A beautiful voice is a free voice. When you find yourself exceptionally moved or dazzled by a singer, it’s likely that one of the most significant things that you are responding to is the sense of freedom that characterizes their performance—an effortless flow of sound, unfettered musicality, and unrestrained emotional sincerity. As a singer, your most memorable and satisfying experiences are likely to occur when you feel completely free to express yourself.
We experience limitations to our vocal freedom as tangible constraints. When you cannot execute a pitch, vowel, or overall phrase in accordance with your wishes, you will likely find yourself engaged in a struggle that elicits uncomfortable physical sensations.
To free your voice, you must identify patterns of tension and resistance in the musculature governing breathing, phonation, articulation, and resonance and then resolve them. Sometimes this involves unmasking and releasing rigidity; other times it involves noting inefficient patterns of coordination and replacing them with movements that facilitate greater freedom. Any chronic tension or suboptimal coordination that impedes the flow of breath, prevents the vocal folds from vibrating together cleanly, inhibits vibrancy, impedes articulation, or muffles resonance will likely also give rise to unpleasant physical sensations.
The freer your voice becomes, the less sensation you are likely to experience. My colleagues and students frequently report that their experience of free singing is accompanied by an almost complete lack of localized physical sensation. They describe a global sense of ease, poise, connectedness, and effervescence. Conversely, when something is amiss, they describe localized sensations of strain, tightness, stiffness, and pressure. These sensations can sometimes become quite intense—a singer recently told me that when things aren’t going well, “it’s like pulling a brick out of my face,” while another complained that “it took a car battery and jumper cables to get it started today!”
When you encounter physical resistance of any kind while singing, I believe the natural and instinctive impulse is to override it, either through direct manipulation or an increase in breath pressure. The impulse to override can kick in so swiftly that it is often difficult to observe. While in the middle of a phrase, it arises as an instinctive sense that some tension or stiffness is about to impede your path to the climactic high note, dampen your vibrato or resonance, destabilize your coloratura, or otherwise interfere with the flow of sound and expression—and you respond by taking whatever action feels necessary to complete the phrase.
By doing so, you are compensating for the resistance rather than resolving it.
Compensation
With regard to physical activity, “compensation” refers to the correction of a lack or temporary loss of strength or mobility in one part of the body through increased functioning in another part. For example, when someone walks with crutches while a broken leg heals, their upper body strength compensates for the weakened leg.
Here are three examples of the ways that singers sometimes compensate for weakness or poor coordination:
-Tightness at the glottis can be overridden by breath pressure catalyzed by the contraction of the abdominal muscles.
-Rigidity that reduces the larynx’s ability to tilt can be compensated for by elevating and depressing the larynx.
-Poorly configured resonance space can be compensated for by dropping the jaw and spreading the lips laterally.
While some singers are able to become quite adept at compensating for stiffness or poor coordination, compensations add layers of complexity that make singing more effortful. It is far preferable to:
-Become aware of the role that compensations may be playing in your technique;
-Investigate what you may be compensating for;
-Alleviate any problems at the source.
Unmasking Compensations
Because compensations are often the result of instinctive, unconscious adjustments singers build into their technique, they can be difficult to detect. But whenever you experience unpleasant localized sensations coupled with inconsistent or involuntary movements, you may be on the trail of a compensation masquerading as a component of your technique.
Unpleasant Localized Sensations
Physical sensations are your body’s means of drawing your awareness to areas that need it and providing you with feedback—pleasant or unpleasant—to help you decide whether or not you should continue doing what you’re doing. The global feeling of ease you experience when your voice is free is an example of positive sensory feedback. When your singing elicits a localized sensation of strain or tightness, your body is trying to alert you to a problem. You have encountered some resistance, and what you are sensing is the result of the effort you are exerting in order to contend with it.
The resistance may be the result of an unintended action. For example, you may be retracting your tongue or protruding your jaw. The resistance may stem from chronic muscular imbalances, such as an exaggerated curve of your neck that reduces range of motion for your larynx and the structures governing resonance. Both kinds of resistance commonly give rise to localized sensations of strain or stiffness due to the force necessary to override them in order for your voice to respond the way you want it to.
Inconsistent or Involuntary Movements
Anything that you do either inconsistently or involuntarily while singing may be evidence of a compensation. The most common compensatory behavior is sporadic, unintended engagement of the abdominal muscles and/or rib cage to push air out. As I discussed in last month’s column, there are a variety of approaches to breath management that can work beautifully for different singers, but a hallmark of efficient breath management is that it is a procedure that can be applied consistently. If you find yourself sporadically and intensely engaging your abdominal muscles, or any other part of your torso that can potentially be used to increase subglottic breath pressure, this departure from otherwise consistent breath coordination is likely compensating for some resistance that you would be better off resolving.
Involuntary movements of your articulators may also serve a compensatory role. If you find that your jaw, lips, tongue and/or soft palate seem to have minds of their own in certain parts of your range, it may be that you are unconsciously using them to carve out extra room for resonance and laryngeal movement, compensating for a lack of ability to create adequate space without their participation.
