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Can vocal technique fix laryngitis?

Or a sore throat? Or other vocal issues?

Laryngitis is an inflammation of the larynx, usually caused by a viral infection, but sometimes has a bacterial source. The vocal cords are typically swollen and irritated, leading to hoarseness, partial or even complete voice loss depending on the severity of the laryngitis. It typically takes around a week to clear, sometimes a little sooner, but often takes a little longer.

As a voice coach or singer, to contract laryngitis is not good. It not only means sessions with clients need to be arranged, but a great source of joy is basically off-limits to permit speedy recovery. If you’ve ever had issues like this, you’ll know how frustrating it can be.

Your instrument is essentially broken for a period of time, and returning to it too soon can result in prolonging the issue, or even causing some harm to it outside of the laryngitis-related swelling.

Now, with that out of the way, time to answer the question:

Can vocal technique fix laryngitis?

In a word, no.

BUT!! It can do amazing things in the recovery – let me explain.

In my experience of working with singers as they are getting over a bug, whether laryngitis or something else, a working knowledge of the state of their recovery can help a HUGE amount.

TESTING THE CONDITION
Firstly, we can test the extent of the swelling during laryngitis (or any other vocal trauma/illness) using simple tests. Swelling means it’s hard for the vocal cords to adduct and perform as they normally would. This normally causes excess air to bleed through, and head voice co-ordination to be hard to access without force, or even inaccessible. Trying to sing a simple melody in the head register (e.g. happy birthday as lightly as possible) tends to indicate whether any work can be done on the voice, or whether it needs to be a day of vocal rest. It’s important to note that sometimes this test is passed, but rest is still necessary.

DURING THE ILLNESS/ISSUE
Often the very swelling of the vocal cords causes the condition to last longer than the initial condition would suggest. Why? The extra thickness in the cords tends to result in a lower pitch of vibration for the person’s voice. Even with limited speaking/singing/talking, this can really grate on the person’s voice even during recovery.

This is where specific applied use of exercises can be immensely helpful. This is NOT something that an inexperienced person can do, it does require training and time spent regularly working with voices.

In a nutshell, the way that functional voice exercises work is to get the operational muscles of the larynx to co-operate correctly with one another. Specific stretching exercises done lightly and in an appropriate range/direction can help to *lift* the voice out of the heavy area it has been left to sit in. While this does not *fix* the condition (laryngitis, nodule recovery, etc), in my experience it DOES serve to neutralise the day-to-day symptoms of those conditions. This can aid in the speed of recovery, and in the cases of singers with bad habits that caused the issue, help them to form new good habits during recovery so that they do not return to that state so readily in the future.

So why did I ask whether vocal technique could fix laryngitis, if the answer is ‘no’?

Well, in short, while it can’t fix it – physical and vocal rest, staying hydrated and keeping energy levels up (like recovery for any illness) is best – the manner in which good functional vocal exercises work can aid massively, both in the diagnosis, and also in the recovery process.

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal technique and great singing, you may enjoy these related articles:
The Difference between Amateurs and Pros
The problem with trying to teach voice using ONLY voice science
Vocal Pedagogy: Past, present and future
Singers: The Difference Between Vocalists and Performers
Vocal Tessitura: What is it?
What is vocal fach?
The Key to Vocal Consistency

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Formants In Singing – What on earth are they?

So, let’s talk about Formants in Singing…

While I’ve taken a break from coaching and working on my own voice in general over the Christmas holiday (boy was that a good rest!), I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on formants in singing. If any of you have any interest in voice science, I can thoroughly recommend Kenneth W. Bozeman’s ‘Practical Vocal Acoustics’. This is a helpful book covering the science of the voice from the perspective of the TEACHER and the singer, rather than purely from a voice scientist’s perspective. It’s this book that I’ll be drawing on for today’s explanation.

One of the things that keeps cropping up in my ol’ noggin is how critical the first bridge is… why? Because it’s crossing this portion of the voice that enables access to the rest of the voice… therefore, pretty important!

For many of us, we may accept that there IS this magical mysterious thing called a “bridge” or “passagi”, or as Kenneth W. Bozeman puts it, “where the voice turns over”… but…

What exactly is the first bridge?

Let’s discuss this. To do that we need to do a very quick (and very coarse) anatomy lesson.

