March has been a busy month for Vocal Process with four different courses. The first course, Successful Singing Auditions, was reported in edition 23 of the Vocal Process eZINE. Here are reports on the remaining three:
 

The Developing Voice on March 17th played to a full house at the Chenies Street building of RADA. The participants included singing teachers, choral trainers and school teachers and peripatetic musicians. Jenevora Williams is a concise and experienced presenter, and the day began with an overview of the vocal mechanism. The information on the development of the larynx from birth to adulthood helped to put into context vocal training for children and adolescents. It also helped participants identify tasks that were not appropriate for children and why some instructions were impossible for them to carry out. Breathing, range and tone colour were all discussed, and questions were invited and answered throughout the day.

Jenevora played a number of recordings of young singers in various stages of change, and included a superb piece of editing where in five sentences a single speaker moved through all five stages of change.

Our thanks go to the young singers (boys and girls) who agreed to be taught live "under glass". The repertoire was varied, from Musical Theatre pieces through folksong to a beautiful Poulenc song delivered in French.

This popular course forms part of the Integrated Voice^TM programme, and will be returning at the end of the year.

 

The following week, Gillyanne had two appointments to keep in the North-East
 

On Friday 23rd March I had been invited to present at the 'Sing for Health Conference' organised by Sage Gateshead, 20,000 Voices and MusicLeader North East. Our brief was to talk about the "physical and mental health benefits of regular singing activity". My contribution was an hour on How the Voice Works: a power-point presentation on key aspects of healthy singing that can be learned by anyone.

Since I don't believe in 'non-singers' everyone was invited to take part and have a go as I took them through techniques for opening the throat, making a comfortable sound, breath use and tips on posture. The session was attended by an eclectic group including music and singing teachers, project leaders and community health development workers. Jeremy's endoscopy video ebook 'Looking at a Voice' provided one of the session's highlights, eliciting 'Ah-ha' moments for quite a number of participants.

The workshop on Saturday 24th was open to the public, and around 45 people attended. It was another mixed bag of participants, although all were involved with singing and music-making in some way. SAGE encourages music in the community so we were joined by community musicians, teachers working with early stages and choral leaders working with silver singer groups, as well as performers and teachers of singing.

Delegate expectations included:

Help my choir to sing better and improve my singing voice

Greater insight into running vocal workshops

Methods to inspire my vocal groups, ways of protecting my voice

Tackle problems like dropping pitch

Warm-up/cool down exercises

Safety in big singing for popular music

A shot in the arm

Very practical tools on how to approach vocal health and techniques with all ages

The group were attentive, generous with each other and open to the challenge of exploring new techniques together. I'm looking forward to more at SAGE in the future.

A reminder of our forthcoming courses

Singing and the Actor Training The next London Singing and the Actor Training will take place on 13-15 July. The Singing and the Actor Training course is packed with information, techniques and training on vocal styles and sounds based on Gillyanne's groundbreaking book. Gillyanne will be teaching this course assisted on this occasion by Gill Main. Gill has taken extensive training with us at Vocal Process and has also facilitated on a number of courses. She teaches at the London Studio Centre and has a particular interest in pop and contemporary styles and sounds.

If you are considering applying for the Integrated Voice^TM training programme, book on Singing and the Actor Training without delay!
 

But before that, With One Voice is back at RADA this Saturday 28th April. Gillyanne and guest tutor David Carey will guide you through key aspects of training for singing and spoken voice. The course begins with an historical perspective on why training for the two disciplines of spoken and sung voice has evolved differently.

Practical work on the course focuses on:

Key targets in singing and voice training

Diagnostic tips for common restrictive problems

Personal input on your voice during the workshops

Moving successfully from spoken to sung voice and back again.

Students, performers and teachers are all invited to this workshop, and there are special discounts for Equity, MU and ISM members. We also have the Vocal Process Student+Teacher scheme in place for this day workshop.

Book on With One Voice by clicking here.
 

