VCE SINGING MASTERCLASS Contemporary Syllabus Claire Everton 3 May 2009

Victorian Chapter

"WHAT DO EXERCISES ACTUALLY DO?" Diary of an ongoing discussion by Sally Collyer

Understanding what exercises actually do is the key to applying them effectively. After all, chin-ups won't do a lot for your calf muscles. But understanding what vocal exercises do is rather difficult, because much of what happens is out of sight, difficult to measure, and not under the direct control of the vocalist or the teacher. For these notes, Claire asked me to write notes about four of the exercises and concepts she uses in her teaching: vocal fry, lip trill, belting above B4, and nasality for female high notes. These four topics regularly resurface in our ongoing discussion about singing pedagogy and singing science, a discussion that's been going since 1995! These notes are by no means exhaustive. There is still so much unknown about the voice, and so much half known or known inaccurately, although voice research is expanding by the very minute. And, of course, each voice comes attached to a unique person, taught by a unique teacher. But we hope these notes might stimulate some new ideas in your own discussions with your ANATS colleagues. Vocal fry Vocal fry is the lowest register in the human voice and is a series of pulses made by the larynx. (It's reputed to have got the name 'fry' from the resemblance to the sound of bacon frying in a pan.) Physiologically, fry is basically ordinary vocal-fold vibration but at very low frequency. In a tone such as A4 (A above middle C), the individual pulses merge and we hear a continuous tone. In fry, the frequency of the cycles (the number of cycles per second) is so low that the sound of each cycle dies out sufficiently before the next one commences so that the ear can discern individual vibratory cycles. Thus, vocal fry is beneath pitch, like a cat purring or the long, contented growl dogs sometimes give when stretching after waking. As we increase the number of cycles per second, we reach the crossover frequency. Above this point, we can no longer hear the individual cycles and now we hear a pitch. How quickly the sound of each cycle dies out will be affected by the vocal tract, so the crossover frequency will be at a different pitch for the vowel /i/ than for / /, for example. Compared with modal or chest voice, vocal fry has been associated with: lower levels of subglottal pressure (meaning that fry is very quiet), long closed phase (the vocal folds stay closed longer in each cycle), lower transglottal airflow (uses less air, probably because the vocal folds spend more time closed), less activity in interarytenoid, cricothyroid and posterior cricoarytenoid muscles (low adductive force and low longitudinal tension), and more activity in the thyroarytenoid muscles. Vocal fry production should be "relaxed with no perception of tension" (Blomgren et al., 1998). Fry can help singers with high laryngeal tension (those who tend to press) adjust to using a more efficient vocal-fold vibratory pattern, giving a richer sound. Singers having trouble developing their chest

