Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

A new student recently asked me if there was a CliffsNotes of my philosophy or concepts that I teach, and I realized that would make a really good podcast episode.

I have things that I call “bumper stickers” – things I say all of the time to just about every student I have – not every lesson, obviously, but like things that come up again, again, and again.

And I’m sure that I’ve talked about this on the podcast elsewhere, and check the show notes for links to other useful things, but I haven’t put my top five bumper stickers all in one place, so that’s what’s happening today.

I’m going to start with bumper stickers for singers. There are bumper stickers for speakers. I think that will be in a future episode, maybe the very next episode.

So, starting at the beginning, Bumper Sticker #1: sound is moving air.

If you don’t like the sound you’re hearing, you can look two places – to the source: how good is your inhalation, how easily are you taking air in and how effectively are you sending that air out?

How easily you’re inhaling – are you in a hurry? Are you closing your throat when you inhale? You can hear, if you can, you can hear my inhalation, I think. The only way that I can make a sound when I’m inhaling is if I’m constricting my throat a bit.

And when you constrict your throat, when you make it smaller, it’s harder to fill the lungs with air and you’re squeezing the tube tight, more tightly, and so it’s going to be harder to freely release that air and turn it into sound.

Elements of your exhalation – when you’re turning the air into sound – can also make it sound not so good. One of those is, how well are you supporting the sound?

So you’re breathing the air into your lungs and is it just the top half of your lungs? Are you really taking the air all the way into the bottom of your lungs, expanding your chest and contracting your diaphragm so that you have a stable base of support in your abdominal muscles, and are those engaging as you exhale the air and make a sound?

Another thing on the exhalation to look at is how much resistance are you creating with tension, not just in your throat, but also with your jaw and your tongue.

Tension in your throat and your jaw and your tongue affects the quality of the sound. And so, sound is moving air. If you’re not liking how it sounds, there’s something about how the air is moving that’s not working.

So remember that sound and sound is only moving air. It’s not something happening in your brain. It’s something that’s happening in your body. It took me a long time to learn that.

I know I talk about this elsewhere on the podcast about how I thought the sound was how good the sound was, was just a function of my thoughts about it, or whether I imagined the melody correctly in my head.

It was a big change in my life when I figured out that my body, how I used my physical body had something to do with it.

So, Bumper Sticker #1: sound is moving air.

Bumper Sticker #2: think ‘down’ to go up. This is about singing high notes.

A physical habit that I witness in many of my students, and in myself, is a lifting of the chin or a craning of the neck to sing a higher note.

And you will see this in professional singers – sometimes there’s a good technical reason to raise your chin a little bit to sing a higher note – but in general, it’s not a good go-to for singing higher pitches.

It’s something about our imagination, I think. We’re, we’re singing a higher note so we try to reach for it with our chin. We try to grab it as though it’s somewhere above our heads.

It’s important to remember that regardless of the pitch, the sound is leaving your mouth at the same altitude. And it’s very helpful to remind yourself of that.

So, if you can, picture the sound just flowing out of your mouth in a line

that’s horizontal to the floor. The sound isn’t following the pitch path where the low notes are closer to the floor and the high notes are further from the floor. It’s all leaving your mouth in a single stream toward the ear of your listener.

And because we have such an ingrained habit of reaching for the high note, I say, “think ‘down’ to go up” to counterbalance that habit. Students will often look up when the high note comes.

Notice, if you’re struggling with a high note, notice, where are your eyes going? If they’re looking up, instead, choose to look at the floor, send, cast your gaze down, and that will help make the high note easier for another reason, which is that higher notes, higher pitches require higher breath pressure which pushes our larynx up. The force of air traveling through the throat actually moves your larynx up.

That’s the piece of cartilage where your vocal folds are. It raises it up, and that’s what creates the, “I’m strangling myself” feeling when I try to sing this note.

When you “think ‘down’ to go up,” you’re encouraging muscles in your throat to push down to resist the flow of air, making the high note easier.

One suggestion for making this more physical is to bend your knees to sing the high note. Other people will say, “squeeze your butt for the high note,” anything to create more energy in the lower part of your body to help things feel easier in your throat.

Depending on you, the piece of music, any number of things, those suggestions may work or they may not. I, I stop at, I mean, and I employ those in helping my students to sing their high notes better.

But as a bumper sticker, as something I feel that I can say without doing unnecessary harm to anyone is to “think ‘down’ to go up.” The strength in your high note is in the floor. It’s not in your chin. It’s not in your neck.

