For the first installment of this series let’s talk about the commonly used word “spin”. I refer to a sung sound that has vibrato and a sense of ease. We…
Tag: buzzwords
Hello singing colleagues! I’m back from some time off and refreshed, ready for new beginnings after a nationally horrible first half of the winter. Powerful singing is a topic that…
Because everyone’s body and their kinesthetic sense is so personal, I think the answer of what “people feel” is going to be very wide-ranging. To me the “lotte vocale” is…
the study of the methods and activities of teaching – retrieved from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pedagogy
Definition of Gestalt: “…something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts” (retrieved from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gestalt) Someone asked me…
What is “natural singing”? Sometimes we say that someone “is a natural” or that the music seems to come so “naturally” from their throats. What does that mean? If we…
[This is an excerpt from Chapter 3 “The Confusions”.] Long ago I thought of the human voice as an instrument, just in a different family than brasses and woodwinds and…
Is “creating space” something you need? If so, how and how much? Let’s say you think you do need more “space”. The Holy Grail for years has been “lowered larynx”,…
In the online forums I’m seeing many discussions about voice science – Explanations of “open throat”. Descriptions of sound profiles of ideal (so they claim) vocal attributes. Assumptions about desirable…
How imagery-based instruction works, in two scenarios:
Scenario A
- Teacher gives weird image-based concept, like “breathe through the soles of your feet” (real advice from a real voice teacher).
- She sings the passage to demonstrate.
- The student copies the demonstration.
- Teacher thinks the imagery “worked”, when really it’s modeling better singing that actually worked, and the student found the same effect in her own voice. The teacher may as well have said “feel it in your knees” as long as the demonstration was adequate.
What does “resonance” mean? You can look up different dictionary definitions as well as I can, but today let’s call it “maximum sound output per energy unit expended”. Let’s assume…
We have a hellacious level of confusion in talking about vocal technique due to the conflation of the universal and the personal. In teaching, we must minimize this and make…