever blown up a balloon and squeezed the air back out of it, you've seen exactly how the vocal folds and Bernoulli work. A "Whoopie Cushion" is an even better example. But the best, in many ways, is the way trumpeters hold their lips against the mouthpiece and cause them to flap back and forth against each other. I think this sound is called "a raspberry" -- but I don't know why. The muscles that control your larynx (voice box?) are many, and it's almost impossible for you to consciously exercise control over them (unlike finger or arm muscles). They serve to set the vocal folds farther apart (AB-duction) or closer together (AD-duction), and they serve to lengthen or shorten the active width of the vocal folds (or, in old-speak "lengthen or shorten the cords"), and the muscles within the vocal folds (mentioned earlier) determine the stiffness or limberness of the folds, so that these three sets of muscles are what you use to change pitch and to adjust the sweetness or nastiness of your voice. (I don't think "sweetness" or "nastiness" will be in Steven's glossary, but they give you the general idea.) Because these muscles do not act 1,000 times per second, it's much less likely that your muscles are getting tired, unless of course you don't feed them and give them enough to drink, of course). They do not directly cause your voice to fail, because they mostly serve to set up the operating conditions for the vocal folds that they support. Under normal conditions, they should easily last the whole day -- even for fast-speaking people. Your vocal folds, on the other hand, can get torn, scarred, dry -- even pureed if you try hard enough! They call for tender-loving-care and nice treatment and respect. As well as occasional rest. This is not a matter of "classical" vs. "new-age" singing instruction. This a matter of human physiology, health and harm. One could write more about the Bernoulli effect -- how it works and what it does -- and much more about shedding vortices in the non-linear air-flow exiting from the larynx, and how sounds are affected by passing through the vocal tract . . . but that is truly a story for another day. Ron Scherer -- if you're reading this -- PLEASE chime in. :)
  9. Vocal box? Released from any pressure? Voice should be restructured and rechannelled to a set of muscles? Facial muscles (sinus cavities)? Significantly amplify? Placed into the facial muscles? Secured and supported by the abdominal muscles? Lower abdomen will secure the height of the sound flowing above the body? Upper diaphragm will secure the width of the sound? And the fullness of its body? Minimizing the use of the throat, larynx and vocal folds? What do these words mean?
  10. Thanks Hilary, I'll search for that. I'm kinda taken up today writing a patent for a client, so I may lay low for a day or two. Pete
  11. Like Hilary, I too am "a fan of straight tone." It's impossible to harmonize with vibrato, and most of the choir singing I do calls for harmonization between the (typically) four parts. When you do a recording of a choir not disciplined to back off on the vibrato, all the sopranos (whose voice pitches dominate the frequencies of peak hearing sensitivity) sound like hash, or distortion, because while some are raising their pitch, others are lowering it, and no one is singing "on pitch." That said, though, there are two vibratos that need mastering, depending on the songs you are singing . . . as a soloist or in a duet, for example. The first is the vibrato often used in opera to add excitement to the theme of the action. This is typically a "wide" vibrato, sometimes spanning a full scale interval, or more. This takes discipline and attention. The other is fully relaxed vibrato, where the singer more-or-less intends to sing a straight tone, but if it's held for a half-note or a whole note or more, a very gentle wavering starts as the muscles used to snap home on that pitch begin to relax a bit. I've seen this expressed as perhaps the normal nerve firing rate of a relaxed muscle (I think by James Daugherty). This vibrato develops gradually after holding a straight pitch for a second or two, and has a vibrato frequency of about six cycles per second or so. In fact, it's almost impossible to completely sing straight tone because this relaxation takes conscious effort to overcome. It's also the vibrato you might hear in a quiet, loving operatic duet -- where Leonora meets Florestan in the dungeon ("Leonora?" . . . "Florestan!) -- not the kind where their voices are trembling with excitement or fear (which Beethoven deliberately writes into the score) a few seconds after they see each other through the darkness ("Gott! Wie dunkel hier!) and realize it's true (Gott! Er ist es!) and they're saved ("O namen-, NAMEN-lose Freude" . . . "O dank dir, Gott, fur diese Lust!"). Dramatic vs. tender. Vibrato.
