In our syllabus, I give a very basic overview of what we are trying to achieve with training a voice. The third step can be loosely described as clustering vowels. What follows is a brief preamble to outline this process in the context of voice, to lead you in to a very helpful video on understanding this from a brilliant video producer called Tom Scott.
What does ‘clustering vowels’ involve?
Broadly speaking, what we are trying to do is shade each vowel that we need to sing to be more similar than different. Each vowel still needs to be intelligible as recognisable as itself, but most of the time people sing vowels in a way where each is excessively divergent/different from one another. This results in overall inefficiency in singing, makes singing more difficult, and also restricts the level of smoothness one can rise to in their singing.
A good example of this you will have experienced, is when one line of a sing seems to be super-smooth, then the next line with the same melody feels really jarring… yet the notes contained within are exactly the same. What gives?
Every singer will have experienced this, and it can seem bewildering, but only if you think that hitting the notes right is all that’s going on there. The vowels – shaped predominantly by the vocal tract – also have a critical impact on the resultant sound.
Seeking efficiency gives control
When people experience this difficulty in a given line of a song, it is a perfect illustration of the inefficiency in how most people form their vowels when they sing.
What we need to do is train the voice (specifically the vocal tract, and a few other bits of physiology) to shape each vowel shares a big amount of overlap in terms of it’s actual physiological and acoustic configuration. This common overlap is what we end up centering every vowel around, so that all vowels and orbit around that commonality. It’s like creating a centre of gravity for all the vowels.
The greater the amount of overlap/commonality we can create, whilst still keeping each vowel identifiable and distinct, the more efficient we make our instrument. The more efficient it is, the more control and the greater ease we unlock.
Now, this might seem very abstract, but linguists and phoneticists recognise that such a vowel exists – it’s known as the ‘schwa’ vowel.
The Schwa Vowel
I know, I know, the ‘schwa‘ vowel seems like a ridiculous name: nevertheless, that’s what it’s called. And it’s a key concept that underpins what we are trying to do when we are clustering vowels to overlap, more than differ.
With that preamble out of the way, have a watch of this very helpful video from Tom Scott.
He covers what the schwa vowel is, how every vowel (a, e, i, o, u) can be substituted for the schwa vowel, how sometimes sentences can end up being almost exclusively populated by such substitutions, and how in other words the schwa vowel can disappear entirely.
In particular, watch out for the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart, where you can see how every vowel orbits around the schwa vowel at the centre.