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. 

Prospective students will often say to me, “I don’t know how to read music. Is that a problem?” And my answer is no!

Learning how to use your voice differently has nothing to do with your ability to read music, and learning a song has really nothing to do with your ability to read music.

People were learning songs for millennia before they started writing them down, so that’s not, that’s not an issue.

It is true that you may find yourself in certain situations where knowing how to read music will be helpful, for example, if you want to audition for a chorus or for a musical.

If you’re going to be in an environment where people around you have more formal training and the expectation is that you’re able to read music, it would behoove you to learn how to read music just so that you can feel more comfortable.

It’s not to say that you couldn’t make it in that environment, but it is a skill that you’re able to learn. I know that because if you were able to find this podcast, you were probably able to read enough English to figure out how to find it and how to download it, and reading music is deciphering a similar symbol system.

The music flows from left to right, like many modern languages do, and you learn what the symbols mean and over time, with practice, you gain fluency, just like you learned to read a book.

That being said, I wanna talk a little bit about how reading music may be holding you back in your singing if you’re a good reader, and give you some exercises to try, some things to think about, to help your singing voice.

A few weeks ago I was at a chorus rehearsal and one of my compatriots complimented me. She said, “Michèle, I really appreciate your strong sight singing.” And I said, “I’m actually not really a strong sight singer.”

Sight singing is when you can look at a piece of music and sing it pretty much how it’s intended to be just by looking at it. You don’t need to hear it played ahead of time.

Super duper sight singers with a great internalized sense of pitch can even figure out the key, sing the precise starting note.

Most of the rest of us who can sight sing are good relative sight singers, so we can figure out where all of the notes are, you know, just starting on any random note, like the note that’s comfortable for us to sing (might not be the note on the page).

The ability to sight sing is something that many choruses require. It’s part of the audition process. You come in and you sing a song and they have you sing some scales, and then they hand you a piece of music that you’ve never seen before and they give you a starting note or and a starting chord, and they just say, “go,” and you’re just supposed to sing.

Most everyone I know finds this situation incredibly stressful and not at all fun. Really not fun. And my good friend, who’s a baritone, makes the point that, you know, you’re only sight singing a piece once.

After that you’ve, you know, it’s the second time. And he feels that evaluating people on how well they can sing something the first time is completely contrary to the life of a musician ’cause it’s not – the first time you sing something is not the performance.

The question isn’t how well can you do it perfectly the first time. It’s maybe, how well can you learn it and finesse it over time and deepen with the music.

But anyway, being able to sight sing isn’t going anywhere. That’s a battle we’re not gonna win.

So I am at this rehearsal and I receive this compliment. Or rather, I deflect the compliment, right? Because, “Michele, you’re such a good sight singer. I really appreciate that.” “Oh no, I’m actually not a great sight singer.”

And there ensued a conversation which has a lot to do with how reading, music, and vocal production can sometimes get in the way or are sometimes at odds.

When I first joined a chorus a zillion years ago, I was recruited because I could read music and they needed more people to sing one of the middle parts, not the melody, usually not the melody, but a tricky harmony part that’s difficult to hear.

And in order to do what the composer intended, you have to be able to read music and know what he meant, because your intuition is probably gonna lead you astray.

And so I went to that rehearsal. I considered myself a violin player for the first bit of my life. I went to the rehearsal, not a confident singer at all, but sat in the alto section and pretended to play my violin in my head as I sang the notes. And I did well enough that they asked me to come back, and that was my approach to sight singing.

For a long time was, I would imagine what it would be like if I were playing those notes on the violin because I was a crackerjack music reader on the violin, but I didn’t know how to make it work in my body yet.

And that approach served me really well for a really long time, and I did in fact appear to be a really great sight singer in the choruses I was in. And I was a good sight singer, but I wasn’t a really good singer because what I was unconsciously or unknowingly doing by imagining playing the violin as I was using my voice, is I was treating my voice as a very mechanistic thing.

When you make a note on the violin, you put your finger down on the string and you pull the bow. The woman that complimented me at the rehearsal is a very accomplished flute player and she uses her flute fingerings to help her sight sing, too.

And connecting that – mechanistic is the best word I have for it today – connecting the movement of other muscles with the production of a sung note inadvertently builds tension into your throat and gives your brain the idea that to sing a note is the same thing as playing it on the violin or making it on the flute.

