THIS BLOG HAS BEEN MOVED TO OUR NEW WEBSITE. GO READ IT HERE.

Do you wish you knew what to do when your voice isn't behaving? 🤷🏼‍♀️⁠

My wish for you, as a singer OR a speaker, is for you to be smart about your voice, so that when it isn't working quite the way you want it to, you can figure out what to do for yourself.⁠

I want to help you do just that.

In this episode of VoiceTalk you'll learn:

What 3 systems need to be in balance.
Why this will improve your voice.
How to work on each.

Understanding this will help you know what to adjust for your voice to sound and feel it’s best.

There are three systems that have to work together for the voice to sound its best, and if one or more isn’t functioning optimally, it will likely throw the rest of them off, too.

We have the RESPIRATION, PHONATION, and the RESONANCE.

Respiration is the breath. It’s like the gas in your car. It gives the energy needed to run the motor.

Phonation is the vibration of the vocal folds (fancy for vocal cords). This is what creates the sound wave. If we keep on with the car analogy, it’s the motor.

Resonance is the filtering that happens in the vocal tract, which is the space from your vocal cords to the tip of your lips. You can think of it almost as a resonating tube. In the car analogy, it is the type of car you drive. We all have unique sounding voices because no two resonating tracts are shaped exactly the same.

“When the breath, the vocal cords, and your resonators all work together, that’s what gives us a feeling of stability when we’re singing.”

— Annie Little

These systems are all interdependent on each other.

The Breath

When you breath you send air up to the vocal folds which are vibrating by opening and closing super fast. When you sing an A 440, which is the pitch a violin tunes to when you see an orchestra tuning, your vocal folds open and close 440 times a second. The higher you sing, the faster they vibrate. The lower you sing, the slower they vibrate.

When the vocal folds close they are compressing these air molecules which are like opposing ends of magnets. They like to be a certain distance from each other. These compressed air molecules build up energy and when they are released they create a sound wave.

The Vibration

Sound waves are actually made up of multiple pitches stacked on top of each other. Those pitches are called harmonics, and our ear blends them together so it sounds like one note. All of those different harmonics are what get formed and filtered when they pass through and resonate in the vocal tract.

We want the sound wave to be balanced, so that there is enough information to be filtered when it’s resonating.

If the vocal folds are too pressed together or aren’t coming together enough, that will cause the sound wave to be out of balance. If the sound wave is out of balance, and there is not enough energy in the high frequencies, then voice will sound dull. If the sound wave doesn’t have enough energy in the low frequencies, then it will sound shrill or steely.

The Resonance

This sound wave is filtered by your resonating tract, which is your throat, mouth, and occasionally the nasal cavity, if you are going for a more nasal sound. (Most of the time we don’t want a nasal sound!) We want the sound wave to be balanced because the resonating tract can only boost or reduce the different harmonics that are present.

The resonating tract is primarily controlled by vowels. When it’s all working together nicely, you get a really nice “ping” to your voice, and it sounds good because you are boosting or reducing the parts of the sound wave to get the color or tone you want.

When it all works well, there is then a feedback of energy to the vocal folds that creates a back pressure and this is when singing feels really good and easy!

That means the air needs to be the right amount and be flowing nice and evenly, and the vocal folds need to be working optimally so they create a balanced sound wave, and then the vowels need to be optimized to filter the sound wave.

Let me know if you found this helpful in the comments!