Ian Sidden

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Google Questions: “How do earplugs help people sing?”

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Website owners see some of the Google search queries that send people to their websites. Sometimes, these queries are questions, so if I can, I’d like to answer them directly.

Question: “How do earplugs help people sing?”

In my experience and in the experience of other singers I’ve spoken with, they help for a few reasons:

  • They change your perception of yourself enough that you’re forced to try something new. It’s very easy to become dependent on hearing your voice a specific way. Without that reinforcement, you may start pushing your voice unhealthily to recreate it. Think about the difference to your singing in vibrant rooms vs. acoustically dead rooms. But you never really hear yourself accurately in any room, so you should break this dependence.
  • In my experience, ear plugs shift your perception to how you feel rather than how you sound, and the result can often be very positive.
  • I believe they make it easier to hear the relative health of my folds. If my voice has been roughed up, I can hear that more clearly through my head with earplugs, and I can adjust more quickly.
  • They protect your hearing. This shouldn’t be underestimated. Singers and instrumentalists are loud, and I presume you’d like to keep your ears healthy for the long haul.

You don’t even need to buy anything to try this out. Just sing your warmups with your hands on your ears and then buy some cheap earplugs to step up. You only need something nicer if you’re going to use them around other musicians.

Further reading: Singing with Earplugs

An Unavoidable Leap of Faith

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You will never have a fully accurate idea of how your singing sounds to other people. Whenever you sing, your ears hear something from your mouth as well as the sound transmitted through your skull, but it’s not the same thing that other people hear when they’re in the room with you. Even recordings can’t communicate it unless you are strictly a recording artist.

You might not even like your own voice if you heard it the way other people do. Or you might like it even more and wonder why you haven’t pushed yourself harder.

It’s hard to know who to trust when you get feedback on your singing. When someone tells you that you’re good, do you believe them? Why should you? When someone tells you that you aren’t good enough, do you believe them? Why should you?

In general, I prefer avoiding unnecessary leaps of faith. But with singing, you can never be 100% sure. So as long as singing is a priority for you, there’s an unavoidable leap of faith involved whenever you open your mouth.

“Al dente”

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“Al dente” is one of those terms that drives me crazy. It means “to the tooth”, and it’s used to describe the ideal amount of cooking for pasta.

However, there’s little in the term that tells you where that is. I’ve heard it used to describe pasta that I consider under cooked as well as pasta that I consider properly cooked. Perhaps there are greater subtleties that have eluded me, but that only adds to my dislike of the term.

Singing is full of these terms. These are terms that are code words for something that is hard to describe. “Head voice”, “chest voice”, “on the breath”, “legato”, “support” and so on all contain clues to what they describe, but once you move past those clues, they start breaking down in their specifics and precise meaning to individuals.

This is the part where I should provide an answer to this problem, but I don’t have one. Perhaps the answer is acknowledging that there is a problem, and these terms don’t have universal meaning between singers and singing teachers.

Resisting Opinions

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It’s easy to get swept up in emotion, and it’s easy to give in to the desire to have an opinion with incomplete information. Especially right now and all future ages where we are bombarded with constant news, resist the pressure to have an opinion right away.

There’s plenty of time to get one, but having one immediately marries you to a point of view that may be hard to break once new information comes. And new information will come.

Open Jug Breath Holding

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Holding the breath comes naturally to us when underwater or when lifting something heavy. This is the closed-jug technique (my name). Picture a jug with a cork in the top. We fill our lungs with air, close the glottis (bring the vocal folds together to block further inflow and outflow of air), and leave it at that for as long as we need to. We can relax the breathing muscles themselves since the closed glottis is doing the work. In fact, we can even tighten our abs and push.

In both of the cases I mention above, swimming and lifting, that’s a good strategy.

But for singing, this is not so helpful. We want to maintain a sense of inhalation and expansion. We want to reduce excessive abdominal pressure. We want onsets that aren’t glottal attacks.

Think of your body as an open jug. Inhale and then leave the body in the position of inhalation. The ribs remain expanded, the remains belly gently down and out, and the glottis remains open. The air in the lungs remains as long as the lungs remain open. Any collapse leads to the air leaving, and any expansion allows more air in.

We’re holding our breath, but we’re not trapping it. Instead, our breathing muscles are doing the work instead of the glottis.

From here, we can practice remaining in the position of inhalation, or we can sing a note.