If you find your voice inconsistent one day to the next…
I wanted to talk about this topic given how many bugs are going round at the moment, just to help you understand why these things can affect our voices so significantly.
I’ve talked before about students who find their voice inconsistent from day to day. When I get enquiries this is also a common theme that comes up in such enquiries – “I find my voice inconsistent one day to the next, one minute it’s fine, the next it’s all croaky, the next it’s all phlegmy…
What’s going on?
Before we talk about how you might be finding your voice inconsistent, let’s talk for a minute about another instrument I love – the guitar.
When I was playing guitar at university, I had it set up in such a way that it was super easy to play. This meant that the strings were very close to the fingerboard – literally only a few millimetres from the fingerboard.
When summer hit, the humidity jumped only a little, but it was enough to cause the wood to swell, the neck changed angle/shape, and this caused the guitar to be unplayable. The strings literally touched the fingerboard, all because the humidity changed a LITTLE overnight.
I would fix the set up one day, and the next it would change further still. All these changes from day to day even with a cut bit of dead wood.
Why does this happen?
Wood, even cut and dried wood, is an organic material, i.e. made from cells. It can absorb water/moisture and swell, and even slight material changes can change the way the instrument plays.
More than this, with acoustic guitars, they NEED to be of a sufficient moisture content not just to play right but to SOUND right. Too little water and they sound very dry and brittle. Too much water and they sound dead muted and heavy.
While I’m not as au fait with violins and classical instruments, I’m aware that a similar principle applies to the way the wood (as an organic material) changes shape and sound merely with moisture content in the air.
OK Mark, great, how about the voice?
So we’ve talked about how just one thing – like moisture – can affect something that is ‘technically’ stable, like a guitar or a violin. It’s dead material, yet because it is organic it still changes with moisture content in the air.
Your voice is an organic material, even more so than dead cut wood. So if dead material like cut wood can change that radically from day to day, how much MORE so would a living, breathing material like our vocal cords and bodies change day to day. If you’re slightly sick, your vocal cords can be slightly thicker and heavier, which means that it’s suddenly like playing a heavier instrument that you are normally used to playing.
If you’ve been drinking alcohol, even from the night before, you could be slightly dehydrated, which gives you an altogether different experience of using your vocal cords than normal.
If you’ve been singing lots recently, your vocal cords could even be a little fatigued, causing you to struggle to control them properly.
Sometimes, there is overproduction of mucus in your throat even though you’re not sick (e.g. allergies or change in weather). This can act like a heavy layer on your vocal cords and make your voice feel heavy too. What’s possibly even worse about excess mucus on your cords is how the mucus can shift about and leave your voice feeling lighter or heavier depending on the time of day and how the mucus is lying on your cords. Not only this, but we have an inbuilt desire to cough excessively to clear this mucus, which can be quite traumatic for the vocal cords – drying them out, causing them to swell, etc.
A bad night’s sleep can leave your voice slightly swollen and fatigued… yada yada…
The list just goes on and on.
There are dozens of factors that can affect your vocal cords, from your health, to the weather, to how hydrated you are, to how much sleep you’ve had, to how much singing you’ve been doing. Women, the hormone changes during your time of the month can (in some cases) cause swelling of your vocal cords and therefore make your voice feel very heavy or different at that time of the month.
With all these different factors, it suddenly becomes more obvious why people find their voice inconsistent from one day to the next. In fact, it’s somehow surprising that people even FIND their voice being consistent one day to the next. There are always subtle, sometimes imperceptible changes in our voices one day to the next, and often the factors are just significant enough to cause us to notice something is different.
At the end of the day…
The voice is an organic instrument with many more factors affecting how it feels and plays than any guitar or violin. It takes time and practice with your own voice to understand and appreciate how it’s feeling day to day, and to get your voice behaving well enough that you can cope with these days when you are feeling your voice is inconsistent and that you’ve been knocked off-balance.