The Challenges of Decompensation
In psychology, “decompensation” refers to the failure of a defense mechanism. Relinquishing defense mechanisms is often a key component in resolving psychological issues, but it can lead to an exacerbation of these issues until a more honest and empowering way of handling them has been developed.
Likewise, ceasing to compensate for a vocal issue will reveal the issue the compensation was concealing. It’s vital to understand that this is an integral step in resolving the issue. You must remain confident that the development of improved coordination and skill will render your singing far more effortless than the compensations you must now relinquish ever could.
I apologize for being tautological, but when you cease to compensate for a problem, what you are left with is the problem. Intonation inaccuracies; irregular or absent vibrato; inadequate resonance, focus, or volume; and a larynx that ascends as the pitch ascends are all examples of technical flaws that can be compensated for by applying extra breath pressure or deliberately manipulating the larynx and/or articulators.
Expose these problems, and it may feel as though you have completely forgotten how to sing. You may temporarily loathe the way your voice sounds, fear that it’s never going to get fixed, and find yourself so distracted and emotionally overwrought by the situation that it can be very hard to do the dispassionate work of observing what is going on, troubleshooting for the possible causes, and applying strategic solutions.
Compensations can be highly addictive. Even after it becomes clear that you have been masking a problem rather than addressing it, it can be very hard to let go of the compensation if you can’t stand the resulting sound. I have a student who had quite a memorable reaction upon realizing that she had been fiercely engaging her abdominal muscles to compensate for habitual overadduction of her vocal folds. After an initial, brave attempt to free up her glottis and inhibit her abs, she stopped, faced me, and with a dramatic glare declared: “I do not want to stop pushing!”
Making adjustments to your technique typically involves actively inhibiting old habits while intentionally engaging in the new, more desirable behavior. You can’t just flip a switch, so for a period of time you will likely be simultaneously doing both the right thing and the wrong thing, thus engaging in kind of a tug of war with yourself. During this period, you will not be able to create your sound in the reliable but effortful old way or experience the new freedom you are cultivating. If, when you emit the occasional odd or unstable sound, you allow yourself to greet it with detached fascination rather than intense frustration, your transition will proceed more swiftly and pleasantly.
When the Compensations Are the Technique
When an untrained singer is gifted with a naturally beautiful voice and produces a fairly consistent sound, their first teacher may be tempted to apply an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach to their education, believing that the best strategy is to avoid interfering with the expression of their talent and simply tweak those few things that do not seem to be well aligned.
Unfortunately, this gifted student will not be free to express themselves without interference. The free flow of their expression will be interrupted every time they find it necessary to administer a compensatory tweak. They may be able to pull this off relatively imperceptibly, but it will pull focus and energy from their musicianship and require unnecessary effort.
While a student with a naturally beautiful, relatively disentangled voice may still enjoy some success with an “if it ain’t broke . . . ” paradigm, teachers who espouse such an approach with all of their students are essentially teaching compensations rather than a technique without realizing that this is what they are doing. They identify the most beautiful, free sound their students appear capable of producing and then give them tweaks to be able to replicate that sound on all pitches and phonemes at varying dynamic levels. It’s actually a highly intuitive approach and it can appear effective for an extended period of time—until the student inevitably exhausts the possibilities of what these compensatory tweaks can afford them.
In The Naked Voice: A Wholistic Approach to Singing, W. Stephen Smith describes the limitations of this teaching style. “If a singer always sings flat on a particular pitch, the teacher might say, ‘At that pitch you must always smile and lift your cheeks,’” Smith writes. “That may fix the pitch problem on that pitch, but it won’t solve the deeper problem of why the singer was flat on that note . . . I call it a ‘trick’ because it is a temporary fix. These tricks . . . do not address the problem at its source, but because they do temporarily make singing better, the singer is lulled into thinking that this approach can solve any problem. However, if the problem is not addressed at its root, it will reappear as a different symptom at a later time, which will require another trick to fix it. The ultimate outcome of this approach is that the singer sounds like a bag of tricks.”
Compensations are an inevitable consequence of the fact that singers all start off as self-taught. The instinctive way to navigate your range, match pitch, and use your breath will rarely be the most effective way. No one starts off with a voice free of resistance. When you reach the physical limits of what it seems your voice can do freely and naturally, you will reflexively employ whatever workarounds will enable you to sing as high, low, loud, and soft as you intend. But if you want to sing freely, you must replace these compensations with a comprehensive technique.
Understand that whenever you feel tightness or strain, there is likely to be an easier, freer way to go about things. You should investigate what that might be. Seek teachers who offer elegant, comprehensive solutions rather than quick fixes and recognize that working with them will entail a transitional period of decompensation. If you fail to cultivate the equanimity needed to survive these transitions with your psyche intact, you will revert to your compensations despite the instruction and impede your own progress.
