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Pant, Wobble and Cry -
getting emotion into your voice
By Jeremy Fisher
I have had a number
of actors arrive in my studio with the question “how do I do that
vibrato thing?” They complain that their singing is straight, and
are searching for the warmth and roundness that they hear other
singers producing.
The use of vibrato
depends on the repertoire you sing, the emotion you want to portray,
and the genre in which you perform. It also depends on personal and
societal taste - I am occasionally surprised at the extremes of
vibrato that appear in performances of both 19th century Opera and
21st century Musical Theatre. Still, one man’s shimmer is another
man’s bleat.
Here are three areas
to explore when searching for “your vibrato”.
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1. |
Breath fluctuation –
think The Bee Gees or Cliff Richard, also singing actors such as
Michael Ball. The breath flow, usually fairly constant when
holding a note, is altered to produce a fluctuation. This
produces an apparent change in pitch at vocal fold level, caused
by under-and over-feeding of air to the vocal folds. This is
usually done by using either the abdominal muscles or the ribs
in tiny “in-and-out” movements. If you like this particular
sound, you can access it using an exaggerated panting, and then
fine it down. As with all vibrato methods, make sure you can
switch this one off at will, otherwise sustained singing might
become a problem. |
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2. |
Good old pitch
changing. The actual pitch of the note (the speed at which your
vocal folds vibrate) is changed, rapidly and smoothly. One
exercise for accessing this is to sing a slow semitone trill
(oscillate between two notes a semitone apart) and gently speed
up, blurring the two notes together. Whether you trill to the
semitone below or the semitone above is a matter of personal
taste. Another key to this one is relaxation – hold a pitch and
then relax your vocal mechanism and “back off” the sound
slightly. As with all vibrato methods, make sure you can switch
this one on and off at will, otherwise moving between notes in
certain styles might become a problem. |
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3. |
“Tilting” your
larynx – sometimes referred to as “cry” or “whine” position, or
“closing the visor”. This is “vibrato from the inside”, if you
like, and is usually quite subtle, more of a warming of the
sound. The position of the two main cartilages of the larynx
change in relation to each other, stretching the vocal folds
forward and down slightly and causing them to vibrate is a
slightly different way. To access this, use your speaking voice
to make a high whining or moaning sound, then bring it down in
pitch keeping the feel of the moan or cry. Be sure to use only a
small amount of breath (holding the breath back a little seems
to help in accessing this vocal set). Gillyanne’s book Singing
and the Actor has a good description of this, and the matching
Singing and the Actor Audio Guide has recordings of the tilting
exercises in both male and female voice. As with all vibrato
methods, make sure you can switch this one off at will,
otherwise fast singing (words or notes) might become a problem. |
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4. |
In order to give a
rounded picture, I am adding a fourth possibility, although I
think it has very specific uses: shaking the instrument itself.
This comes in two forms - larynx movement and jaw/tongue shake.
Larynx movement is used by some opera and gospel singers,
particularly at high volumes. The larynx is allowed to move up
and down “freely” on a single note. While there can be a feeling
of “letting go” with this style, when taken to extreme it is
sometimes difficult to identify which note is being sung as the
entire mechanism shudders in the gale. I witnessed a solo singer
in a Las Vegas show who allowed her larynx to fluctuate slowly
in a vibrato covering a horrifying major 6th. Jaw/tongue shake
uses a similar device – the back of the tongue or the lower jaw
(or both) move up and down, causing the sound to oscillate. This
particular version can become addictive so make sure you can
switch it off. However, jaw shake (and even head shake) is now
being used in contemporary commercial singing as a device for
adding tiny vibrato-like trills, particularly in R&B. Use it
sparingly. |
In my experience,
most singers use a combination of 2 and 3, or 1, 2 and 3, depending
on the music, the emotion and the context, so I encourage you to
experiment with all the versions.
We live in a world
of comparison, so I often encourage my clients to do it “wrong”.
Sometimes you can only discover what you want to do by deliberately
not doing it. Experiment with exaggerating each version, then apply
the following fixes for excessive use.
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For excessive breath
fluctuation, one of the fixes for this is to practise the
sustained hiss, re-educating the muscles of expiration to work
smoothly. |
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For excessive
laryngeal movement, one of the fixes is to use the external
anchoring muscles (back of the neck, soft palate), and to reduce
the airflow slightly, rebalancing the combination of breath,
sound and body. |
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For excessive
tilting, one of the fixes is to use voiced fricatives (vv, zz,
zh) to “unhook” and return to a neutral thyroid position. We
also recommend using a “boring” voice, taking out any hint of
emotion, to reset the laryngeal position. |
There are some
excellent articles on the web
NOTE: Web links open a new window
Just type 'vibrato'
into your search engine and read what people have to say. I
particularly enjoyed Mark Baxter’s descriptions of vibrato “The
combined movements of pitch, volume and tone are what set vibrato
apart from tremolo (change in volume only) and wobble (change in
pitch only).”
http://www.voicelesson.com/html/lessons/free_lessons_07.htm
Also the articles of
David L Jones are worth a look
http://www.voiceteacher.com/vibrato.html
For something a
little different, not to say thought-provoking, there is an
excellent article on throat vibrato used by oboe and flute players
at the following link –
http://idrs.colorado.edu/Publications/Journal/JNL4/vibrato.html
As an ex-oboist
myself, I can heartily concur, although I am not sure whether this
method applies to singing. I have found the breathing techniques to
be taught differently from singing, and am aware as an oboist that I
have to deal with a great deal more back pressure from the reed than
I do as a singer.
And finally, over to
Louis Moreau Gottschalk, American pianist-virtuoso, who wrote in
1900: “Tremolo of the voice is the result of either of the three
following causes—diseased vocal organs, old age, or defective
breathing, and as such has no excuse for its existence.”
You have been warned…
©
2005 Jeremy Fisher for Vocal Process
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Giving the student broader knowledge about the structures of the
larynx can be effective on many levels of their training and
understanding. The 'moveable larynx' has long been the starting
point of Vocal Process courses including Singing and the Actor Training.
Download:
build_your_own_
tilting_larynx.pdf
[2-page PDF, 294kb]
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connections.
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