  12. Hi Tim, From my engineering and love-of-music perspective, I can see lots of answers to your question. First, let's consider just the word "singing." Around here, we've come to a sort of understanding that singing has many dimensions. We've argued for nearly ten years about "what makes for the best quality singing" and have generally reached agreement that a young mother singing to her baby is the bulls-eye of quality singing. Beautiful, non-confrontational, loving, gentle . . . And we've generally agreed that "singing" entails the use of pitch and time, and is probably distinguished from "poetry" in that it does not need to use "language" (verbal expression, with or without text). That said, there are many ways to communicate with singing, and some of them are angry or hateful. A song that has a title and verse like "Hit Me Baby One More Time" or where the singer feels compelled to bite the head off a chicken during the performance does not fall under the topic of "best quality," and yet it certainly says a lot about the singer, the song or the songwriter. Even the fact that a singer sings the songwriter's song says something about the singer. Let's confine ourselves to the quality stuff first. Let's say there's a young (or older) person who "wishes they could sing." We hear this ALL the time. Now, if this person had no language, or was in a foreign land, they certainly could express themselves using pitch and timing alone. As Hilary has said elsewhere: "I have traveled quite a bit of the world and have been able to converse with people with no language proficiency simply through the RESONANCE of VOWEL SOUNDS." Our standard reply to these folks is "I don't know how to play golf, either, but I know I can, if I take a few lessons." I suppose that's unfair to say to a quadriplegic, but no more so than "that's silly; anyone can sing." What we do is offer them some first hand acquaintance with our "musical scale" -- since it's an arbitrary and societal invention -- and then offer them a set of HearFones so they can hear themselves sing and practice their scales, intonation and voice. This flies somewhat in the face of the 'traditional' approach of having a "coach" or "teacher" who listens to you and then tells you what's wrong and how to right it, but we also know that far too many "recording artists" have foul voices and yet multi-mega-million dollar sales. They thereby have defined their own "style" and extended it by recordings to listeners throughout the world. HearFones let these "noobs" hear themselves as the listener (or sadly more often, the microphone) hears them. Armed with this new information on-the-fly, in real-time, they immediately modify and learn habits from the sounds they want to produce. They also learn to avoid 'screaming' or over-driving their vocal folds into distortion and non-linear regions that cause damage to them. Once they build some decent habits of arriving at pitch, of breathing properly, of sensing physical harm, they are better positioned to explore their voice safely and to have fun doing it. Instructors or coaches can apply their own knowledge and experience to encourage the shy singer, to help them find a voice they need for a certain message, to point out clinically safe practices, and to meet them "where they're at" -- that is, to communicate with them inside their personal comfort zone. Sometimes this takes a psychological approach, as Hilary uses; other time it takes a clinical approach, such as an otolaryngologist or a speech-language pathologist visit, and other times it calls for a simple scientific understanding of how the voice works. Which I think explains why there are so many "schools of thought" -- or to use your own words "approaches" -- on singing. With luck, you'll find them all here. Pete
  13. Yep . . . Britney Spears is unique, alright! Let's think here: there's the "IH" sound in "Hit" and the "EE" (i) sound in "Me" and the "AY" sound in "Baby" . . . And what a pretty girl she was, too! I haven't figured out all the fancy things we can and can't do with this Website, but one thing that could help is to be able to type the IPA character set. But even then, as I said earlier, there is an infinite number of ways we can create, sustain and modify vowel sounds to suit what we are trying to do, so even the selected set of IPA characters is necessarily limited. At least, though, we could discuss the difference between Dutch vowels and New England American vowels! : ) My comment that vowels are to raise the hairs on the back of your head wasn't very technical, was it? Hilary is wonderful at relating the subjective side of music, and perfectly right to do so. We (and many other species) have used sounds and even music (birds?) to communicate feelings and warnings and other important facts L-O-N-G before we speakers ever evolved. Once we engineered "language" and later "text" we began to add dimensions to these sounds. And add to that the fact that we migrated all over the earth, carrying with us our spoken language -- as well as we could remember it through thousands of generations without writing! You folks who stopped in Belgium, Germany and France speak a bunch of dialects; we who moved up through Danmark and Sverige and on to New York City speak a mix of your language and our new pseudo-English dialect. Here in Maine, we say "AY'-YA" for "yes." Down south in Tennessee, Americans say "YAY'-ess" instead. Regardless of "YAH" "YAW" "JOH" "YOO" "AY-YA" or YAY-ess," each of these languages and dialects has its own way of saying "Yes" as in "that's enough, damn it!" or "Yes, I love you, too." And they do it by modifying their vowel sound. That's what I meant by "raising the hairs." You asked how vowels are used in singing, and that's part of the picture. Not quite a chapter in that book I promised you. ;-) Pete
