9 Things Singers Need to Know About Their Bodies - A Critical Discussion

9 Things Singers Need to Know About Their Bodies has been shared recently by singing friends on Facebook. It’s always problematic when short summaries are circulated that don’t reveal sources (yes, I am an academic in daylight). However, it gets most problematic when these tips are taken at face value without reflecting on them any further. I’m not saying that all of the tips are wrong, however, they aren’t necessarily very helpful. Here I go through each point taking each of the following headers from the website.

1) Your whole body is your instrument, not just your vocal mechanism.

This is in principle true and good advice. However, there is a problem with the tip relating to this point:

To become a better singer, shift your emphasis from trying to sing well, to using your entire mind-body-voice Self well.

To do this, you first need to know what singing well is. I have seen people describing singing well as ‘you need to feel good’ or ‘use your diaphragm’. Neither of these matches with vocal physiology. So the average reader of this website might not know what ‘singing well’ is, and I certainly do not know from this website what the ‘entire mind-body-voice Self’ is and how I use it well.

2) The poise of the head on the spine directly affects the quality of sound.

While this is a true sentence, the explanation is not very helpful. 

Excess tension kills vibrations and will produce a sound that is tight and strained.

It is important to notice that tension can come from many places. Yes, aligning the neck is crucial. But so is the resonance system of mouth cavity and lips. There are also other reasons why vibration does not take place, for example too much or too little air pressure. 

Allow the head to move subtly up off the spine which lets the vocal mechanism hang freely and the breathing and support muscles of the torso work effortlessly.

More useful would be to think about how to align the neck with the spine and this starts with positioning our feet correctly. This is really well shown by Alexander Massey in his post on Aligning and Awareness and his YouTube video.

3) Pain and discomfort is caused by chronic tightening and shortening of muscles.

Again, it sounds plausible what the first paragraph says. However, the following is not a useful tip:

By learning how to access the deep, [sic] support muscles in your body, you can relieve pain and tension by allowing chronically tight superficial muscles to release into greater length and flexibility.

This all sounds very well, but How do I do this ‘access the deep support muscles’? Where are they? Also, let’s say one of my muscles in the tongue (which actually consists of eight muscles) is overused. My first question would be why? What does it relate to? Could it be my jaw clenching? Then I would need to see what I can do against this and treat the muscle problem in the tongue this way.

4) The more you try to control your breathing, the less control you have over it.

This is a dangerous sentence to write. It could easily lead to a singing student ignoring breathing. I also do think that quite the opposite needs to happen. However, you need to know what happens when breathing, so that there are certain points that you can be aware of. Alexander Massey has come up with a whole YouTube series on Breathing which is well worth watching.

If you’re into academic work - here’s an article on breathing:

Salomoni S, van den Hoorn W, Hodges P (2016) Breathing and Singing: Objective Characterization of Breathing Patterns in Classical Singers. PLoS ONE 11(5): e0155084. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0155084

5) Gasping for breath indicates tension in the throat and false vocal folds.

Okay, let’s start with breathing again. If you breathe in by widening your rib cage and out using your lower abdominal muscle and use the release of this muscle to take a new breath, you will see that there won’t be any sound.

6) We have 24 ribs (12 on each side) and they are designed for movement.

Yes, that’s true. However, this is again so short that this cannot be classified as useful information.

7) The lungs are in the upper torso and the diaphragm sits right below them.

I’m not convinced that the lungs go up to the collar bone (later in the text). Even if that’s true (any physiologist reading this - please let me know), I think this is again dangerous information as we do want to avoid inexperienced singers breathing with the help of their shoulders.

8) It is impossible to directly control the diaphragm.

I agree very much here and I’m glad to see that this is now being mentioned more often in books (for example Jenevora William’s book Teaching Singing to Children and Young Adults). Go back to Alexander Massey’s breathing tutorial on YouTube for useful tips on what to do instead.

9) By cooperating with your design you can find freedom and ease in your singing.

Well, yes. However, good knowledge is key. Body maps can help here and also looking at pictures of human physiology. 

So generally, when you find tips like this on the Internet, be aware that there might be mistakes in them and that they are often very short and therefore not able to explain properly.

previously published 31 May 2017