Singing

• 1. Introduction

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  Singing is the oldest form of musical expression, and to some, the human voice counts as the very first musical instrument. No reed, no string, no equipment beyond the body that carries it. Yet the source cannot even settle on a single definition. One calls it the act of creating musical sounds with the voice. Another offers the utterance of words or sounds in tuneful succession. A third names it the production of musical tones by means of the human voice.

  That slipperiness runs deeper than wording. Four separate physical mechanisms have to coordinate before a single clear note leaves the mouth. Voices get sorted into seven major categories in classical music, and yet no system is universally accepted. Teachers, scientists, and singers argue over what a register even is. The questions ahead are simple to ask and stubborn to answer. How does a body turn breath into music? Why does every voice sound unlike any other? And why, after centuries of study, do the people who teach this art still disagree about its most basic terms?

• 2. The Body As Instrument

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  The lungs act as an air supply or bellows, pushing the breath that everything else depends on. The larynx serves as the reed or vibrator. The chest, the head cavities, and the skeleton work as an amplifier, much like the tube in a wind instrument. The tongue, joined by the palate, teeth, and lips, articulates and imposes consonants and vowels onto the amplified sound. These four mechanisms function independently, yet they are made to interact and coordinate into a single vocal technique.

  During passive breathing, air is inhaled with the diaphragm, and exhalation happens without effort. Singing changes that. Exhalation may be aided by the abdominal, internal intercostal, and lower pelvic muscles. Inhalation draws on the external intercostals, the scalenes, and the sternocleidomastoid. Pitch is altered with the vocal cords, and with the lips closed, the result is called humming.

  No two voices sound the same, and the reason is more than the vocal cords. The shape and size of the rest of the body matter too. Vocal folds can loosen, tighten, or change thickness, with breath passing over them at varying pressures. The shape of the chest and neck, the position of the tongue, even the tightness of otherwise unrelated muscles can shift pitch, volume, timbre, or tone. Sound resonates through different parts of the body, so bone structure shapes what comes out. One physical detail reaches further still. A fatter, more fluid-like vocal fold mucosa transfers energy from the airflow more efficiently, producing a more powerful voice.

• 3. Seven Voices And A Quarrel

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  Soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, countertenor, tenor, baritone, bass. In European classical music and opera, voices are treated like musical instruments, and most classical systems acknowledge seven major voice categories. Women fall into three groups, men into four. For pre-pubescent children, an eighth term applies: treble. Within each category, sub-categories track qualities like coloratura facility and vocal weight. The whole exercise, voice classification, exists in opera partly to match possible roles with potential voices.

  The German Fach system and the choral music system are among several in use, and none is universally applied or accepted. Choral music divides singers solely by vocal range, most commonly into high and low voices within each sex: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass. That creates a trap. Since most people have medium voices, they get assigned to a part that runs too high or too low. The mezzo-soprano must sing soprano or alto, the baritone must sing tenor or bass. For most singers, there are fewer dangers in singing too low than in singing too high.

  Contemporary commercial music refuses the whole scheme. Singers there are classified by style instead: jazz, pop, blues, soul, country, folk, rock. The classical categories were built around unamplified production and classical vocal technique within a specified range. Contemporary musicians use microphones and different techniques, and they are not forced into a fixed vocal role. Applying terms like soprano or baritone to them can mislead or even mistake the voice entirely.

• 4. The Register Wars

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  A register is a particular series of tones, produced in the same vibratory pattern of the vocal folds, and possessing the same quality. Registers originate in laryngeal function, arising because the vocal folds can produce several different vibratory patterns. The word itself causes trouble. It can mean a part of the vocal range, a resonance area like chest voice or head voice, a phonatory process, a vocal color, or a region defined by vocal breaks. Speech pathologists name four registers by physiology: the vocal fry, the modal, the falsetto, and the whistle.

  Chest voice and head voice carry their own dispute, and vocal pedagogical circles hold no single consistent opinion about them. In men, the head voice is commonly called the falsetto. The first recorded mention of chest voice and head voice came around the 13th century, when the writers Johannes de Garlandia and Jerome of Moravia distinguished them from the throat voice. The Latin terms ran pectoris, guttoris, capitis. Bel canto, the Italian opera singing method, later cast chest voice as the lowest and head voice the highest of three registers, separated by the passaggio.

  Knowledge of physiology has grown over the past two hundred years, and with it the argument. Ralph Appelman at Indiana University and William Vennard at the University of Southern California redefined or abandoned the terms chest voice and head voice. Many pedagogists now see registration as a product of laryngeal function unrelated to the chest, lungs, and head. The vibratory sensations a singer feels in those areas, they argue, are resonance phenomena, not registers. That view aligns with speech pathology, phonetics, and linguistics, and current practice leans toward it. Pushing an overly strong chest voice into higher registers leads to forcing, and forcing can lead to vocal deterioration.

• 5. Crossing The Passaggio

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  Passaggio is the term classical singing uses for the transition area between vocal registers. The passaggi lie between the chest voice, where any singer can produce a powerful sound, the middle voice, and the head voice, where a penetrating sound is accessible but usually only through training. The historic Italian school describes a primo passaggio and a secondo passaggio connected by a zona di passaggio in the male voice, and a primo and secondo passaggio in the female voice. A major goal of classical training is to maintain an even timbre across these transitions.