You do something to make a note. There’s some grabbing in your throat, or this is what happened to me:

The air didn’t flow as freely. I would make notes in my throat. I would let my larynx jump around, to wherever it needed to be to make a particular pitch. I had notes that were associated with a particular posture of my body. This approach to sight singing slowed me down when it came to “my voice is just my voice and the breath makes the pitch, and I try to keep everything in my throat as free and loose as possible.”

Sight singing like a violin player, slowed the air down, created grabbing in my throat, and didn’t lead to the best tone.

As I grew as a singer, as I started to get like a clue about how I was supposed to use my body, I noticed that my sight singing got worse because I didn’t have this crutch anymore.

I didn’t have my helpie of thinking like a violin player to make the notes. And as my, my voice got freer, I became a much more loosey-goosey sight reader.

So that now when I’m sight reading, I’ll often sing what I think the next note should be, what seems intuitively right to me and often has a little or nothing to do with what’s on the page.

So this was maybe 15, 20 years ago when I was starting to really sing well and my sight reading was kind of going off the rails, there was a wonderful, generous woman about the age of my own mom who – we often sat next to each other.

And she would gently put a hand on my leg, or she would lean over and she would say, “Michele, you made that up,” to remind me, or to let me know that I had made that up.

Because also I was so enjoying the process of singing that I wasn’t listening very clearly all the time to what the notes should be.

If you’re thinking at this point that, I was a hot mess to have an acquire. That’s true. Sometimes we’re all a hot mess in choir. I still am a really strong sight singer. I am a very good singer-singer, just in general. And I learn music well, and I take direction well.

So when conductors want something finessed, want something a particular way, I’m able to do that right away. And I think now those skills make up for the fact that sometimes when we’re sight singing, I just, I just make it up. I just want it to go the way I want it to go and not the way the composer wanted it to go.

So here’s the thing I want to unpack a little bit for you:

When we’re singing, it’s true that the sound is created in our throat. That’s where the vocal folds are. That’s where they’re vibrating. So air is coming up from the lungs, it’s coming past the vocal folds, and the vocal folds are turning it into sound.

And the pitch that’s created is determined by the breath, pressure of the air and the thickness of the muscles at the time. The pitch is entirely created in your throat.

A lot of us – because we’re, we speak, we’re speakers – like, we use our voice for talking most of the time, like, almost all of the time is how we’re using our voice is for talking – the brain has the idea that the pitch is somehow connected to the tongue and the jaw and the lips because when we’re speaking all of those things are moving. All of those things are happening at the same time.

But the scientific reality is that the pitch is created in your throat, and when you’re a really good music reader, it’s tempting to see those discreet black dots on the page as specific things that need to happen, specific things that need to be created.

And while it’s true that those notes have to happen at a particular time for a particular duration, how we accomplish that when we’re singing is with a river of air.

The voice leaving our body is not black dots. The voice leaving our body is maybe a great black smush of sound.

Learning to release pressure from the throat and instead track the resonance of the sound by how it feels in your cheeks, in your forehead, in your chest is what will help you read music and sing as well as you can.

“But Michèle, I really wanna sing the right notes!”

Yes, we all really wanna sing the right notes. And the best way to sing the right notes is to allow air to flow through your instrument freely.

The more we try to sing the right notes, usually the less right they are. Because when we’re trying in air quotes to “sing the right notes,” we’re usually grasping in our throat. We’re usually clenching with our jaw, or we’re doing some kind of yanking with our tongue.

And that is just, it’s not easy, and it’s stuck. It’s creating interference in the system.

And what makes a particular note beautiful is the fact that it is freely flowing. The air is freely vibrating, whether it’s air coming out of a flute or the air that’s set into vibration by the bow of a violin, and that has to be true in our physical bodies as well.

The best notes are the freest notes. Those are the ones that aren’t grabbed in the throat. Those are ones that are allowed into being rather than made.

It’s common to talk about hitting the right note, “Oh, I can’t hit the high note,” right?

When you’re playing the piano, you are actually literally hitting notes. You’re playing, well, hopefully you’re not, you know, hitting-hitting, but you’re pressing down on a key that’s forcing a hammer to hit a string inside the piano. There is actual hitting going on.