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register can find fry especially helpful. Interestingly, it has also been associated with reduced nasality, even though it is often begun with the mouth closed and therefore the velopharyngeal port open, eg Seth Riggs in Speech Level Singing. (The velopharyngeal port is the opening to the nasopharynx. See 'nasality to help female high notes', below, for more on the perception of nasality.) It's also been suggested that vocal fry reduces a posterior glottal chink, though the value of that is a separate discussion. There is some debate over whether vocal fry is good or bad for the singer. Much of the debate seems to be due to different ideas of what vocal fry is. For example, Richard Miller describes it as non-periodic (ie chaotic or irregular) vocal-fold vibration. The pulses in vocal fry should be regular and even, not erratic. It's also been equated with tight, strained and creaky voice, such as when struggling to lift something heavy. A tight voice uses high subglottal pressure and high adductive force. The mucosal covering of the vocal folds is very loose in fry, so vibration requires low subglottal pressure and low adductive force. In fact, vocal fry comes with an in-built warning system. High adductive force causes the pulses to become uneven and irregular. If we increase the subglottal pressure in vocal fry, we'll increase the frequency of cycles and soon hear the pulses merging into a continuous tone when we pass the crossover frequency. True vocal fry is a very gentle and therapeutic exercise. Lip trill The vocal tract consists of the oral and nasal airways above the vocal folds. In some vowels and consonants, both are used; in some, only one or the other is used. Like everything, the air in the airways has inertia, what Ingo Titze calls 'sluggishness'. Inertia in the vocal tract helps vocal fold vibration by causing a time lag in pressure just above the vocal folds relative to pressure below the vocal folds: lower pressure just above the vocal folds when subglottal pressure is causing them to open helps them open, and higher pressure when they're closing helps them close. Vowels and consonants that create a semiocclusion (partial blockage) raise vocal-tract inertia by increasing backpressure. This reduces both the adductive force of the vocal folds and their amplitude of vibration for the same subglottal pressure: less effort. Exercises like pulsing on / / (the 'z' in 'pleasure') are popular warmups for getting reluctant breathing going because they demand more air pressure and flow without overtaxing the vocal folds. Closed vowels /i/ and /u/ have the same advantage over open vowels like / /. Although backpressure reduces the adductive force of the vocal folds, a singer who presses can still do the exercises whilst squeezing the vocal folds together. The advantage of rolled 'r' and lip trill is that they create backpressure but they also guarantee reduced vocal-fold adduction. Otherwise, there won't be enough air getting through the glottis to create the airflow to drive the tongue and lips, respectively. So they're a hearty way of getting the lethargic singer to engage the breathing more without tightening the vocal folds and of getting the singer who presses to do more in the body and less in the throat. They also reduce tension in the tongue and lips: too much resistance, and they won't move. That makes their third benefit: they are very good models for new singers of what happens at the vocal folds. Belting above B4 Discussions about belting or belt voice very soon run up against the problem that there is as yet no one, universally accepted definition of what belting sounds like. After all, how can we test the recipe if we don't agree on what we're making? I don't intend here to add yet another definition to the multitude on offer, but rather to raise a topic that doesn't often figure in discussions on belting (whatever the definition): subglottal resonance.

