This week I was having a discussion with a client about vocal weakness. Many people who come to me for voice coaching suffer from similar complaints of their voice feeling weak/not strong enough, though these are often in different arenas.
Some are professional performers who experience vocal decline in power/tone. Others require their voice for speaking and communicating within their job and notice it cannot deliver what they are looking for. Many are in choirs or sing for pleasure, and they’ve noticed their voice change for the worse over some period of time, and they want to remedy it.
Traits of a weak/weaker voice
The exact traits of a weak voice are fairly idenitifiable for most, e.g.
– lighter or thinner timbre,
– excessive breathiness,
– instability in the tone,
– quiet speaking or singing volume, etc.
However, we need to put this in greater context, in that all voices are unique and different. Even WITH training and maximum vocal development, some voices will be lighter and quieter than others and others will be louder and weightier than others (and some will be in-between). Some voices when trained perfectly will have more breathiness in their tone, others will have less/none. We perceive this as vocal weakness when these traits seem EXCESSIVE.
But what factors can cause this?
Age
I have written countless times about how voices are meant to peak in their 50s, but this only holds true if people are working on their voice and training it to handle this. In reality, most people don’t look after their voices, and as their body becomes less supple and robust with age (compared with youth) wear and tear is more easily acquired, and takes longer to recover from.
Older voices tend to lose muscle (when not built or maintained), and can lead to vocal ‘wobble’ in the voice. This is where there is insufficient muscle or muscle tone to maintain a stable tone in the voice. This is usually most overt in female choral singers over age 50/60. As the voice becomes weightier with age, such singers desire to sound more choral, so resort to a lighter and lighter sound to side-step the increased weight in their voice. Men tend to notice the bottom end of their voice seep away, and end up with a drier scratchier version of what they once had.
In both cases this is a decrease in muscle tone, and an increase in vocal weakness. In reality, good vocal control involves integrating the bottom range into the top range, and learning to navigate that with no perceiveable switch. This gets harder to solve the later one comes to train their voice. Hence, age is one of the biggest challenges people can face in terms of keeping their voice sounding even and strong.
Damage
This can be acute or chronic. Sometimes people suffer from more serious incidents like nodules, granulomas, etc, but it can be as simple as speaking excessively on a voice that is losing it’s muscle tone (per my point about age).
If there is swelling, wear/tear, abnormality in the vocal fold tissue or other parts of the voice, often people will be able to speak but something will not sound right. Some men or women who smoke or drink, suffer from acid reflux, etc can have a noticeable raspy sounding voice much of the time. There is a precipitating injury (however mild), but the act of constantly speaking keeps wearing down the voice, making the issue worse and denying the body a chance to recover. Singers coming off a cold often don’t give themselves enough time to recover and end up limping on with a weak voice for many months.
More serious injuries, e.g. trauma from giving birth, neck injury, vocal trauma from singing, can also be a factor. The biggest issue I’ve seen is people not fully recovering before getting back to doing what they were doing before, especially worrisome if the behaviour they were engaging in before was responsible for such damage.
Lack of vocal development
I am trying to avoid the use of the word ‘training’ here, quite simply because I try not to think about my voice when I am speaking. Similarly so when singing. Our goal with voice coaching is to build a voice that is (well, yes, trained… but that is) vocally developed such that it does not suffer from the above issues, whether or not we are deeply thinking about it. When a voice can move evenly from the bottom to the top and back again, with no breaks, flips or switches, we tend not to suffer from such issues.
Why would this be? The act of doing the training instils in the body not just the correct technique, but a physical aversion to doing something it knows is a bad idea. I can tell when I’m at a pub and I’m speaking slightly too loud – how? Because it FEELS wrong. I have used my voice enough through training such that I know when I’m overstepping the mark. I know when an environment is not conducive to me being heard, so I avoid trying to be heard over volumes I cannot compete with. This is a by-product of training, but it’s a state of vocal development that keeps voices functioning well at any age.
Improper deployment of their voice
This overlaps with my previous point, which is centred around not trying to deploy your voice in a way it cannot perform.
For example, if you have a lighter voice, your voice will be quieter but also less deep than other voices. Trying to compete with deeper voices in the frequency that deeper voices dominate in is a waste of time. You won’t sound right, you’ll sound quiet, and it’ll be exhausting. Repeatedly doing this also wears the voice down and introduces weakness/instability into the voice.
Instead, we have to build voices so that they can operate well in WHATEVER range they work best in. The richness and fullness in one’s voice comes from building it and using it well, rather than trying to compete with others at what their voices do well. This is not something I can advise on without working with and building someone’s voice to a reasonable degree, and by then, the vocal development tends to do all the heavy lifting for me/the voice user.
There’s many examples I could give, but I hope this gives you a sense of why voices can find themselves becoming weak and sounding as such.
Conclusion
The answer to all of this is point 3. If we can instil a level of vocal development in someone’s instrument and body, they will tend to do more of the good things, avoid more of the bad things, and have some physiological awareness of inevitable changes that could otherwise derail their voice.