The high note may feel like it’s resonating high above your head, but remember, your whole self is the instrument. Your instrument starts with your feet, and your feet are connected to the floor, and for that high note to be glorious, you really need to be connected to the lower part of your body, so I say “think ‘down’ to go up.”

Okay, Bumper Sticker #3: sing sounds, not words.

The reason we sing a song rather than recite a poem or send a letter is because there’s an emotion that we’re trying to convey that just won’t come through unless there’s a melody.

And it’s the vowels of the words that carry the melody and carry the emotion of the song.

In order to get the emotion into your listener’s heart, you need to give them the biggest, truest, most moving vowels you can. Which means that you need to start to look at words as collections of sounds rather than atomistic words.

It means thinking about the word peace, for example, as a P, followed by an EE, followed by a S. And when you sing the word, to put the energy of the word into the vowel – “pEEEEEEEEEs. Rather than “Peace” or “PPeace.” If you overemphasize the consonant, it disrupts the flow of the vowel.

This is something that often lands as a great A-HA! in my students lap and it’s really hard to remember because we’re word people. Most of the time when my students, when I choose a song, I’m choosing the song because I like the words.

I like the meaning that the words convey, and I’ve been reading for a long time and talking for a long time, and I think that there’s a particular way that I need to say a word in order for it to be understood.

But when it’s now in a song and you have melody and rhythm and other elements to help you convey the meaning, you’re really no longer singing words, you’re singing sounds, and trusting that if you sing the right series of sounds, they will get assembled together into a word in the mind of the person who’s listening to you.

So a corollary to sing sounds, not words, is when you’re learning a piece of music, start with noises. Start with a lip trill. Start with a hum. Mmm. When you’re learning the melody. And see how fluidly and easily you can make that noise on the melody.

Then move to vowels and at the very end start putting in consonants.

Bumper Sticker #4: yawn early and often.

A yawn shows you how much space you have inside your body, how big in there you really are. Your whole self is the instrument and you are bigger than you think you are.

It’s the space of a yawn that you’re going to need to sing the high notes easily. It’s the space of a yawn that you’re going to need to learn to relax your jaw and your tongue, to learn how much more space is possible there than you’re walking around with, than you’re carrying in everyday life.

Remember that maybe the primary function – from an evolutionary perspective – of your mouth is to help you ingest food, but also to keep nasty things out of your lungs.

You have lips and behind the lips, your teeth and behind your teeth, your tongue. And if you just sit with your mouth closed for a moment and feel what that is to have lips and teeth and a tongue, you can feel that you’re not going to, in this position, you’re not going to accidentally inhale anything you shouldn’t.

It’s a safety mechanism. It’s a barrier. This, your mouth, is keeping you alive by allowing you to chew and ingest food, but it’s also keeping you alive by keeping the bad things out of your lungs.

But when we’re singing, we’re reversing that trajectory. We’re wanting to get – remember, sound is moving air – we’re trying to get a great flowing stream of air out of our body and across the room. And in order to do that, we need to break down this barrier, this natural barrier that we have so that that can happen.

That means releasing our jaw, relaxing our tongue, letting our mouth be open so that more sound can pour out.

Yawning early and often shows you just how much space you really have.

Bumper Sticker #5: I’ve already said it several times and I might even have called it Bumper Sticker #1, except that it makes more sense after the first four, which is that your whole self is the instrument.

Your whole self.

How well you sing has to do, in part, with how well your feet are connected to the floor, whether your knees are soft or stiff, whether your hips are soft or stiff.

When you breathe, when you breathe, are you expanding your ribs in all directions? Not just to the front, but also to the sides and the back? Are you engaging your pelvic floor? Are your shoulders wide and relaxed or are they stuck up by your ears?

Can your jaw open freely? Can your tongue move freely? Tongue twisters are a great thing to practice loosening up your tongue. And, I skipped over it, but how open is your heart? And how calm is your mind? And do you have butterflies in your stomach?

All of this has to do with how well you’re going to sing.

Your whole self is the instrument, and so, because of that, journaling, noticing, speaking affirmations, all of these things help you sing better.

The more you know yourself, the more comfortable you are with who you are, the easier it is to sing, because the easier it is to be present.

If you’re not running from some part of yourself, if you’re not ashamed of yourself, when you can be comfortable in who you are, even if it’s only for a few minutes, the duration of the song, you will sing better.

So those are my bumper stickers.

One more time:

Sound is moving air.

Think down to go up.

Sing sounds, not words.

Yawn early and often.

And your whole self is the instrument.

Again, there’ll be links in the show notes to other episodes, other blog posts, other helpful things related to this. I really hope this has been helpful. Thanks so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.