You may remember that the latest video ebook in the highly successful Looking at a Voice series (number 5) had been lost late last year in a disastrous visit to computer hospital. Jeremy has been slaving over a hot keyboard and has rebuilt the ebook from scratch.

Raising and Lowering the Larynx is now ready to download from the Vocal Process website. Raising and Lowering the Larynx demonstrates some of the changes in sound that are possible with a flexible larynx. The subject holds a constant pitch, and raises and lowers the larynx, lengthening and shortening the tube to create brighter or darker sounds.

This footage clarifies the often confusing difference between pitch and tuning. A pitch counter is shown throughout the examples, indicating that the pitch itself fluctuates only minutely - the vocal folds continue to vibrate at the same rate. However, the tuning and quality of the sound changes markedly as the vocal tract is lengthened and shortened, demonstrating that vocal tract alterations can be used to adjust tuning even if the pitch is held.

Download the latest Vocal Process Voicebox Video by clicking here.

At the end of last year, Jeremy received a phonecall from the London's prestigious Science Museum. The Museum has an excellent interactive centre, the Dana Centre, that hosts "everything from Edinburgh-Fringe-style stand-up comics debunking science myths to updates on radical research, handling sessions of rarely seen objects from the Science Museum's collection and challenging debates on modern science".

The Event Programmes Manager wanted an interactive evening of voice and singing, and had a crazy idea to film someone singing from the inside. Her searches on the web quickly turned up the Looking at a Voice series, the UK's first downloadable video endoscopy ebooks recently featured on Radio 4's Leading Edge science programme. Several conversations later, and Vocal Process has been invited to create a new video ebook for the event, due to take place in July. The video ebook, still being filmed, will contain information, photographs, video and voiceover on how a singing voice works, and will include nasendoscopy footage of Jeremy singing a popular song (the hottest contender at the moment is My Way).

The Blagger's Guide to Singing is on Tuesday 3rd July, 19.00-20.30, at the Dana Centre, 165 Queens' Gate, South Kensington, London SW7 5HD and is part of Sing London 2007.

We'll keep you posted!
 

Following on from the last edition's feature article "Staying Together - movements of the vocal folds", this edition's feature article focuses on the phases of movement of the vocal folds themselves. This article appears at the special request of a number of our course participants.

We established in the last edition that for phonation the vocal folds are held close together and air passes between them. The combination of positioning, elastic muscular forces and airflow causes Bernoulli's Principle to occur, pulling the folds closed and then opening them rapidly.

The vocal folds can close and open many hundreds of times per second. When something vibrates evenly, the human ear hears it as a distinct pitch. So a ruler bent over the side of a desk and released will vibrate rapidly and evenly, producing a pitch. This pitch can be altered by changing the length of the vibrating portion of the ruler (shorter moving faster which raises the pitch, longer moving slower which lowers the pitch).

It is important to note that it is not the length of the vibrating mechanism but the speed at which it vibrates that governs the perceived pitch. So an oboe reed, a violin string and a set of vocal folds can all produce the A above middle C - they may sound different but each sound is created by something vibrating regularly at 440 cycles per second.

Some people become confused when hearing a man and a woman singing 'the same note'. A soprano singing the A in the second space of the treble clef will be singing in the middle of her range at 440 cycles per second. A tenor singing the A in the middle of his range (also usually written in the 'treble' clef as the second space) will be producing the pitch an octave lower at 220 cycles per second. [If you look closely at the tenor's music you will notice a small 8 underneath the 'treble' clef denoting that the music sounds an octave lower.] For the tenor to sing the same pitch (ie vibrate his vocal folds at the same frequency) he will have to sing his high A.

Vocal folds and the closed/open phases

Let us take a soprano singing her middle A (A=440). Her vocal folds are vibrating at 440 times per second. Each closing and opening of the vocal folds is called a cycle (hence 440 cycles per second). This is where the vocal mechanism gets really interesting.

Within each cycle, the balance between opening and closing can change, depending the texture, position and kinetic energy of the vocal folds. So they might stay closed for 30% (closed phase) and open for 70% of each cycle (open phase). Or they might stay closed for 60% and open for only 40% of each cycle.

