Oren Lathrop Brown* taught voice at The Juilliard School for nearly two decades. His book, Discover Your Voice: How to Develop Healthy Voice Habits, is an important source book for anyone who sings, teaches singing, or who has an interest in the singing voice. Brown’s education and professional training was in the field of singing, but he is one of the pioneers in the field of voice therapy. Thanks to his 50 years of work with all types of voice disorders, his text offers a unique perspective on the “how-to” of healthy, vibrant singing. This article seeks to distill into a few pages the foundational principles of Brown’s personal approach to vocal development.
“Learning to sing is a process of discovering what your voice can do for you. It isn’t so much a matter of making sounds as it is a matter of learning how to let sounds happen. Through experimentation, you become aware of what is taking place. By a process of selection, you reinforce what is easy through repetition” (p.xiii).
This opening statement underscores one of the fundamental differences between Brown’s teaching and that of many others. Just as a voice therapist seeks facilitating techniques that produce a client’s best voice, Brown believes that voice study, particularly in vocalization, should seek to discover those “techniques” or exercises that facilitate a singer’s most efficient (easy) sound.
The concept of primal sound is critical to this idea of vocal discovery. Brown describes this sound as reflexive sound, or involuntary sound. The primal sound is a product of the lower brain, the portion of the brain responsible for emotional expression. He suggests several reflexive sounds that you might try for yourself. For example, just say, “huh!” as if astonished, or try “uh-huh” as in an expression of agreement. You might also try a light laugh and prolong the last sound. Then extend one of these reflexive sounds into a long sigh, he suggests.
Next, try prolonging the reflexive sound and let it glide upwards and downwards. By beginning with an involuntary sound, you can avoid many problems with voice onset. By elongating the sound, the singer begins to establish a neural bridge between the lower brain (the source of emotional expression) and the upper brain, the cortex (the thinking part of the brain). Primal sound benefits the singer in two ways, writes Brown: it facilitates the emotional expression that allows the artist to communicate to the audience, and it promotes vocal freedom.
In the next two chapters, Brown discusses release, posture and breath. Teachers of singing agree almost universally upon the importance of proper posture and breathing. Release is a topic mentioned less often. Brown underscores the fact that most interfering tensions are acquired, and that before we sing, we should do all we can to reestablish a physical environment for the uninhibited release of energy, our goal being to “allow all possible freedom to carry out the conditioned response” (p.9). He suggests that many students are skipping these simple relaxing exercises (head rolls, jaw loosening movements, self-massage of jaw and neck, easy breathing, etc.) because they are so basic that they seem unnecessary.
Primal sound, release, posture, and breathing prepare us for the experience of letting the voice respond to a thought and a flow of air. The vocal folds adjust automatically to the thought of pitch, and research has shown that relaxed muscles produce fuller resonance and stronger tone. So it becomes the singer’s goal to start vocalization “looking not for the full-blown, cultivated voice that comes with practice, but the normal, spontaneous, human sound, free of all effort to ‘do’ anything” (p.39).
These utterances should be thought of as neither soft nor loud. In vocalization, we are seeking to condition responses, to establish a pattern of ease and effortlessness. Because of this, Brown places much emphasis on downward motion in vocalization.
Brown recommends beginning vocalization with the primal “uh,” the task being to discover your primal sound and cultivate it through exercises that release the tone. You might begin the process by releasing an audible sigh from high to low several times, he says. You could follow with a glide from 5 down to 1, beginning in the medium range of the voice (A or A-flat gliding down to D or D-flat). The way the voice responds should be exactly the same with or without definite pitch. Repeat this easy glide downward by half steps, after which you might extend the glide to cover an octave, beginning around C. After you have sequenced this down by half steps, skip up to D and sequence down once more.
“Letting tones slide from top to bottom seems too easy to be called singing, but it is the very root of all that follows” (p.41). Vocalization is conditioning responses in the muscles. Rather than challenging the muscles, we want to reinforce an easy response.
Follow these glides with downward scales from 5 and 8, all sung without placing special emphasis on each note. Use “uh” (schwa) for these beginning exercises because we use fewer muscular adjustments for this vowel, Brown explains. Follow that up with hums and lip trills that follow the same descending patterns and sequences.
