1. Sound and hearing
In physics, sound is studied by acoustics. Every sound is the sensation produced in the ear by the vibrating movement of an elastic body.
Any body capable of vibrating produces a sound that our hearing easily perceives.
You can check this by stretching a rubber band between your fingers and plucking it. If you bring it close to your ear, you will hear the sound characteristic of that material; the same happens with a guitar string. This vibration occurs when the molecules of a body are pushed out of their resting position and then released, slowly returning to balance. When a sounding body vibrates in the air, its movement is passed on to the surrounding air and reaches our ears. When a body vibrates steadily and continuously, the air vibrates too and carries the sound in all directions as sound waves, the result of that vibration. As the sound waves move away from their source, the sound grows weaker until it disappears.
Sound vibrations can be regular or irregular, that is, with equal, constant periods or with unequal ones. Regular vibrations give us sound; irregular ones give us noise (distorted, unpleasant sound).
The basic qualities of a sound are intensity, pitch and timbre.
Intensity is the quality that lets a sound be heard from a greater or smaller distance: it is the volume. Pitch is the quality that lets us tell a low sound from a high one; it depends directly on the frequency of the vibration: the higher the frequency (number of vibrations), the higher the sound, and the lower the frequency, the lower the sound. Timbre is the quality that lets us tell apart two sounds produced by different instruments, even at the same frequency.
2. Perceiving sound
We perceive every kind of sound through our hearing apparatus, the ear. It has three distinct parts:
1) The outer ear: gathers the sound waves.
2) The middle ear: passes the sound waves on to the auditory nerve.
3) The inner ear: houses the endings of the auditory nerve, whose special sensitivity makes the perception of sound possible.
3. Hearing
How can music make sense to an ear and a brain that developed mainly to detect the sounds of nature for protection, such as an approaching lion or a crawling snake? The sense of hearing is about 300 million years old; music has existed for only a tiny fraction of that time. What makes the melody of a well-tuned violin or a flute solo beautiful? Why does one chord sound “big” and “happy” and another “sad” and “anguished”? How can certain sounds be beautiful to some ears and terrible to others? Why can some people not live without music while others are completely indifferent to it? And why, among billions of brains, are only a few able to create music of ecstasy (sounds that take a person outside themselves, floating, traveling)?
These questions are not new. We find them in Plato (Greek thinker, born in Athens in 427 BC), Immanuel Kant (born in Königsberg in 1724) and Friedrich Nietzsche (born in Röcken in 1844). Yet it was only in the last century or so that scientists began taking music into their laboratories to study these phenomena.
4. The ear
Be careful with what you call the ear. The outer part, that elastic mass of bumps and folds, is just a device to channel sound to the real ear, the inner ear, deep inside your head. The outer ear is called the “pinna”, a Latin word meaning “feather”, and its main task is to amplify sound as it funnels it into the ear canal (which is, on average, about two and a half centimeters, or one inch, deep).
Music enters through the outer ear and travels along the ear canal to the eardrum, at the end of the canal. Up to this point, sound travels as pressure waves through the air; after it strikes the eardrum, it continues as mechanical movement.
Just beyond the eardrum is the middle ear, where three oddly shaped bones, the ossicles, are held by ligaments. The eardrum pushes the first one, the hammer (malleus), which bumps into the second, the anvil (incus), which in turn pulls the third, the stirrup (stapes), pushing the sound through an opening into the fluid-filled inner ear, where neurons (nerve cells) are waiting for it.
When you speak or sing, sound travels not only from your lips to your ears but also directly through your head to the inner ear. In a way, you hear yourself twice: once through the ear canal and once through the bones of your head. Bone conduction makes the sound louder than it would otherwise be and changes its makeup (its frequencies).
That is why we do not recognize our own voice in a recording: the recording contains only part of the voice you hear.
5. The middle ear
The middle ear sits in a cavity in the skull, between the outer and inner ear. It holds three small bones: the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. They move in sequence and pass the sound waves picked up by the outer ear on to the inner ear.
6. The inner ear
When music completes its journey through the ossicles, it changes once again, this time into a pressure wave in fluid. The inner ear, the true ear, turns sound vibrations into information the brain can use, leaving the mechanical world for the sensory world of psychology. As mentioned, the inner ear is a fluid-filled cavity. Part of it contains the cochlea, a coiled tube that receives vibrations from the middle ear. These travel through the fluid and are detected by sensory hair cells that turn them into nerve impulses. The brain interprets these impulses as sound.
7. Hearing loss
The ear has many enemies: a hard blow to the head, exposure to loud noise, bacterial infections, biochemical damage caused by drugs, and so on.
All of these can cause hearing loss. When the damage is serious, there is little that can be done, because the body cannot grow new nerve cells the way it regrows bone, skin and muscle.
Over the years there is also normal wear of hearing, called presbycusis: the limit of our hearing declines as we age. This is a natural deafness that comes with age. There is also pathological deafness, caused by illness or accidents.
8. Identifying sounds
All our listening experience is geared to identifying sounds: a cat meowing, a dripping tap, people’s voices.