  14. Matt is right on! Harmony is ultra-simple math -- way less confusing than balancing a checkbook or figuring a tip. TMV member, and my close friend, Ray Miller has sung in Barbershop since . . . well . . . since he was in Marine Corps basic training preparing to sail for Iwo Jima in 1945. He's been an officer in the SPEBSQSA (now called the Barbershop Harmony Society) where they specialize -- and I mean SPECIALIZE -- in singing harmony. No instruments -- just voice. Ray has been cogitating on a book (I have a draft right here) on the subject of "The Architecture of Harmony," which of course resonates with the analogy that Jimi offers of building up the chords. As a psychology major (which he studied to understand more about the perception of harmony), Ray studies the "harmonic" (which simply means "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, . . . ") structure of chords and how we are accustomed to using them. Here in the USA, with largely a "western" influence and habit of music, we sense and we use slightly different chords from how our pal Sangeeta might use them, or her neighbors to the north, but in any case, we feel good when we hear them. First of all, when a sound as complex as the human voice is produced, the disturbances it makes in the air -- the "waveforms" -- are more than just a single "pitch." For example, a bass singing a low "A" makes 110 of these disturbances per second, but the characteristics of what sound he's making -- let's say an "AH" -- and let's say "in an angry part of the song" -- actually produces a compound tone that can be represented mathematically as a series of plain tones, each playing harmonically above the 110. So he's producing a loud sound at 110, a weaker one at 220, another at 330 and then -- because he's angry -- another strong one at 440 times per second . . . and so on. Each of these pitches together make up a chord of sorts, even just while he's holding that one note. If another singer joins him, we will feel most comfortable if what she sings "fits" mathematically into the pattern he's producing. In four-part harmony, each voice fits if it's going to produce a harmonic chord. That job is up to the composer, but it's also up to each singer because an angry "AH" is discernibly different from a loving "AH" and so produces different strengths at 220, 330 and 440. One way to think of a chord is like a wind chime. Each chime rings at a different pitch, and produces its own harmonics, but no matter which chime rings first or next, the sound is simply lovely. Good melodies are built upon the architecture of the harmony in the song, so in some ways the melody notes are often like the wind chimes -- strung out in a measure or two (a phrase) but still "belonging" and "fitting" into the chord and its harmonics. Bach used these strung out chords, or "arpeggios" to literally create chords in his Prelude in C (BWV 846) that opens his "Well-Tempered Clavier" series, based on the then-new idea of "equal" tuning invented by Andreas Werckmeister in 1691. Even though equal temperament is not very pure, we've grown so used to it that we hardly can tell when it goes wrong. Ray is studying particularly the "progression" of chords: not just "do we like this chord?" but also "where does this chord want to go to next?" One familiar piece of this question is "why do we always feel better if the symphony we're hearing ends -- 40 minutes later -- in the same "key" or set of chords that started it 40 minutes ago?" Another aspect of chords is the "feeling" or psychological set-up a particular chord creates in the person who hears it. The pianists who used to play along with silent black-and-white movies were artists at this -- using major and minor and higher and lower chords and melodies to make us thrill just as the devil arrived, or chill when the north wind blew, or know that the hero and the girl were going to fall in love. All with simple harmony! Because harmony -- literally -- is as simple as "one, two, three," the sounds it makes are deeply felt by our subconscious. When they don't fit, it's like a gear in a transmission that has one tooth too many, or one tooth too few. It gnashes! Sometimes even crashes! Pure barbershoppers cringe when they hear a perfectly-tuned piano, because equal temperament can only rarely make pure harmony. So, yes: do what Steven and Robert and Jimi are suggesting and play around with an instrument to get a sense of what makes your hair curl and what lulls you to sleep, and after a while you'll feel really good about it. ;-) And have fun! Pete