But when we’re singing, there’s no hitting. There’s no hitting. There’s just air and muscle. And tiny muscle. There’s just air and tiny muscle like a bird, right? Birds are not hitting notes. They’re just letting them be. They’re just letting them flow freely.

So, if I could leave you with an image, it’s to think of your voice, your singing voice as a river of sound. And if I could leave you with an idea, it’s to consider that the act of singing is allowing notes, allowing a song to flow through you rather than a song being something that you make with effort. And, I don’t know. agility.

Agility in singing, being able to sing, you know, lots of notes really quickly, for example, to be able to turn on a dime, that honestly comes from total freedom in the throat and in the body.

Watching an electric guitarist, watching Eddie Van Halen play the guitar. Yeah, there’s a certain amount of effort expressed in the body, right There’s a being hunched over the guitar. There’s a lot of really fine, precise work with the fingers.

And at the same time his face, and the face of lots of even classical guitar players, you can feel the joy in his body and the freedom in his body.

There’s a way when you look at it that it looks like it’s something very intense and very effortful, but if you look more closely, those players are actually really loose. This is true of violinists, true of flute players, all musicians. When it’s really fast and really just effortless-sounding, it’s because there’s freedom behind it.

It doesn’t mean it’s simple to play those notes. It doesn’t mean there’s no effort in playing those notes, but there’s only the amount of effort required to play those notes.

That’s where the art is, is to find the minimal amount of effort required to play the notes and to let all the other extra tensions go.

An exercise you can try to explore this on your own is comparing your singing voice to your whooping voice. So when you make a siren-y kind of sound, a whoop, [whooping sound], notice what that feels like in your body.

Notice how, where you feel that sound in your head, you don’t have to match my pitches, just your own easy whoop will do.

[whooping sounds]

You can change the vowels. I started with a “whoop” and then I turned it into a “whah.” You could also “woah” or “whee,” whatever feels easiest for your body. Really noticing where you feel those sounds in your head.

It’s probably the case that as you make a lower sound, you’ll feel it resonate in your chest, and as the pitch goes up, you’ll feel it resonates somewhere in your head.

And if you don’t feel it in your head yet, don’t worry. Keep whooping or woah-ing, and keep asking your brain, “where do I feel this in my head?”

You have nerve endings there. This is possible to feel. And if you’re like most people who are just at the beginning of really thinking about their singing voice, those nerve endings are probably turned off.

You’re just not used to paying attention to your voice in this way, so your brain isn’t feeding you that information. But once you start asking, you’ll start getting some feedback. And so whoop for a little bit and then sing a simple thing, and notice how different it feels.

Does it feel stilted and grabby? Does it resonate in the same place in your head or does it feel lower?

Actual singing-singing, singing is not always going to feel like a whoop, but we want it to feel closer to a whoop than speech.

If you live in a small space with other people who are always around and whooping doesn’t feel like it would be welcome, you can accomplish the same thing by blowing bubbles through a straw into a glass of water, or using a lip trill or a rolled r or on a whoop. So [lip trill] and noticing where you feel that resonance in your head and then comparing that to lip drilling a melody,

[lip trilled melody]

So that’s Amazing Grace. Notice how the, my lips kept moving rather than

[Amazing Grace with spaces between the notes]

That’s a very music reader-y way of producing a melody, and what we wanna do is get closer to a singing way of producing a melody where the notes run together.

[lip trilled melody]

So that you can experience more regularly that black smush of sound, rather than be preoccupied with creating one black dot after another with your voice.

I really hope this episode has given you some encouragement and some affirmation that however you learn music, whether it’s mostly with your ears or it’s with your eyes, or with a combination of your ears and your eyes, it’s enough. It’s not wrong. We need more music in the world, and I am so glad that you’re making it.

You may not be able to tell, but it’s allergy season now in Berkeley, California, and I have a huskier voice than usual this morning, and I have been stopping and restarting the recording over and over and over again so that I can drink more warm fluid and clear my throat and keep talking.

And it’s important for me to tell you that because I, most of all wanna be honest with you about the state of my own instrument, and to let you know that that is, that’s a workable strategy, especially if it’s coming to be allergy season where you are, drink more fluid.

Take the time you need. Just work with the phlegm. It’s not going anywhere. It’s a good part of our life as physical beings, and it can be a pain, but just keep working with it. You can make it through.

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.