We are much more interested in what a sound is than in where it comes from. Sounds are funneled as they enter our hearing system; it is as if nature threw away much of the chance to locate them. So, from now on, pay attention to where the sounds you hear come from: right, left, the floor, above. Animals locate sounds much more often and naturally. Watch a cat: when it hears and senses another animal, it moves its ears to fine-tune its hearing. Because our ears do not move, we may fail to notice, for example, a violin on the left, a bass on the right and the winds at the back when we listen to an orchestra.
Even with this reduced mobility, we are not so bad at locating sounds. Owls, however, are the champions: they track their prey by ear with a tiny margin of error.
9. Vocal resonators and the articulators
The sound produced in the larynx would be practically inaudible if it were not amplified and shaped by the resonance chambers around it. In vocal technique (singing), we give special attention to the resonators of the face: the mouth, the nasal cavities and the paranasal sinuses, which we call facial resonators, or the facial voice. This facial voice is what every singer, whatever their voice type, must develop. A voice that does not use these resonances, even if it is strong, will lack brilliance and sound quality. A well-placed voice has penetration, beauty and quality.
An untrained, unplaced voice usually rests on the throat and produces imperfect, dull sounds, even if the timbre is very beautiful and pleasant.
You have probably heard of “singing in the mask”, that is, using the facial resonators. Try this simple test: place one hand on your “Adam’s apple”, the bump of the larynx, and the other between your upper lip and nose, just resting your hand there. Do not press or squeeze. With your mouth closed, make any sound, such as a “HUM”. If you feel vibration in the Adam’s apple, you are resting the voice on your throat instead of on the facial resonators. Do not worry, we will do other exercises to develop this.
A voice that does not use the facial resonators tends to wear out, forcing the singer to make unnecessary effort, and it will certainly age prematurely.
Placing the voice in the face does not mean forcing it into the facial resonators with excessive effort, but producing it physiologically and using it naturally.
The articulators are the lips, teeth, tongue, hard palate, soft palate (velum) and jaw, and they shape the speaking or singing voice. Any weakness in articulation will make it harder to understand what is being sung.
It is extremely important to pronounce words well according to the language and its rules, using the articulators correctly for each word. The mouth changes size and shape constantly through the movements of the tongue, considered the main organ of articulation because its muscles allow an enormous variety of movements.
10. Opening the throat
When we eat something very hot, we instinctively open our mouth and enlarge the space inside it, so that the tongue and palate (the roof of the mouth) stay as far as possible from the hot food. Likewise, when we yawn, the tongue goes down and the soft palate rises.
Shall we try an experiment to understand this better?
Go to a mirror, preferably a well-lit bathroom mirror, open your mouth wide and look at the position of your tongue and soft palate (it is attached to the uvula, and when the uvula rises, it lifts the soft palate with it). Notice how the tongue and soft palate move. There is a considerable increase in the space inside your mouth, isn’t there?
11. Mouth position
You need to open your mouth for the sound to project better. Watch your favorite singers: even in different styles, they all open their mouths well to sing.
Keep the jaw relaxed, without pushing it forward or to the sides, and keep the tongue low and relaxed most of the time.
12. Concentrating
Today many professionals use concentration techniques, especially people who study mental focus, self-knowledge or personal development. We will use concentration as a kind of meditation. In our case, it is nothing more than complete attention to what we are about to do: a song or an exercise. Everything comes from this concentration.
Disconnect from the world and your problems, free your mind from any thought other than singing, and direct your attention entirely to singing. Because of this, we always recommend studying music in general, singing or playing an instrument, to people who are emotionally shaken, nervous or restless. Nervousness throws anyone off balance and keeps us from concentrating on what we set out to do.
Concentration, the state of complete attention to what you are doing, especially during practice or a performance, is a reliable path to applying the techniques and singing healthily. Try to master your emotional state, your nerves and your impatience with positive thoughts, and always believe in yourself. Repeat every day: “If I study hard, I will become an excellent singer.”
It is very important to reach a state of complete muscular relaxation, without losing the energy you need for the singing exercises. Do not tense up, and avoid any kind of muscular tension, especially in the organs of phonation. In unprepared singers we often see excessive visible tension in the neck, as if it were about to burst when they sing a very high note outside their range. You need to find your point of balance, where the energy needed to produce the singing voice does not turn into force caused by excessive muscular tension.
13. The body
A singer must develop their body. It not only contains the larynx, which produces vocal sounds, but is itself the instrument.
Imagine your body, for example, as something that can become the sound box of a violin. Let us look at some exercises.
14. Stretching and warm-up exercises
15. Breathing exercises
16. Music
From this lesson on, you have enough information to start perceiving and telling sounds apart. Begin with something simple:
Clap along to a song you like. This will help you feel the musical accents, the so-called “strong beats” of the music. Then hum the same song using only “La, la, la”.
After these exercises, always sing along with the recording, following the singer. Where you run into trouble with pitch or breathing, do not worry: we will work a lot on these points in the coming lessons.