The length of the closed phase within each cycle will not affect the pitch (the vocal folds are still opening and closing 440 times per second), but has a major effect on the timbre and volume of the sound.

In general (and in simple terms), the longer the folds stay closed in each cycle, the louder the sound source will be. So lyric singing (cry quality) will have a shorter closed phase (approximately 30%). Belting will have a longer closed phase (anything up to 60%).

This will also have a powerful effect on breath use.

Since in Belting the vocal folds are closed for longer in the cycle than they are open (for example, 55% closed, 45% open), there is no opportunity for the breath to emerge. Less breath is used, and belters can often hold notes for 30-50 seconds without breathing. This comes as somewhat of a surprise to some singers who believe that active breath flow is paramount in singing. This is why in our studio we will often encourage new belters to breath out before they start, as having to hold back large amounts of air can cause problems of constriction and pressed phonation.

Conversely, in cry quality the vocal folds are closed for less time than they are open (up to 30% closed and 70% open). With the vocal folds open for so much of the time in each cycle, air can escape easily, and it is easy to overbreathe. Our instructions in the studio for those new to cry quality is to hold the air back deliberately using the breathing muscles, so that the flow of air is smaller and slower.

True falsetto (as seen on the Modal to Falsetto 1 - Making the Change video ebook) has no closed phase at all - the gentle flapping in the breeze that is demonstrated in the stroboscopic footage means that the folds actually do not meet. Air passes through the folds continuously and is used up very quickly, so more air intake is required.

Incidentally, there is a difference between true falsetto and a breathy modal phonation (as seen on the Modal to Falsetto 2 - Breathy Speech video ebook). With a breathy phonation, the vocal folds do have a closed phase, but the rear portion of the folds (between and in front of the arytenoids) remain open, allowing air to flow through the gap or chink even while the front portion are closed. This breathy phonation can be attractive in singing or speaking voice as a colour, but is not recommended as a default setting!

You can immediately understand from this that no one breathing pattern will work for all vocal sounds.

The next edition will look at why the closed/open phase is not the whole story of volume change.

Those of you keeping abreast of the Vocal Process tutors will realise that this summer is going to be a little different from previous years. Jeremy's contract with the Scarborough Spa Orchestra will last for four months (June to September), and while he is away, Gillyanne will be catching up on her PhD studying at the Institute of Education.

From June to September Vocal Process will be offering INSET and private courses for institutions and organisations, and there will be one major public event. The flagship course Singing and the Actor Training in July will be taught by Gillyanne, ably assisted by Vocal Process regular Gill Main.

The next instalment of the Integrated Voice^TM Module One begins on Jeremy's return to London In October. The pre-requisite for admission to the programme is attendance at the Singing and the Actor Training, so if you haven't taken the course yet, book your place now!
 

For those new to the eZINE, Jeremy begins a short contract at the beginning of June as Musical Director of the legendary Scarborough Spa Orchestra. The last surviving summer season orchestra in the UK, the orchestra plays 10 concerts each week for the summer months with no programme repeats. This means that the musicians perform well over 1,000 different pieces, so sight-reading to concert standard is a necessity!

The orchestra's heyday was in the 60s and 70s when, together with its conductor, the violinist Max Jaffa, appeared in live weekly radio broadcasts as part of the Light Programme. The repertoire ranges from Bach and Vivaldi through Wagner to Victoriana, light classics and modern blockbusters. Jeremy will be conducting from the piano, presenting, and accompanying the numerous singers who drop in for concerts each week. Soloists for 2007 include Marilyn Hill Smith, Ros Evans and of course, Hatstand Opera. The orchestra is delighted that Sir Willard White is making a return visit for the Celebrity Gala Concert before his season with the Opera Bastille.

If you are in Yorkshire this summer, make sure to visit the Grade II listed Spa in Scarborough and enjoy a concert or two with Jeremy.

Jeremy's blog this month contains news of standing ovations, West End auditions, breakneck touring schedules and musical lederhosen. 
http://www.singingcoach.blogspot.com