Ian Sidden

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The Stress Feedback Loop

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Do you experience emotions without some corresponding physical manifestation? I doubt it. Anger, fear, sadness, stress all tend to crop up physically as well as mentally: you get that hit of adrenaline, your muscles tighten up, and you’re on the emotional ride.

You might not even remember why you feel stressed! I’ve had to sometimes think through my day to remember why I feel stressed when I had such lingering stress artifacts. Once found, the logical question is whether carrying that stress forward is warranted. Usually it isn’t.

But what if this residual stress echo is brought with us over days, months, or years?

Anything can turn into a habit if we practice it enough, and that goes for those physical reactions as well. If we were to break down our physical habits and catalogue all unnecessary muscle use, we would find that some, if not most, of it is practiced stress carried into non-stressful situations.

If you’re singing with this residual stress, you will sound stressed because your muscles are acting stressed. You will behave stressed. You may feel stressed mentally because your body is acting stressed. And by feeling stressed mentally, we reinforce the physical stress.

It’s a stress feedback loop.

The first two places to look for this feedback loop are:

  • Your solar plexus (the point in your abdominals between the floating ribs). This will manifest through abdominal tightness and a torso collapsed in and around the solar plexus.
  • The atlanto-occipital joint (the point where your head meets your neck). This will be tight, and you’ll be trying to shorten your neck by pulling your head down and back.

Take a moment right now and divert some attention to one of these points and then the other. Breathe into them and soften them. By releasing them, they will expand on their own. Let them. It’s a subtle feeling, but I’ve found that it feels good.

Ideally, it needs to be practiced away from stressful situations because it’s hard to form new habits deliberately when we’re under stress. That’s where a practice like meditation comes in: it reintroduces us to ourselves in the most mundane circumstances (breathing, walking, sitting) and lets us re-habituate how we think and use our bodies.

It’s easier to see how stress changes us when our default is calm. But if we’re chronically stressed, the change isn’t as perceptible.

Nevertheless, next time you’re in a stressful situation, try and divert some awareness to these two points. Are you pulling your head down and back? Are you tightening your solar plexus and pulling yourself down and inward? If yes, then try and let go of that, and in so doing you may free yourself from much of the stress that the situation would otherwise provoke.

Try to break the loop.

PS. These are not exclusively my original ideas. The idea of physical stress leading to mental stress as a feedback loop was taught to me by my teacher Andrew Zimmerman who learned from his practice and study of Alexander Technique.

Solving Problems

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One lens to view your task as a performer is as a problem solver.

The director gives you a weird direction, and you don’t know what to do with it. She’s clearly wrong, right? She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, right? My interpretation is the best, right?

Wrong. Getting stuck on those thoughts will sabotage your creative process. You have a problem, so solve it: what would it look like if you followed her direction? Figure it out. Find the pathway to make it work.

The same is true if there’s something weird in the script or if there’s some weird harmony. Clearly, the composer or librettist just made a dumb choice here. Clearly, they were pressed for time and forgot they left this in here. Clearly, no one will notice if I just say or sing this without much intention behind it.

Wrong. Solve the problem. Assume it’s intentional. Why are you singing that? What kind of creative discoveries can you make if you accept the anomalies existent as valid?

If you need to gin up your courage, remember that everyone involved in the production is also trying to solve problems, and they need your help. The director is also wrestling with weird stuff in the script. Your other actors are trying to solve the problem of some of your interpretive choices. The conductor is trying to solve the weird tempo marking, harmonies and dynamic shifts.

Solve the problem.

Reader Question: How Loud am I with Earplugs?

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Got a reader question a few days ago after reading my article “Singing with Earplugs”:

The main challenge I find with singing with ear plugs is knowing how to regulate the loudness of my own voice. Since I don’t have the normal feedback sound level, it’s difficult for me to know if I’m singing too loudly or too softly.

How do you overcome this problem?

I’ll respond with a couple tips, but a lot of the answer has to do with patience and changing your priorities.

