Ian Sidden

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A Sea of Best Guesses

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When we wake up and get going, we’re operating under a series of best guesses about how the world works.

We can’t know what random events will happen that day.

We can’t know how we will react until the moment comes.

We cannot know fully the contents of another person’s mind, let alone many other people’s minds, and we cannot fully understand their motivations and needs.

They can’t fully understand our motivations and needs.

We can barely understand our own motivations and needs.

We have a vague understanding of why we do what we do, and our own account of our actions may not line up with the truth.

The full truth of any given moment, however, may be unknowable, and the more time spent analyzing, the further time glides us away from that moment.

We get along with heuristics and best guesses because we have to.

And that will have to do, I guess, until we all become omniscient.

Whenever that will be.

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”.

Singing Checklist?

"Neck elongated... check... mouth open... check... smell the rose... check..."

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If we could design a checklist of actions to take before singing a tone, what would that look like? After all, pilots use checklists because they improve safety. No matter how smart you are, you can miss something:

As we all know, flying has opportunities aplenty for distraction from inside or outside the cockpit. These often lead to overlooked items at a critical portion of a flight. As a painful and expensive example, distraction has caused countless gear-up landings. No human is perfect, but using the flow/checklist method is guaranteed to trap more errors than using just one of each.

Obviously, a singer can’t carry around a physical piece of paper with them that they fill out every time they start a new phrase. Yet it might be useful to design such a checklist anyway. I’ve often had the experience where a vocal problem was eventually solved by something I already knew and had practiced but had neglected. Having a checklist might have saved time.

So I’m not going to write out a checklist today, but this is a to-do.