Three Myths About Singing

I love mythology, but only when I’m reading Homer and Virgil, or looking at paintings of Aphrodite on old vases in an art museum. I don’t at all enjoy the myths that get in the way of singing.

 

In this post I will reveal three common myths about singing. These myths can potentially hold you back from exploring your voice and discovering your potential. At worst, they can be counterproductive or even dangerous. Here they are:

 

1. My voice isn’t good enough. I don’t have the right kind of voice for singing.

 

This is false! If your voice is good enough for speaking, it should be good enough for singing. Both speaking and singing are natural activities. In other words, nature has created our bodies in such a way as to enable us to talk and sing. Singing and talking are really two different forms of the same fundamental activity: using our mouths, tongues, vocal chords, etc. to produce sounds in order to communicate for practical or artistic purposes.

 

Singing is part of what it means to be a human being. The trick to singing is not worrying about what sort of equipment you have, but learning how to use it.

 

2. I can’t sing because my voice isn’t big enough or loud enough.

 

This is also false. Good singing is about technique, not about size. This myth reminds me of the story (maybe also a myth?) about Abraham Lincoln, who was unusually tall. Someone asked him: “How long do you think a man’s legs really ought to be?” He answered: “Long enough to reach the ground!”

 

How loud does your voice have to be? Loud enough to reach your listeners’ ears. Suppose you’re sitting on the sofa and talking to a couple of friends who are walking around the room. Sometimes they’re closer to you; sometimes they’re further away. As they’re moving around the room, do you grab a pencil and calculator, start entering the cosine of the angle their path forms to the front of your sofa, and divide by the square of their velocity, in order to determine how much to increase or lower your volume while they traipse around the room?

 

Or do you look at them, follow them with your eyes, and adjust accordingly without even thinking about it?

 

Singing “loudly enough” (or “softly enough,” which is actually harder to do well) depends on two things: the emotion that you would like to convey at a particular point in a song, and focusing on the listeners with whom you are communicating through your singing. Assuming that you are in a reasonable locale (for example, your living room or an average auditorium, and not standing at home plate trying to sing or talk to somebody in the outfield), it should not be difficult to learn how to reach your listeners with your voice.

 

3. I’ll never be able to sing because I don’t know how to breathe. Breathing is so complicated!

 

Unless you have a medical condition that affects your breathing, you are probably perfectly capable of breathing on your own. If you’re worried about breathing, ask yourself these two questions:

 

Question #1: How do I breathe when I’m talking? Let’s say you’re engaged in a long conversation with a friend, and you’re recounting what you did over the weekend, or explaining something that happened yesterday. Obviously you’ll need to breathe several times in the midst of your remarks. How do you do it?

 

Do you worry about how you’re going to manage to breathe during your conversation, interrupt your chat to start breathing, and implement a ten-part plan to breathe “correctly”? Or do you just concentrate on the meaning of what you would like to communicate, and happily go on talking, confident that your body will take care of the breathing on its own?

 

Question #2: How did you breathe last night while you were sleeping? Of course if you were sleeping, then you weren’t awake to examine how you were breathing. But you don’t have to be a biologist or a physician to know what condition you would be in right now if you hadn’t breathed for several hours while you were asleep. You would have turned blue long ago and would probably be dead.

 

So how did you breathe while you were asleep? Your mind wasn’t there to intervene and take control. Your body had to do it on its own, without your even thinking of it, reminding yourself of it, or being aware of it.

 

That’s exactly how you should breathe when you’re singing! There may be times at a more advanced stage when it may be helpful to think about breathing, but right now there is no need to worry about it. Let your body do what it already knows how to do, and you can step back and just worry about the singing. I hope you feel as relieved to hear this as I did when I first found out 1) that my body already knows how to breathe and 2) that I now had one less topic that I needed to deal with.

 

My voice teacher in New York, the late Harold Parker, used to say to me: “Inhibit the breath.” He didn’t mean that I shouldn’t breathe or that I should hold my breath (on the contrary, holding your breath is the last thing you want to do as a singer). He meant that I should inhibit any conscious physical or mental process that would interfere with my body’s breathing for itself, or with the natural flow of air in and out of my body.

 

This is actually a bit trickier than it sounds, because it is not so easy to place sufficient trust in ourselves to step back, relinquish active control, and permit ourselves to breathe naturally. But it’s worthwhile to develop the habit of “inhibiting the breath” and allowing ourselves to breathe naturally.