  Ingo Titze, in his book The Principles of Voice Production, writes that the term register describes perceptually distinct regions of vocal quality maintained over some ranges of pitch and loudness. Discrepancies in terminology run between teachers, singers, researchers, and clinicians. Marilee David points out that voice scientists see registration primarily as acoustic events, while singers explain it through the physical sensations they feel.

  The three main registers, head, middle or mixed, and chest, take their names from where the singer feels sympathetic vibration in the body. The chest register is the lowest, the one people most commonly use while speaking. The head register is the highest, felt in the face or elsewhere in the head. Two further registers, falsetto and flageolet, lie above the head register and usually require training, with lower-voiced women receiving very little instruction in the flageolet. Men have one more register below the chest voice, the strohbass, which is hard on the vocal cords and therefore hardly ever used.

• 6. Learning To Sing

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  Singing requires highly developed muscle reflexes, not much muscle strength but a high degree of muscle coordination. Vocal pedagogy, the study of teaching singing, has a long history that began in Ancient Greece and continues to change today. Its practitioners include vocal coaches, choral directors, vocal music educators, and opera directors. Excellence demands time, dedication, instruction, and regular practice, and with regular practice the sounds become clearer and stronger.

  Four physical processes produce vocal sound in sequence: breath is taken, sound is initiated in the larynx, the resonators receive and influence it, and the articulators shape it into recognizable units. Studied separately, they merge in practice into one coordinated function. With an effective singer, the listener is rarely reminded of the process at all. Many vocal problems trace to a breakdown in one part of this coordinated act, which is why teachers often drill one area intensively until the issue resolves.

  McKinney captures the mechanics of range in three rules. As you sing higher, you must use more energy, more space, and more depth; as you sing lower, you use less of each. Space refers to the size of the inside of the mouth and the position of the palate and larynx, widened by relaxing the throat into what pedagogists call the beginning of a yawn. Posture matters just as much. The ideal has eight components, from feet slightly apart to head facing straight forward, and a sunken chest limits lung capacity while a tense abdominal wall blocks the diaphragm. A guide is essential, because a singer does not hear inside their head the same sounds that others hear outside.

• 7. Voices In The World

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  Vocal music is probably the oldest form of music, since it needs no instrument or equipment besides the voice. Every musical culture has some form of it, and singing traditions stretch across the world. A short piece with lyrics is broadly called a song, though classical music uses terms such as aria. Some vocal music abandons words entirely, performed with non-linguistic syllables or noises, sometimes as musical onomatopoeia. When singing appears but does not lead, as in a blues rock song built around instrumental melodies and a simple call-and-response chorus, the piece counts as instrumental music.

  The microphone reshaped popular music. In classical performance, singers often perform without amplification in small to mid-size halls. In popular music, a microphone and PA system appear in almost every venue, even a small coffee house. That amplification made possible intimate styles like crooning, which would lack projection otherwise, along with whispering, humming, and mixed half-sung tones. Hip-hop beatboxers turn the mic into a percussion instrument with plosive p and b sounds. In the 2000s, controversy arose over electronic Auto-Tune pitch correction. It arose again over lip-syncing, most notoriously with the act Milli Vanilli, who lip-synced to tracks recorded by other uncredited singers.

  Singing is not rapping, and the source is firm on the distinction. Rap historian Martin E. Connor states that rap is often defined by its very opposition to singing. Rap does not engage tonality the same way and does not require pitch accuracy; its words are spoken rather than sung on specific pitches. Grove Music Online frames rap, within American popular music, as an alternative to singing that could connect directly with stylistic speech practices in African American English. Some artists do both, using the switch between rhythmic speech and sung pitch as a striking contrast to seize the listener's attention.

• 8. Beyond The Note

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  Brodmann area 47 handles the processing of syntax in oral and sign languages, and also musical syntax and semantic aspects of language. Research on the link between music and language keeps showing how alike the two processes are, and how different. Levitin describes sound waves translated at the eardrum into pitch, a tonotopic map, after which speech and music probably diverge into separate processing circuits. In infants, the neural circuits may start out undifferentiated. Musical syntax localizes near Broca's area, and musical semantics near Wernicke's area, both crucial to language.

  Singing has been shown to help stroke victims recover speech. Neurologist Gottfried Schlaug describes a singing center on the right side of the brain, corresponding to the speech area in the left hemisphere. By teaching stroke victims to sing their words, this region can be trained to help produce speech, since processing centers for important mental functions can move after trauma or brain damage.

  The voice can be carried without sound at all. An artistic signer translates a song's lyrics into American Sign Language, modifying existing signs, creating new ones, and manipulating the signing space to express rhythm, pitch, phrasing, and timbre. Such a signer may be Deaf, hearing, or hard of hearing. Justina Miles, a Deaf performer, used ASL to interpret Rihanna's 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show. Stephen Torrence, a hearing person, built signed songs on YouTube. The accent itself can travel away from where a singer was born, since British singers of rock or popular music often sing in an American or neutral accent. And not every voice is free to be raised: in Iran women are not allowed to sing.