  15. Hi Tim, Here in the U.S. we're having a huge debate about faith vs. science, mostly centered on Darwin vs. Adam and Eve, and I can't help but see a comparison to your question. TMV is a fairly new community, and in the short few weeks since I've joined, it's occurred to me that more members are involved in what's been termed CCM (commercial contemporary music) than in what might be called 'classical' voice. I sing in a church choir, but I also have an avid interest in the voice and how it works. That said, the need for some form of terminology touchstone has been recognized, and Dr. Fraser has volunteered the herculean effort of putting it together -- not just the formally accepted terminology but also the jargon terminology that hits the streets as each day passes. He has his work cut out for him, but it is urgently needed. If I understand your wishes, I'd recommend that you purchase a copy of Johan Sundberg's excellent book "The Science of the Singing Voice." Johan stands today as certainly the most respected and knowledgeable expert on the voice and how it works, and is a wonderful writer and a close friend as well. In his book, he covers in a very accessible way the entire gamut from physiology to physics, with clear illustrations throughout. It is not a weighty tome, and when you finish it, you will fully understand how the voice works, what you're dealing with and what vocal teachers are faced with. Another, though older, work is "The Science of Vocal Pedagogy: Theory and Application" by D. Ralph Appelman. Dr. Appelman has written a classically excellent work, including X-ray pictures of the vocal tract and its many formants that are used to sing the full IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) sound vocabulary. He also explains how and why each of these needs to be adjusted slightly depending on its pitch, because the pitch and the formants need to be aligned in order to clearly enunciate each syllable in a song. After you read it, you will understand why formal voice training is a demanding study. The job of the vocal teacher or coach is to somehow evoke these sounds from your body in a manner that does no harm to your vocal anatomy and also meets your own personal learning style. To find the teacher who 'speaks your language' you need to discuss with each of them their methods and their beliefs (yes, "beliefs"). In this huge world of ours, and certainly in our growing TMV community, teachers run the entire gamut from Darwin to Adam and Eve. Some are religious attendees at the annual voice conferences and both learn and contribute to the field. Others are followers of subjective methods, either developed by themselves or patterned after a named style of teaching. And others are otherwise. People are each unique, and what works for one turns off the other. Some of us feel that simply freeing the voice and letting you sing is what's needed, and others work intensely on details of technique that need to be progressively mastered. Which style works best for you is impossible to answer, but the more you understand how he voice works, the more ready you'll be to decide how to approach it. What worked for me was a solo venture, using HearFones so that I could actually hear how my voice sounds while I'm singing, and then playing around with Sundberg and Appelman to hear what they meant in actual practice. But that may not work for you . . . Pete
  16. The only terms on your list which I understand are "distortion" and "vocal fry." When we work with HearFones and study the results, there is one and only one reference waveform (other than complete silence, I suppose) that contains no noise or distortion, and that is the sine wave, where SPL (sound pressure level, or think of it as "loudness") at any instantaneous moment is equal to a base amplitude (we'll call it "A") times the sine of an angle that increases steadily with time, just like a clock hand goes around and around. When the hand points down (six o'clock), the sine is -1 (minus one), and when it points left or right (9 or 3 o'clock) the sine is equal to zero. When it points up, the sine equals +1 (plus one). If you imagine that this sine is smoothly and always changing from zero to +1 and back through zero to -! and on and on, you will understand that this is a totally simple, perfectly described variation of a multiplier that multiplies "A" so that if you were making dots on a graph as fast as it changes, you would see a smooth, mathematically-simple wave shape that looks a lot like a jump rope. Because it is perfectly described, it is termed "simple harmonic motion." And because it is so perfect and simply defined, it simply contains one and only one "fundamental" frequency. From this reference 'perfect' sound, all deviations are, by definition, "distortion." When we buy electronic audio equipment, of any kind, the very first thing we look for in its "Specifications" is called "Harmonic Distortion" because any at all will destroy the sound we want to hear -- even if the original sound is not a perfect sound but rather -- for example -- the sound of a voice or a violin The word "noise" is defined as any part of a signal that is not the same as the signal being sent. If I subtract the original signal (say, a perfect sine wave) from the sound coming out of my headphones, the remainder -- what's left over after I subtract -- is by definition "noise." In our daily lives, most of us experience taxi cab horns, roaring bus motors and dogs barking as "noise" if we are trying to hear the