It bears restating here that these exercises may seem so simple as to appear unimportant, but they are, in fact, foundational. We are looking to establish a feeling of complete release in the utterance of each sound, because habits established correctly early on, enable all other (more advanced) vocal activities.
Brown makes several arguments for this practice of downward vocalization. I will mention two here.
There is a danger in the tendency to raise pitch by increasing breath pressure. Shaping vocalizes in a downward fashion allows the vocal folds to learn to adjust for pitch without the interference of increased pressure. Higher ranges need to develop with unstrained exercises over a period of time. Downward exercises facilitate the high range by placing the highest pitch at the beginning of the utterance, when the lungs are full.
“If you feel that your larynx is in a low, relaxed position just before you finish taking a breath, then it is ready to initiate the tone,” Brown teaches. “…The sensation should be that you almost start to sing before you finish taking a breath” (p. 39).
After you establish easy downward movement in the voice, you can add exercises that begin with a downward sweep and then move upward and downward. For these glides and scales, singers should feel a bounce on the lower note and float back up lightly, like a roller coaster that starts at a high peak “and is carried over the next peak by momentum” (p. 41). Then the exploration of other vowels begins. Vowels should be formed as easily as possible, maintaining the free open sense of the primal “uh” as the basis for their production.
In addition to facilitating ease in the upper ranges, Brown’s approach to vocalization also promotes register adjustment. Brown defines register adjustment as the smooth transition between high and low that is the result of carrying over one register into the range of another and adding the second register without letting go of the first (p. 52). Throughout the range of the voice, the proportion of light to heavy is constantly changing. Ideally, both the heavy and the light are working all the time.
The heavy register (register 2) is the register used in your speaking voice. It is quite strong because it has been used throughout your life, every time you speak. In the untrained voice, register 2 activates the thyroarytenoid muscles without activation of the cricothyroids. Register 3 activates the cricothyroids, which exert a longitudinal pull on the vocal folds. Singers learn to bridge the gap when they learn to keep the cricothyroids active while adding the thyroarytenoids at the same time. By beginning exercises with a light sound and gliding downward, gradually allowing the voice to fill out, we are establishing register adjustment.
Some singers may have to work at bridging the gap for several weeks before they are successful. Brown offers the following suggestion. At the point where the “break” occurs, feel a sense of slight yawn at the back of your throat, and allow the tones to become even lighter and more breathy. Once you can slide from register 3 (higher) to register 2 (lower) without a break then you are ready to add exercises that return to the top. These should return you to the same light quality you started with. It is necessary to lighten the voice immediately when ascending.
There is no way to include all the wisdom contained in “Discover Your Voice” in this short article. I have sought here only to highlight those aspects of Brown’s teaching that are most foundational. I encourage interested singers to read the rest for themselves.
Singing requires three things:
1) An understanding of how the voice functions,
2) An awareness of what is happening,
3) The will to put it to use. Practice every day. Too little is
always better than too much. Think, let, trust—that was Oren Brown’s credo.
Brown’s text includes an appendix of vocalizes that are organized according to difficulty, and most importantly, it comes with a CD that demonstrates primal sound and the exercises suggested throughout the book. For those who consider themselves anatomy and physiology phobic, Brown’s book is a surprisingly easy read. The text contains all the vital information about the structures and functions of the human voice, but presents it in such a reader-friendly manner that comprehension seems almost effortless. Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Mr. Brown’s understanding must have run very deep indeed.
Brown, Oren L. “Discover Your Voice: How to Develop Healthy Voice Habits.” San Diego: Singular Publishing Group, 1996. ISBN 1-56593-704-X.
Table of Contents:
1. Primal Sound
2. Release
3. Posture and Breathing
4. Eliciting Pitches: Beginning Exercises
5. Range and Registers
6. Voice Classification: Children’s Voices
7. Agility
8. Resonance and Power
9. Growth and Maturation
10. Articulation
11. Practice Patterns
12. Interpretation: Program Thoughts
13. Requirements for a Professional Career
14. Choral Singing
15. Physical Facts
16. Laryngeal Anatomy and Physiology
17. Neurology and the Brain
18. Hearing
19. Enigmas
20. Voice Problems and Therapy
21. Hints for Teachers
*Oren Brown passed away in March 2004. See the article in CS archives, August 2004 www.classicalsinger.com.