Our Hearing is Imperfect

First, we aren’t great at determining how loud we are even without earplugs. Ever get asked why you’re being so loud or why you’re speaking so quietly and been surprised? I think we’ve all also experienced other people who were inappropriately loud or quiet and who seemed unaware of it. That can happen with or without earplugs because the mouth’s position relative to our ears prevents us from getting a totally clear idea of the relative volume of our voice to others’.

We’re hearing some combination of a voice coming from the throat and mouth and arriving at our ears from inside our own head and the sound from our mouths on the outside of our ears and the reflections of our own voice from acoustically reflective structures. We don’t hear our own voice the same way others hear it, and we never will, and we have to trust that we’ve picked up enough cues and good habits to be using our voice at an appropriate volume.

On top of that are personal vocal biases that encourage certain vocal behavior. Maybe there’s some intention to show off, so you tend to be louder to get attention. Maybe you’re shy and uncertain of yourself, so you tend to hide vocally. Maybe you vacillate between the two. Either one, however, is an extra-musical bias that needs to be internally combatted to find the ideal dynamic level.

So what’s different when we wear earplugs that adds to the above challenges?

  • Our own timbre and perceived loudness are different. Our perception of our own voice is tilted much more towards the voice coming from inside our own head rather than reflections of our voice from the outside world. It feels more cut off from the other voices and has a very different timbre than the other voices. We also feel relatively loud compared to the voices around us.
  • The experience is unusual. The normal cues we have to determine appropriate volume are distorted because we’re just not used to experiencing the world like this.
  • The overall volume of the outside world is reduced. Low volume cues can be totally missed while wearing earplugs. If you’re wearing earplugs that aren’t meant for musicians, then the timbral character can also be changed significantly.

All of these are disorienting if you’re not used to them. So what to do?

Practice More

The simplest solution is to use your earplugs more often. There’s no replacement for simply practicing more often with them. And I mean that seriously: don’t just use the earplugs in noisy group rehearsals, but use them when you’re practicing alone even if you’re not at risk of hurting your own ears.

You have to let yourself get used to them, and that may mean you might sing a bit too loudly or softly sometimes. But that’s what rehearsals are for. You’re practicing. Let yourself make mistakes and adjust from there. Eventually, your ears and brain will figure the new paradigm out.

Alternate With and Without

I like changing modes quickly to trick myself into learning new things. For example, the open mouth hum from Richard Miller is one of my favorite exercises. That’s where you cover your mouth with your hand, sing up to a high note, and then after you’ve begun singing the note you remove the hand.

Do the same with earplugs. Begin singing with them, then remove them in the middle of a phrase, then add them back, and then repeat. You’ll begin getting a good sense of what your voice sounds like both with and without. You can do this alone or in rehearsal. Just try to do it subtly, so you don’t disrupt anyone else’s work process.

You don’t necessarily have to use earplugs for this. Just cover your ears with your hands, and alternate on and off as you sing.

Pay Attention Better

Your pre-earplugs level of attention won’t cut it. You have to up your game or you’ll miss too much. Even through the earplugs, you’ll be able to get a lot of information, but only if you actively work at it.

Since you’re hearing less, you have to give more attention to what you’re hearing. Can you hear your neighbor’s voice? What does their timbre tell you about their vocal intensity? If the conductor speaks, can you hear what they’re saying? Can you hear the piano/orchestra?

Likewise, pay more attention to yourself. Do you feel like you’re really working hard to sing? Do you feel like you’re pushing? Do you feel like you’re singing without energy? Does your energy match the singers around you?

Which leads me to the next point…

Sing By Feeling

You have to learn to sing in a way where your primary reference is how it feels rather than how it sounds. Low-effort low volume singing feels a certain way, and you don’t need your ears to know it. Excessively loud pushed singing also feels a certain way, and you don’t need to hear it to feel it.

Even if you’re not singing with earplugs, if you sing long enough, you’ll be faced with weird acoustic situations. If you’re dependent on the sound of your own voice, you will constantly be frustrated and blame your troubles on the “bad acoustic” or “dead space” or the “weird costume” (hats and hoods are notorious for messing with how you hear yourself). But singing primarily by feeling applies to every acoustic situation.

Get Away From Extremes

At some point, you get an idea of how softly you can sing and how loudly, and your singing will be and should be far away from either extreme.

