MTD Vocal Freedom

One of my earliest memories is from when I was around 6 years old sitting in my little year 2 classroom, with little colouring pencil pots on the table and a little carpet in front of our teacher’s desk for story time.

I remember singing something quietly and then being struck suddenly with fear. I turned to my friend sitting next to me and I said to her – ‘does my voice sound air-y when I sing?’ She looked confused. She said no. I sang something small to her to make sure. ‘Are you sure?’ She said she was sure.

I didn’t think it was at all bizarre at the time, but my god when this memory came back to me it rang MASSIVE alarm bells. What 6-year-old is analysing the sound their singing makes with a sense of fear and apprehension? What 6-year-old is preoccupied with how they sound to others, instead of just enjoying singing for singing’s sake?

I don’t know for sure where adjusting vocalising to sound a certain way first started but, clearly, judging my sound had already started by age 6. I had a fear that my voice wouldn’t be ‘pure’ if it was too breathy. I can’t emphasise enough just how many things are wrong with this. I WISH I could go back in time, pull up an undersized plastic chair and say to 6-year-old me – ‘Please don’t judge your singing, Emily. Focus on your own enjoyment and pleasure. That comes first.’

The way I was viewing singing was warped, and idolising musical theatre singers did not help. Every voice I listened to on MT soundtracks sounded crystal clear, ‘pure’ and absolutely perfect to me. I wanted to sound like them. Except that I was coming up with my own methods to achieve that sound – or, I should say, to achieve something that sounded like that sound to my own ears. I started holding back my breath when I sang, to avoid sounding too air-y. However, as Janice Chapman states in her book Singing and Teaching Singing: A Holistic Approach to Classical Voice, ‘the singer who is using his or her own ears for feedback tends to develop vocal faults as a result.’ And that’s exactly what happened to me.

Instead of learning about healthy and effortless vocalisation and listening to my body, I was results-focused. I wanted to achieve a certain sound, and I would do whatever I needed to get it, even if that didn’t feel comfortable. In a sense this is very much the way of the Western world – achieve results and validation for your work even if it stresses you out in the process. Even if your body is screaming out at you to stop. Even if you’re getting migraines, and back aches, and anxiety.

If you are prioritising wanting to SOUND a certain way, you are at risk of overriding the sounds your body wants to naturally make, which in turn overrides your true emotional expression and intuition. It’s no wonder my body became unhappy with me. It was the ultimate betrayal. The message I was sending to my body was, ‘I don’t care what you want or how you feel, I’m going to push you to be perfect, even if I have to drag you there, kicking and screaming.’

So there’s an emotional side of altering your singing to sound a certain way and overriding what your body wants to do. Your body and brain are no longer in alignment, and your full self-expression is blocked. There’s also physical repercussions. When you step in to alter a natural bodily function, changing one thing can impact the whole system, and other muscles jump in to try and compensate for what now isn’t ‘working’. In my case, I held back my breath which is essentially the engine for your voice. Without an adequate power source, other muscles started to get involved to compensate.

You might have experienced this bodily function from having a physical injury. When you injure a muscle and it’s unable to function properly, a neighbouring one jumps in to help it out. Our bodies are so clever, and they are always trying their best to help us to survive. But sometimes, if we are out of alignment and we don’t get professional intervention (like physiotherapy), this can take us down a bad route of developing unhelpful habits which can lead to further problems or injury.

Although we have the ability to mimic other singers, and all singers have wonderful capabilities to make a range of healthy beautiful sounds, singing is about emotional expression, and embracing the uniqueness of YOUR voice over anyone else’s. We have to be able to prioritise pleasure over perfection in our singing practice, emotional authenticity over self-judgement. Ironically, this is the space where the beautiful singing comes from anyway.

When you were growing up, what did you want to sound like? Do you still try to sound like other singers you admire? What is the ‘ideal’ singing voice to you, and do you find yourself falling ‘short’ of that ideal? 

Please write in with your experiences, or with suggestions about what you’d like more of in this blog. I’d love to hear from you! Stay tuned for more each week.