The voice as an instrument consists of two parts:

1) the vocal cords; and

2) the vocal tract (the airway tube between your vocal cords and your lips)

The vocal cords

The vocal cords generate sound (acting as a source of sound), the vocal tract shapes the sound (filter). From here on in, please do me a favour – think of the vocal tract like a plastic water bottle, the squishable kind you can buy from any corner store.

The vocal tract

Have you ever blown across the top of a bottle that isn’t completely full? Have you ever noticed that the bottle has a particular pitch that it seems to generate? This is called resonance. Empty volumes (like plastic bottles) have distinct frequencies that they vibrate at when excited (e.g. by blowing across the top of it). You can spot the same effect by banging the side of a long cardboard poster tube and notice the pitch of the noise it emits, or even by humming down the length of that tube. These pitches are referred to as “formants”, and are a by-product of the fact that empty volumes exhibit resonance at particular frequencies.

NOTE: You don’t need to remember all this per se, I merely mention it so you respect the idea that empty volumes have an associated pitch they like to vibrate it, and that these pitches are called formants.

Now, let’s continue the analogy. If you change the shape of the empty volume inside the bottle (e.g. by squeezing it or adding some water in/taking some water out), then blowing across it, the associated pitches it wants to vibrate it (the formants) will have changed. The same effect can be achieved by cutting that long cardboard poster tube to a different length, then banging it again. The change in shape affects the resonance, which in turn affects the formants.

HALFWAY SUMMARY:
– The vocal cords generate specific frequencies (the singer’s pitch)
– The vocal tract resonates at specific frequencies (the formant(s) of the instrument)

In short, despite the chief difference where the cords generate the frequencies whilst the tract doesn’t actually generate those frequencies, both the vocal cords and the vocal tract possess their own particular sets of frequencies that are associated with them.

It’s the interaction between these two sets of specific frequencies that is an important phenomenon for singing.

Here’s the low-down…

The first bridge occurs when a certain frequency generated by the vocal cords happens to pass through a certain corresponding frequency of the vocal tract (a specific formant)*.

As you can see, this makes the whole concept of the first bridge *relatively* straight-forward to understand, but also results in the realisation that it’s a REEEEEEALLY complicated thing to get sorted in singers. If the first bridge happens as two frequencies cross each other, then what happens if they both start changing together? What happens if one suddenly changes during the process?

It’s a complicated system… it’s dependent on the pitch/frequency of the voice, the pitch that the vocal tract wants to vibrate it, which in turn is dependent on the shape of the vocal tract, but is also affected by the volume of the singer (as this affects excitation of the vocal tract).

*Deep breath*

Don’t panic.

This is all completely trainable, and completely manageable… but it takes more than just good exercises. It requires (in my opinion) a structured and logical approach to applying those exercises, so that singers are not constantly hyper-aware of bridges and essentially trying to control a million things at once all whilst trying to sing with emotion, but instead builds the required co-ordination into muscle memory, to thereby make easy connected singing automatic.

So… now you know where the first bridge comes from… What’s stopping you?

* – Specifically, when the second harmonic (H2) generated by the vocal cords passes through the first formant (F1) of the vocal tract. You DON’T need to remember this to be a great singer.

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Open Strings and The Voice

Today I want to talk about open strings and the voice… but first, I want to ask you…

Have you ever heard country music?

A vast swathe of country music – both vintage and modern – is guitar driven. And a lot of the great players (Brad Paisley, Brent Mason, etc) define the sound of guitar. If you’ve never heard some of these guys, go check em out.

Why Country Music?
Well, within country music there are a number of idiosyncratic riffs and sounds (i.e. signature sounds) that we recognise as being distinctly “country” sounding. One of the things that is responsible for this is the use of the “open strings” of a guitar.

What are open strings?
Open strings are strings that are just plucked by the player without them pressing the string down on any one fret, i.e. the strings are essentially just plucked and left to vibrate. This allows country players to do quite complicated sounding riffs that are essentially switching quickly from a fretted note (i.e, pressing the string) to an open note (i.e. not pressing the string). Good players use this to create flurries of notes that sound impossible… but are actually relatively straight-forward because of the way the instrument is tuned and built…

NOTE: The reason the above bits are in bold is because this is EXTREMELY relevant to the rest of this article

Here’s the rub…
While I’ve just said what sounds impossible is relatively straightforward to do, this is really only true within the keys that just happen to share those open strings… As such, if you try and pull off that complicated sounding riff in ANOTHER key that DOESN’T use those open strings… my oh my you are in for a world of pain. Essentially what once sounded impossible but is in fact easy, then ACTUALLY becomes impossible/near-impossible, because you are no longer able to switch easily from a fretted note to an unfretted note… you’re having to fret EVERYTHING…

Trust me when I say that clever utilisation of open strings is a feature of guitars that makes certain kinds of riffs only really possible in certain keys for given instruments, because of the way it’s tuned and how it uses certain strings.