sweet words our loved one is murmuring in our ear. But if we look at a perfect sine wave and we see that it has a small bump somewhere along it, even that minor bump is a distortion, and therefor a noise. No human voice can perfectly produce a sine wave (though we can come close), and so every human voice has noise in it. On the other hand, if all human sound were a sine wave, we would only have pitch and loudness to use as language. We could talk in Morse code, or make someone think a fire engine is coming. But instead, we all have learned to use noise as a part of our language, causing the differences in our dialect, our vowels and our voiced consonants, and even allowing the hearer to guess which individual is speaking: we say "Hello" on the telephone (or "si" or "endross" or "da" or . . . ) and we somehow expect the caller to guess whether this is Pete or Jane answering. So we use this noise meaningfully. If we produce a pitch with our vocal folds, because we feed them enough air to keep them periodically opening and closing against one another, then we are creating regular periodic motion. But if we try to produce such a low pitch that the slowed motion allows the folds to stop behaving on a regulated basis but rather to flap around randomly, the irregular sound they produce is called vocal "fry" -- as if the randomness of bubbles when frying potatoes in hot oil is a better representation of their movement than is a sine wave. From one cycle to the next, there is no similarity or predictability. That's the sound we call "vocal fry" and it's not uncommon in many distressed or destroyed voices. We find the voice harsh, but usually not difficult to understand. Indeed, some country or folk singers create and employ vocal fry to make the listener more empathetic with them. Other distortions are routinely used to convey emotions, such as love and anger. It will be interesting -- even enlightening -- to read what the other terms are construed to mean. And yes, Steven -- I'm sure -- will be adding words like "dark" and "bright" to the list. As a singer, it's hard for me to relate to these other words as characteristics of a voice, and I'd expect their meanings in that sense are not universally defined.
  17. Right on, Matt! The only fly in that ointment is that "scales" are entirely transportable -- or transposable, one might say -- such that you can pick absolutely ANY pitch you'd like and call it "DO," after which you can build these harmonies based on that pitch. Four barbershoppers can stand alone on a stage. One can suggest a pitch "Hmmmmmmm," and the others will build a chord on it, like "DO, FA, SO, DO" and off they go! No one knows or cares what pitch they started on, nor whether anyone might consider that pitch "flat" or "sharp" since, unlike the Celsius scale, there's no reference present . . . unless of course someone reaches their upper or lower vocal limit -- like your "A" that you mentioned -- and the whole piece falls apart! : ) But I'd guess Pablo is asking about how and why he "goes flat" while he's singing, which I think has more to do with "support" from his trachea and perhaps a slightly inadequate attention to what he's doing, which can be influenced by one's psyche. I kid people when I talk about "Mickelson's Uniform Effect:" the tendency for people to take themselves more seriously when they put on a uniform and become another character, so to say. In my Navy days, even when our 'uniform' was a tattered old discarded flight suit, if the drill sergeant bellowed "ten-HUT!" we suddenly became different, more capable people. A college boy like me, doing fifty (yes, 50) push-ups! I'd lean in the direction of Hilary's suggestion: toning drills (tuning drills), using a pitch reference to start off, and building scales on that pitch. It's clear that he already has a sense that he's going flat, so using that sense and Tomatis' suggestions and practice, practice, practice with HearFones so he hears what he's doing, he should be able to build his skills set, and thence his confidence, and thence his psyche so that he's a new person. How's that for faith-based healing? You mentioned "a good ear" as being a huge help, and I recall Pablo telling us he was frequently "plugged up" so that his hearing capability may be impeded, especially in the higher ranges where all the partials lie. Steven Fraser and Judy Rodman have an excellent short dissertation on this 'partial' effect in the "Does thinking change pitch" forum, just a day ago or so. Since "partials" are 'integer multiples' of the fundamental (pitch), your ear's access to hearing them is critical -- especially for us guys -- because they "leverage" your sense of pitch, just as a microscope's or telescope's optics leverage your vision. That's where the HearFones come into play. Human hearing falls off, like, 80 decibels from its peak around C6 to when the pitch you're hearing gets down around C1. If a guy sings at C3, his pitch is down by about 20 dB . . . a significant hearing loss. If you peek at Fig. 2 on Page 3 of "Effects of HearFones" <www.hearfones.com/Research.pdf> you'll see that they boost this same range by about 15 dB, so that the partials are much more available to your ears. You sort of become your own voice coach, and the muscle memories you build can serve you later on.