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Singing teachers are familiar with the concept of resonances or formants in the vocal tract. Generally speaking, the lowest two formats (ie lowest in frequency) determine the vowel. The vowel /i/ has a low first formant and a high second formant, while /u/ has a low first formant and a low second formant. The upper formants (F3, F4 and perhaps F5) can be drawn closer together to create the singer's formant cluster. As fundamental frequency (pitch) rises and gets closer to the first formant, female singers in particular raise the first formant (primarily by opening their mouths) to keep it higher than the pitch. If the pitch goes above the first formant, the timbre loses much of its richness and the voice becomes much less efficient. A similar thing happens below the vocal folds. The subglottal tract or trachea also has resonances, which influence vocal fold vibration. Subglottal resonance particularly affects the underside of the vocal folds. Interestingly, it is the underside of the vocal fold which bulges out when the thyroarytenoid muscle contracts, as in low pitches and chest voice. So subglottal resonance has a strong influence on vocal fold vibration when the folds are vertically thicker, as in belting. The first subglottal resonance has been estimated at 500-600Hz (~C5-D5), meaning it is favourable to belting up to ~B4. Above B4, however, the subglottal resonance begins to work against vocal fold vibration. Unfortunately, the trachea doesn't have the range of adjustment of the vocal tract. My colleagues and I encountered this recently, where we found that maximum high partial energy for female classical singers was ~20dB lower on notes above B4. There are all sorts of supraglottal adjustments that the singer can make, such as a large mouth opening (what Ingo Titze calls 'megaphone mouth') which can reduce the effect of the subglottal resonance. These have pros and cons, not just in their filter effect on timbre but also in the effects they have on vocal-fold vibration, and it's likely that some adjustments work better in certain circumstances and for certain singers. However, the point to remember is that resonance has a major effect on vocal fold vibration, and subglottal resonance is a key player in belting. Nasality to help female high notes Opening the velopharyngeal port (VPP) connects the nasal cavity to the oral cavity. This adds a nasal quality to the sound, eg on French nasal vowels like nasalised 'o' / / in 'non'. To find out if the VPP is open, sustain a vowel on a comfortable pitch, then alternately pinch and release your nose. If the sound quality doesn't change, the VPP is closed. On an /m/ or an /n/, the mouth is blocked and airflow is directed through the nose: holding your nose will stop the sound. Nasality on non-nasal sounds is not desirable in speaking or singing voices. However, vocalising through only the nasal cavity - humming has long been known to be very therapeutic for the voice. The Voice Clinic Handbook lists the advantages of humming as: gentle closure; relatively little medial compression; good mucosal wave; tends to be neutral larynx; seems to release excess supraglottic and extrinsic laryngeal tension; and assists closure of posterior glottal chink. Adding a little nasality at the very start of a high note can help women to sing high notes with less effort. But why? Switching from a sound travelling through the larger oral cavity to a sound travelling through the narrow VPP into the nasal cavity increases backpressure. As noted in the section on lip trill, above, backpressure reduces the work of the vocal folds for the same subglottal pressure. So, humming at the start of the note should improve the balance of resistance and pressure which is then maintained when switching to the oral resonance. But switching from nasal-only to oral-only resonance sounds like a rather savage shift, and there's no reason why it must be all or nothing. The relationship between VPP opening and perceived nasality in the voice isn't that straight-forward. Birch and colleagues found that some professional opera singers
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had quite a wide VPP opening but an expert panels of listeners detected no nasality. One factor is vowel: high-tongued vowels like /i/ and /u/ will sound more nasal for the same size of opening than low vowels like / /. (Try sustaining / / with just a hint of nasality, then change to an /i/. It should sound much more nasal.) Pitch is another factor: nasality is far more perceptible on low than on high pitches. This makes sense when we consider why the nasal sound is different from the non-nasal sound. The section on 'belting above B4' talked about formants in the vocal tract. The nasal cavity has its own formants, which (from a vocal tract perspective) have the effect of introducing an anti-resonance near the first and third formants, ie a nasal sound is quieter and less pleasant because it reduces the richness of lower partials in the female singing voice (especially the fundamental) and reduces the power of the singer's formant. For women's lower notes, these are disadvantages. But the situation is different for high notes, where the singer's formant doesn't matter, although for even more complication see Barnes et al. 2004. On high notes, most of the sound energy comes from aligning the first formant and the fundamental partial. An anti-resonance means that the singer can take full advantage of the backpressure to establish higher subglottal pressure with reduced laryngeal effort, making an effortless but highly resonant high note. Since nasality is less perceptible on high notes, this leaves a lot of room to move before the sound becomes nasal. It's especially useful for quiet high notes. For an excellent example, listen to Cecilia Bartoli in Sposa son disprezzata (from 3:55 to 4:03 on the album Se tu m'ami, Decca 436 267-2): nasality on the exquisitely quiet top note only becomes evident when she leaps down the octave. So nasality can be a very useful tool in the box.
References and recommended reading

Austin SF. 2000. Nasal resonance - fact or fiction? Journal of Singing 57(2): 33-41. Barnes JJ, Davis PJ, Oates J, Chapman J. 2004. The relationship between professional operatic soprano voice and high range spectral energy. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116: 530-538. Birch P, Gumoes B, Stavad H, Prytz S, Bjrkner E, Sundberg J. 2002. Velum behavior in professional classic operatic singing. Journal of Voice 16: 61-71. Blomgren M, Chen Y, Ng ML, Gilbert HR. 1998. Acoustic, aerodynamic, physiologic, and perceptual properties of modal and vocal fry registers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 103: 2649-2658. Collyer S, Davis PJ, Thorpe CW, Callaghan J. Fundamental frequency influences the relationship between sound pressure level and spectral balance in female classically trained singers. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, in press. Harris T, Harris S, Rubin JS, Howard DM. 1998. The Voice Clinic Handbook. London: Whurr Publishers. House AS, Stevens KN. 1956. Analog studies of the nasalization of vowels. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 22: 218-231. Miller R. 2008. Securing Baritone, Bass-Baritone, and Bass Voices. Oxford: Oxford UP. Nix J, Emerich K, Titze IR. 2005. Application of vocal fry to the training of singers. Journal of Singing 62: 53-59. Titze IR. 1994. Principles of voice production. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall. Titze IR. 1999. The use of low first formant vowels and nasals to train the lighter mechanism. Journal of Singing 55(4): 41-43. Titze IR, Story BH. 1997. Acoustic interactions of the voice source with the lower vocal tract. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101: 2234-2243

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