I’m celebrating the fact that over the past two months, I have experienced a measurable improvement in my cardiorespiratory fitness. During an hour-long cardio session yesterday, I burned 85 more calories than I had been able to while using the same machine at the same settings the beginning of the summer. In addition, my heart beat on average 15–20 fewer times per minute throughout. In other words, I am now objectively able to accomplish more work with less effort in the same period of time.
Of course, the numbers are nowhere near as important to me as the way in which I subjectively experience my fitness. I feel more energetic upon waking in the morning and can climb stairs and haul groceries with a noticeable decrease in effort. And I can reasonably expect that this will hold true for all physical activities, both the things I engage in to improve strength and stamina as well as running errands, practicing singing, and so on.
The more ambitious and long-term your goals, the more important it is that you track your progress in order to gauge where you are in relation to your goals and sustain the motivation you need to keep going. In George Leonard’s succinct book Mastery, he points out that the journey to excellence in any endeavor is characterized by long plateaus punctuated by incremental breakthroughs. “Learning any new skill involves relatively brief spurts of progress, each of which is followed by a slight decline to a plateau somewhat higher in most cases than that which preceded it,” writes Leonard. “To take the master’s journey, you have to practice diligently, striving to hone your skills, to attain new levels of competence” while accepting that there may be long stretches of time when you seem to be going nowhere. The relative infrequency of significant breakthroughs makes it all the more important that you be able to recognize and quantify them when they occur.
Leonard’s writing is based on his experiences practicing and teaching Aikido. Martial artists and athletes rely on established milestones and clear, quantifiable criteria in setting and pursuing short- and long-term goals, such as a hierarchy of sashes or belts to be earned or the measurable speed and power with which a given physical activity can be accomplished. Clear criteria and well-defined milestones would prove just as useful for those who wish to pursue mastery in singing, but we lack similar traditional means for tracking our progress. The purpose of this column is to discuss the value of tracking vocal progress and explore benchmarks that can potentially help us measure our work.
Every voice is unique, and many aspects of vocal technique and beauty cannot be measured objectively. Many skills and qualities, however, are quantifiable:
-Pitch range
-Volume range
-Intonation
-Resonance
-Clarity of articulation
-Stamina
-Consistency
-Registration
-Flexibility
Beauty of tone may not be something that can be assessed objectively, but in my opinion vocal beauty is characterized by an absence of excessive effort or strain, both which can be observed and, to some extent, measured.
Martial arts practices and athletic training programs tend to be structured and prescriptive. By contrast, most approaches to vocal technique that I am aware of consist of exercise sequences that, when performed regularly, engender balanced overall development. Voice teachers may occasionally assign a specific exercise intended to rehabilitate a particular flaw or may customize their vocalises to suit students at different skill levels. But the general idea is that if you perform their basic series of exercises on a regular basis, you will progress toward mastery. There is no formal process to assess a singer’s expertise with regard to the skills and qualities listed above nor a structured means to set specific goals to improve them and track their progress.
I believe, however, that we could develop the means to assess and track progress. Were we to create a comprehensive means, it would help singers make more effective use of their time in the practice room, assess their readiness for various educational and professional opportunities, and sustain their motivation along the way.
There exist some studies on the objective evaluation of classical singers. “Development of an Auditory-Perceptual Rating Instrument for the Operatic Singing Voice,” by Jennifer M. Oates, Belinda Bain, Pamela Davis, Janice Chapman, and Dianna Kenny (2006) explores seven factors that determine vocal quality—vibrato, resonance balance, ring, pitch accuracy, breath management, evenness of tone, and strain—to develop an auditory-perceptual instrument for rating classical singers. But even if you find their instrument useful for evaluating voices, it cannot tell you the reasons that a given voice falls short, what it would take to improve it, or how to track whether a singer is getting better.
Spectrography is a useful tool for assessing resonance and articulation. It provides a visual display of the overtone series you are producing on a given pitch and vowel and facilitates comparing your production with an ideal scenario. It cannot teach you how to optimize overtone production—that would require a targeted strategy—but it can help you track your progress.
There are some aspects of your singing that you can assess fairly objectively through observation, and I feel that it is well worth your time to do so. For example, there are probably some lengthy phrases in your repertoire that you can use to measure your breathing stamina. A metronome can help you gauge the swiftness and flexibility of your coloratura. And while it’s a somewhat subjective tool, you can rate on a scale of 1 to 10 the level of strain you experience when executing a particular note or passage. You can use this data to set goals, apply favorite exercises or learn new ones that you believe will facilitate improvements, and repeat your self-assessment at regular intervals.
I recently began engaging in such a process for the purpose of extending my range. I am currently preparing an aria that features a high C that I once performed on a regular basis. However, for the past decade or so I have been spending most of my time teaching and writing and perform only occasionally. So I do not sustain high notes on a daily basis and will have to work up to it.
There was once a time when that would have meant just going for it again and again, day after day, pushing my voice a little harder and longer each time and cultivating the requisite tolerance with the discomfort that it would cause. The result was a high C that would probably come out in performance or audition but would not possess much bloom and would feel strained, impairing my ability to both communicate my character’s intent in that moment and create beautiful music.
If the goal were just to produce a high C, then I could be said to have accomplished my mission—but my goal is to perform the music expressively. So I have to devise a strategy that will progressively enable me to sing that pitch more freely and criteria for tracking my progress that go beyond whether or not “it comes out.”
Given my strengths and weaknesses, I suspected that what I needed was more effective breath management and more precise resonance/vowel definition (i.e., “space”). I have an arsenal of exercises that I regularly apply in my teaching for working on these things. It’s the tracking part that is difficult to manage.
I decided that the most useful criterion for this was assessing tongue retraction, which I can monitor both visually and with touch—singing higher freely, for me, means becoming able to produce higher notes without retracting my tongue. When I began to pursue this goal, the highest note I could sing without retracting my tongue was a B-flat.
At the time of this writing, I can manage a B-natural with a relaxed tongue. Pitches above that will still “come out” but they will not be as free and expressive. So far, my strategy is working. If at some point it ceases to yield further progress, I’ll need to devise a new strategy, but I am encouraged to continue because I am getting closer to my goal.
I do not know whether it will ever be possible to create a means of assessing vocal progress that is as clearly structured as a martial arts belt progression or as precise as a heart rate monitor. But I do believe that we can develop techniques for assessing and measuring certain skills that could focus our work in the studio, expedite our progress, and alert us to ways in which our current regimen may need to evolve in order to move us towards mastery.
Take inventory of your strengths and weaknesses, analyze the more elusive passages in your songs and arias, and seek specific strategies that will bring the skills and qualities you desire within reach.