  18. Neurology is a complex field! : ) If I need a starting place, I sing the first two measures of "Drop, Drop, Slow Tears" by Orlando Gibbons . . . and there it is. It sort of needs 'context'. And Tuesday nights, as we climb the stairs of the church up to the third floor, there's something about the ambient sound or possibly "the formants" of the stairway that homes me in on G -- a fifth above C -- that is almost always the first note our director uses in our warm-ups "nay-oh-nay-oh-nay-oh-nay-oh-nay." When I get into the choir room, I hit G on the piano, and "BAM" there it is. But I would NEVER say that I have perfect pitch! ;-)
  19. "Not sure where to go" sounds familiar. That's one reason (among many) that choristers always warm up using a series of pitches for a while before they perform. Each day is different, and each singer is different each day. Out of 40 of us, I know of not one who professes to be able to look at the first measure of the hymn or anthem and just "sing the first note." There's a whole body of "normal" people that lies between those with "tone deafness" and "perfect pitch" and somehow we all come together when the downbeat comes. Or not -- if its "one of those days!" Guess that's why we have pitch pipes, or a piano handy. : )
  20. Hey! Glad you're still there. Seems like we were drifting off track here, but sure, because singing is almost entirely vowel sounds (except of course "contemporary a cappella" where we use all kinds of explosive consonants to emulate the sounds of a percussion section and an electric bass guitar at the same time (see www.casa.org>). First of all, what's most important about the subject is that -- if we take vowel sounds as what they seem to be defined -- we humans can produce an incredible complete range of vowel sounds. We humans have been walking this earth making these sounds for like 100,000 to 1,000,000 years or more, and long ago began to use these sounds to communicate emotions and later actions and objects (not necessarily in that order, as they say). Probably nouns (nomen, name, nomenclature) came first so that we could ask another person to bring something to somewhere, but that's just an educated guess. Then verbs, and so on. Language evolved, and is ever evolving. But the key is that we make these vowel sounds by creating a sound -- usually by phonating with the lips of our vocal folds (a buzz like a Whoopee cushion down in our throat) -- and then letting that sound reach out through our open mouth and on into someone else's ears, and the variety -- no -- that's the wrong word -- the "continuum" or range of sounds we can produce is simply amazing! When we talk about the letters, or more correctly "the text characters" A, E, I, O, and U, we are specifically restricting ourselves to little drawings that are used to stand for a variety of vowel sounds when used in a text (written) statement. But these five characters do NOT stand for five vowel sounds, or even five "major" vowel sounds. A "major" vowel sound is . . . the sound you intended to make in order to communicate the meaning you intended. The text character "A" in "father" can be a sound of great sweeping pleasure -- the sound you make when you communicate "Yes! I like that!" The same text character (but NOT the same vowel) "A" in "hat" conveys an entirely different meaning -- the sound you make when you are unpleasantly startled. And these intended meanings are universal, not simply in English or Roman. Even in Thailand or China, where the character "A" is never seen, these two vowel sounds convey the same meanings. A vowel sound is a sound, not a drawing or an engraving into granite slabs. Only by making a sound in our throat and adjusting (not really 'amplifying' -- at least not in loudness) that sound with our vocal filter ('tract') can we offer a vowel sound. And there is literally no limit to the number of ways we can adjust our vocal tract. There may be limits at the extremes, but still an infinite range of nuances between them that we can create when we need to. When I was in the U.S. Navy, we were flying in a really unique airplane -- the SP-2H "Neptune" -- with two huge radial piston propeller engines AND two extra General Electric jet engines that we used for takeoff and emergency situations. It made the most amazing sounds as it ran up its engines, both types, and came at you -- "up Doppler" -- down the runway, a roar as it went past, and the diminishing "down Doppler" sounds from each engine type separately as it lifted off the runway. When it landed, and slowed with propeller thrust reversal, and coasted to a taxiway, its huge drum brakes would emit this haunting moan. Why do I tell you this? Because it was such a haunting memory that several of us worked at making a cassette recording of the sounds, years later, with nothing but a microphone and our personal vocal blessings. And it worked! This forum is titled "Vowels and their effect." The effect of vowels is to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. The effect of vowels is to express great caring, and love. And yes, fear. More another day, Pete