Find that middle ground and move to and away from that point in line with the musical demands. Think of giving around 60% of your max volume as the default mezzo forte dynamic. Then 55% for piano and 40% for pianissimo. 70% for forte and 80% for fortissimo.

You basically never want to approach 100% in terms of volume unless you’re going for an effect, and if you’re singing in an ensemble, you probably shouldn’t be going for that effect.

Focus on the Ensemble

There’s more to blending as an ensemble than just how loud you are relative to the others. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • Is our diction clear and unified?
  • Are our phrases moving together?
  • Do our vowels match?
  • Are we attacking the pitch cleanly without sliding or other undesirable vocal effects?
  • Are we responding to the conductor dynamically?
  • Tuning? Rhythm? I’d argue that getting the rhythm wrong is a much bigger danger of singing with earplugs than being too loud just because you can drop your attention for a few seconds and not realize you’ve gone off into your own rhythm-world.

There are a lot of ways to draw unwanted attention to yourself well before you sing too loudly or softly. If you’re really paying attention to the ensemble and getting all those other things right, it’s really unlikely that your personal loudness is by itself going to be a problem.

Be Patient with Yourself

If you combine everything above, you’ll be paying a lot of attention in rehearsal. You’ll be listening to your colleagues carefully through the reduced loudness of the earplugs. You’ll be following the conductor’s movements and her or his words very closely. You’ll be paying attention to how your singing feels. You’ll be paying attention to all the things that make an ensemble sound unified. You’ll have found a healthy standard loudness that’s neither too soft nor too loud, and you’ll reference your other dynamic levels to that point. You’ll never sing with 100% volume or near-0% energy.

The earplugs will make you feel a bit isolated, and it’s a scary place to be at first, but with patience, you’ll adapt to them and enjoy the benefits that I believe regular singing with earplugs can bestow.

Rules-Based Singing

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Since we can’t fully hear ourselves, and since we might decide we can take excessive vocal risk based on transitory feelings, we have to have a process that includes certain rules. We then rely on these rules to guide us through challenging situations where our present emotions might encourage us to behave differently:

  • “I breathe here. No matter what.”
  • “I round my lips here. No matter what.”
  • “I wear my ear plugs for this piece. No matter what.”
  • “I only give 85% of my max volume here even though it says ff. No matter what.”
  • “I maintain some squillo here, even though it says ppp. No matter what.”
  • “I modify the vowel here. No matter what.”
  • “I check in with the conductor here. No matter what.”

You’ll develop these rules on your own given your own strengths and weaknesses and the challenges of your given circumstances. When should you make such rules? Here are a few over arching times:

  • When you keep forgetting something that you know will help you.
  • When you have shifting circumstances such as room acoustics.
  • When you have very difficult music, especially music that presents a risk of early vocal fatigue.

Behind all this is the idea that your practice is mindful, so that you can develop rules in advance in order to fully integrate them. But late-developed rules are better than none at all.

On the Breath

Find the Overarching Breath Gesture

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Each phrase you sing can and should be prepared in the breath beginning with the moment of inhalation, and it should be followed through — like you’re riding on it — until the end of the phrase.

  • Determine how you want to structure a phrase in your practice.
  • As you inhale, hear the phrase (the pitches, the dynamics, etc.) in your mind and imagine how it should feel to sing that phrase. Tune your throat in advance of the onset and in reaction to your imagination. With practice, this can be done quickly.
  • Seamlessly integrate the end of inhalation and start of exhalation into one larger breath gesture.
  • Sing the phrase by shaping the exhalation with your body to your desired phrasing. Utilize both inhalation and exhalation muscles to find balance.
  • Repeat for the next phrase.

You can practice by doing simple sounds without worrying about more complex phrasing. Some body-connected sighing can start the connection. Do the steps above, just remove the music. Experiment with different inhalations and exhalations and pay attention to the resulting sound and how you feel about it.

There are, of course, smaller techniques within each of the steps above. Just the exhalation portion can be stuffed with other guidelines. But this is something of a macro overview, and the main idea is the mind/body integration around an overarching breath gesture, in which the actual sound-making is only a part.

Anyway, that’s my rough personal definition of “on the breath”.