Why do I bring this up?

Because the voice is verrry similar.

Certain melodies, riffs and musical ideas will seem very easy in some keys (relative to your bridges, i.e. the way your voice is built), and seem impossible in other keys… and the intervals and the melody itself hasn’t changed (other than key).

And still further, just changing the key by one semitone will close down some opportunities, and open up other avenues of possibility for the melody/riffing, etc. It’s a constant balancing act.

Why is this?

Well, it’s very similar to the guitar analogy.

If you choose to work WITH the instrument, i.e. take advantage of it’s little idiosyncrasies, taking care to understand and go WITH those qualities rather than work against them, then you will find things a LOT easier… and seemingly impossible sounds become easy enough to pull off. That’s not to say “effortless”, but more natural and co-ordinated (certainly with training).

BUT!! If you INSIST on forcing the voice to do what you intellectually think SHOULD be fine and doable (like insisting that open string guitar riffs should be playable in any key), rather than noticing how things feel and what your voice is telling you will work, then you will find yourself extremely frustrated. This is very much the amateur/non-singer approach, who just tries to wrangle the voice into submission, rather than recognising it’s an instrument in it’s own right… I can say this with a tinge of embarrassment because I definitely USED to be one of those singers.

There’s a lot above to take in, so here’s the take-home message.

“Work WITH your voice, not against it”

Remember that keys matter, and your voice is an instrument that needs to be respected and understood in the way you must learn and understand any other instrument. Above all, don’t force things to happen when you can clearly hear they aren’t.

Have an experiment, and have a ponder! I hope you’ll find something new and useful come out of this, and that you’ll start to hear the quality in your voice increase as a result.

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Clever Use of Keys

Today I want to talk about the clever use of keys. For those of you who don’t know I grew up in Hong Kong. One of the things that you hear a LOT of in HK is canto-pop – i.e. cantonese pop music.

In canto-pop there is a HUGE love for softly sung ballads with lighter voices and higher pitched songs.. often CRAZY high pitched in order to get a much thinner and arguably more feminine sound even from the men.

Other countries in Asia have a very similar preference for pop music, and Korea is no different. A Korean student of mine (who has great taste in music!) brought in this prime example of more Asian lighter-voiced pop from Park Hyo Shin:

IMPORTANT: Even if (like me) you don’t speak Korean, just have a listen to the quality of the voice in the verses – notice how light and airy it is…

This is the result of intentionally picking a higher key than perhaps is vocally ideal for ease in the voice, then overly thinning the voice out in order to make it more comfortable to sing.

Over time this can be verrrry fatiguing or even damaging for the singers’ voice, and can also result in a singing voice that is drastically disparate from the singers speaking – i.e. they sound verrry different when they sing.

While there are many singers that do this, at a very basic level (to one extent or another) this does erode the conversational nature of the singer singing the song…

If singing is about moving people, maintaining a conversational spoken quality to the voice is of critical importance in achieving this… irrespective of style.

The Clever Use of Keys I Mentioned…

Here is another singer from Korea (also brought in my by Korean student) who keeps that conversational quality I mentioned above…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVLgi39b84g

Notice how he bucks the trend of the light voiced Asian pop? There is real depth and definition to his voice, and the WHOLE range is richer for it.

I would probably put money on the notion that if the other singer (Park Hyo Shin) was given the same song, he would probably choose to place it several keys higher to achieve that more thinned out sound (NOTE: I’m reliably informed Park has adjusted his sound to be more appropriate for the natural balance of his speaking voice since that era of his recording life).

By changing the tonal centre, by way of a clever use of keys, singers can not only embrace the best bits of their voice and avoid the pitfalls of any organic instrument, but also create a more conversational spoken quality to their performance… irrespective of style or genre.

Try it yourself!

Try taking a song you feel is a bit of a reach down about 3 semitones and see how it sounds in your voice. It’s not about ego or being macho, it’s about sounding the best for your voice. Remember, 3 semitones is not the magic key change number, it’s just to get you starter in experiencing a different sensation in your voice, and to realise that a clever use of keys and key-changing of your songs is a BIG factor in how good (to great!) you can sound!