  21. Yeah, well . . . I'm getting older too! ;-) Not to argue with you, Hilary . . . but my understanding of vowels is a bit broader. In the Oxford English dictionary they define "vowel" as "a sound produced by the vocal cords*" (* this is an older printing, before the now-proper use of "folds"). What I think they mean is any sound we can phonate for a protracted or sustained time, as contrasted with a consonant which is . . . well . . . all else. When we say "FFF" we don't use our vocal folds, and so there is no 'pitch' identified. Same with "T" and "K." So, technically, I even see an "M" is a vowel sound, although we call it a "voiced consonant" instead. We can pitch an "M" but not an "X." My Greek isn't as polished as yours must be, but the big island near Spetse called "Hydra" has no "EE" vowel in it, but rather an "Ö" almost as in "her." English has more than 56 separate vowels in it, but in later years, when text was invented, a lot of these were condensed so they could be living within our limit of "26 text characters." In singing, we use them all -- and then some. The "Dictionary of Vocal Terminology" holds that a vowel is "a sustained phonation or sound produced by an undulating movement of the vocal folds, whose vibratory pattern is amplified because of adjustments made by the cavities of the mouth." I guess that excludes "M." : ) I only am explaining this so that I'm fully understood when I said "There aren't just five vowel sounds." There certainly are five "Roman" text characters that we English-taught children are told "are the vowels," but the variety of sounds is -- literally -- infinite. I hope this doesn't break our friendship, Pete
  22. Well . . . first of all . . HearFones (registered trademark, U.S Patent 6,229,901) are not headphones. Not in any way, at all. But yes, they work with practice to hone pitch control and accuracy. Young kids sing perfectly on pitch sitting in the back seat of your car with their friends as they go Christmas shopping, but the same kids can't agree on pitch in a junior choir. This is where the "perception" and "self-monitoring" aspects play a huge role. HearFones provide the feedback that you need in -- let's see -- 0.5 feet divided by 1,100 feet-per-second equals -- umm . . . less than a half of a millisecond. Which is why they do what they do. : ) Pete
  23. Matt, you're probably right. But the pitch of a pinched string is a fairly one-dimensional problem: the only meaningful "variable" is the length of string that's free to vibrate. With the vocal process, it's a bit more involved. Not to get too complex, let's look at just three factors. First, there is the trachea, which is sort of like a cheap vacuum cleaner hose --- those kinds where they have a long, thin wire wrapped into a four-foot long coil spring, and then a tube of transparent, thin plastic is shrunk onto it so that it's wide open inside the spring, yet flexible too. If this kind of hose is under pressure -- instead of vacuum -- then the pressure has a an effect on the diameter and also the stiffness of the tube. Our trachea is like this, even though it's shorter and just connects from our lungs to our throat. Because it's a tube, any disturbance in the flow through it will cause a ripple effect called 'resonance' where the disturbance is reflected back inside the tube in the opposite direction. Think of the effect on a running crowd of people reaching the end of a tunnel and finding the door suddenly closed. Boink. Built into the top of the tube -- instead of a door -- is a sort of squishy pair of sidewalls that are adjusted by outsiders so that they can be pinched together (closed) or moved apart (open) or left to fend on their own as the air rushes out through them from your lungs. If the outsiders are weaklings, then when a pressure approaches them, they'll be pushed back (more open) and need to gather their strength to push back in. If they're open and relaxed, then air rushing through will suck them together, the same way air over a curved wing sucks an airplane up off the runway. Depending on how stiffly these outsiders are holding the walls in place, this pushing apart and sucking together (vibration) will assume a certain periodicity or oscillation frequency. So there's an interaction going on between the pressure in the tube, the average resistance to letting it through the top, the frequency of flapping of the side walls and the frequency of air bouncing up and down inside the tube. You can press harder with your diaphragm and produce a higher sub-glottal pressure against stiffly held sidewalls squeezed tensely toward one another, or you can produce a lower pressure against a more relaxed set of sidewalls, and get the same general frequency. If you surprise the sidewall holders with a rise in air pressure from below, there will be an increase in the frequency of oscillation. If you reduce the pressure, then there's a lowering of frequency. And if you lower the pressure too much, the flexible plastic around the tube will go slack and it won't be as good a resonator. The third effect is what the filter, formed by the mouth, lets out into the world. If it's resonances don't help the higher parts of the complex sounds coming out past the sidewalls, the the sounds will be less complex, or "duller" in a psychological sense. If they help, then the sounds will be "brighter" in a psychological sense. Some listeners will perceive this as "flatter" singing, even though the 'fundamental' of the pitch stays the same. It's only flatter in a "flat-liner" sense of the word. By standing to attention, rather than by slumping into a seated position, the geometry of all these parts works more as it should. By "supporting" the airflow and the tube walls with a higher subglottal pressure, the geometry will become a bit more rigid and the sound will become more stable and reliable. Even the psychology of standing -- alone -- will draw the performer's attention more to the task at hand. Ask any drill sergeant! So I don't think it's so much a matter of "the breath carrying the voice" as you say, but rather a factor of the breath being a bit stronger and more consistent, so he'll be able to better control the pitch to what he wants. And speaking of pitches, this is a 'pitch' for HearFones as well, because the more higher partials of his tone he can hear, the more sensitive he'll be to his pitch problems WHILE he's singing, and the less dissatisfied he'll be with the resulting recordings. There is simply nothing else on earth that does that. Pete
  24. I was sort-of afraid of that. My 17-year old composed a beautiful song a year ago, and had his friend sing it. Both of them sat on the piano bench, and the singer held a microphone as he sang, but you need to understand that "the diaphragm" is not just some little accessory thing. It's as wide as your stomach, and shaped like an upside-down bowl. When you draw in air to sing, not only your diaphragm but also all the internal organs underneath it need somewhere to go. If they can't go there, because you're sitting down, then you can barely be expected to properly 'support' the air pressure coming out of your lungs. Most of it will originate from 'chest breathing' which is a poor sister substitute for real breathing. For the heck of it, I asked this young singer to stand up the next time he sang my son's song (which was two nights later at a different high school 'talent show'). The difference was like day and night, and you could even see it on his face as he sang. After you get as experienced as -- say -- Ray Charles, then you might want to go back to trying it seated. Sometimes, the combined spectacle of a person both playing and singing simultaneously is enough for the critics to afford him wider latitude. : ) Singing in a choir, as I do, our director has us sitting during most of our rehearsals, and the collective sigh of relief when he "asks" us to stand up almost fills the choir room. When I'm sitting down, I've found the best position is laying back as far as I can in the metal chair, with my legs stretched straight out ahead of me. It's a horrible posture for singing, but at least it allows your diaphragm some room to move -- especially since Tuesday night's rehearsals are at 7:00 p.m., right after dinner at home! "Get your books; hop in the car; we'll do the dishes when we come home." In "South Pacific" there's a scene where Mary Martin lies on her back (yes!) over a bar stool and sings. When you reach the ranks of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, there will be lots of tricks you will have learned. : )
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