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Vocal “Sweet-spots” – Where does my voice sound best?

Many people ask (and search for!) the answer to – where does my voice sound best?. As it happens, I was reading a blog article about moving into head voice by fantastic OC based voice coach, Guy Babusek. This article is excellent reading for anyone brand new to the idea of what it takes (functionally speaking) for the vocal cords to get themselves into head voice and a co-ordination that provides that all desireable mix quality.

The explanation in Guy’s article (which you should definitely read) is perfect to get you started in understanding moving into head voice. And there’s depths to this explanation even at higher levels.

However, I will confess that at certain points in my development I’ve found certain aspects to this explanation a little confusing once I’d FOUND my mix. The challenge with identifying that the vocal cords are constantly (meant to be) thinning and stretching as you ascend and contracting and thickening as you descend, to my mind implies that once you’re mixing your voice should be feeling effortlessly and imperceptibly smooth/perfect when singing songs… not just to the audience but to the singer too… Right? RIGHT?!?

Mmmm, not exactly…

And it’s this misconception I wanted to talk about today.

A “landscape” to your voice

If anything, once I started mixing, I found that the expanded range mix afforded me revealed what you might describe as a “landscape” to my voice, with areas of noticeable harmonic intensity as well as a feeling of physical intensity when approaching or passing through those areas. Now of course, there are always things to be addressing in singer’s voices voice at any stage, and I’m not pretending to have a perfect voice, however, the idea that things are going to be perfectly homogenuous up and down your range is not quite true… and I think that’s worth breaking down, don’t you?

Now some of the more well-read of you might be thinking ‘those areas in your voice, you mean bridges right?’… well, kind of, as these areas are to some extent connected with bridges, but what I’m actually talking about are the unique characteristics of particular instruments. If we could have perfectly homogenous ranges, then we could truly sing in any key we liked, notice no discomfort or difficult in any key, and sound great… but the voice doesn’t work that way, even after years of high quality training.

Your voice is TRULY unique

For better or for worse, we all have uniquely dimensioned instruments, from the shape of our throat and the various chambers in the vocal tract, to the thickness and exact length of our vocal cords. All these things play a part in our instrument’s ideal setup and ultimate tone.

This means that in most cases, mixes will not feel perfectly uniform to the singer themself. There will be pockets of intensity and comfortable areas to sing in and lean into, and areas where the opposite is true.

You can consider these favourable areas to be vocal “sweet-spots” in your voice. Areas where your voice’s unique attributes align to create an intense and aesthetically desireable sound that is your sonic signature, i.e. they are signposts that will help you understand the answer to “where does my voice sound best?”.

WARNING:

If you attempt to locate these or pin these down BEFORE having built your voice to an appropriate standard, you will miss out on your true sweet-spots, and likely will settle for whatever the best tones of your current limitations are. However, once you train your voice in line with Guy’s article, you may well notice it isn’t a perfectly uniform sensation all the way up and back. Guy and I were chatting about this very topic recently, and Guy said that he’d describe his own sensation and experience more as a connected and co-ordinated voice rather than having “one voice” per se, and that neither of us feel it that way.

In that same conversation, both Guy and I chatted about how areas that we used to feel were real *bastard* areas in our voices are now the places that we often want to stick money notes of songs. Isn’t that weird? Often it’s excessive resistance in particular areas of your voice at the beginning of training (the areas that initially get in the way) that indicates once the co-ordination is better, THAT’S where areas of increased sonic intensity and power (i.e. sweet-spots) are hiding. Often these areas can feel like they are screwing everything up pre-training!

As such, if you’re feeling like your mix is not uniform even after years of quality training, this is not abnormal, and you should not take this as a slight. This can be (with the assumption of correct training) taken as a hint as to where your sweet spots may lie, where money notes and key notes of song melodies should be placed to exploit YOUR sonic signature.

SMALL FOOTNOTE:

To those who’ve never mixed, I’m afraid this may not make a lot (or any!) sense. To those who’ve been mixing for a while but are not satisfied in some undefinable way with their mix and you can’t understand why it’s not that perfect “one voice” that so many talk about… I really hope this sheds some light on an oft-underdiscussed topic.

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Tori Amos – Winter

A wonderful client brought this song in today and it REALLY mated well with her voice.

A real lush richness in the lower registers as well as some sweet vocal stylings in the upper register. MASSIVELY underrated vocals in this one. Check it out!

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