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.

Passaggio Tips III: Exercises

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Straws, metronome, mirror and Messiah

In this post, I’ll give you a few exercises for working out your passaggio. It’s not easy, but it can be done with some patience.

Glides

I love glides.

“Glide” means sliding between two notes. There’s no stopping on individual pitches except for the two poles at either end (which isn’t true in the “siren” genre of glides). There’s no worrying about whether you’re singing in tune. Instead, it’s just an exercise to get in touch with your voice and your range.

Honestly, you can perform a glide between any two pitches, but it’s probably best to have at least a spread of an octave. Beginners often get stymied by glides that are too short.

Falsetto to speaking glide

This comes from Berton Coffin’s The Sounds of Singing. One of the gentlest exercises I do is to start on F#4 in falsetto and then glide down two octaves. I start on the vowel “ooo” ([u]).

For women: One octave is sufficient from this pitch, though two later become doable. If this feels too low, there’s no crime in starting higher. As you transpose higher, you can switch to more open sounds as “oo” will become more difficult.

When I get to the bottom pitch, I open to “Ah” in speaking voice. Along the way, I try to ease the transition from falsetto to modal and from closed vowel to open so that there’s no obvious break in the sound. This should become pretty easy after a few tries.

Then I glide up from the bottom note back to the starting pitch, in this case F#4. Again, you should strive to move from modal to falsetto without an obvious break. Then you can transpose the entire exercise up by half steps.

Goal

First you begin to sense what vowel shapes feel best in a certain part of your voices and what shapes help move you in and out of register changes.

Second, you begin to sense where you like to make the switch from that lower voice into the higher voice. For me, this happens around B3.

Breath warmup with straws

Sing through a straw. Really small straws will just cause stress for some people, so experiment with different sizes to see what you like. I personally prefer a coffee stirring straw. YMMV

Try a glide with the straw, but now you’ll start from the bottom of your voice and glide upwards to some high note. Because it’s safer to sing through a straw than with your mouth hanging open, you can experiment with different levels of breath support.

Remember that the feeling of gentle breath push from your abdomen must be paired with a sense of resistance and openness from the ribcage and inhalation muscles. La lotta vocale and all that.

Goal

Why straws? Ingo Titze, the voice researcher, has published a lot of material about how high impedance vowels and voiced consonants (shapes that block the outflow of air from your vocal tract) help vocal folds to begin phonation with less air pressure. A straw really increases impedance.

This is a gentle warmup for your folds, and you can begin warming up your breath muscles without too much worry about tiring out your voice.

Scales and Arpeggio Strategies

Any of the following strategies can be used for both scales and arpeggios. Play around with both and even combine them.

Small voice

Andrew Zimmerman taught me this.

Small voice is exactly that. You attempt to make the smallest sound possible while maintaining some kind of pitch. The trick is to move it throughout your range without needing to blast your voice.

Begin low in your voice. Raise the back of the tongue to the “ng” position. Begin singing a five note scale in the smallest voice possible. Transpose this up by half steps. Be patient. Your voice will have obvious breaks at first, and some tones won’t want to work. But if you’re gentle, you will find the ability to make your voice work without too much breath pressure.

Whilst doing this, your voice will feel register-less, and it is hard to tell whether you’ve entered falsetto or not. Don’t worry about it. Later you can try and maintain some sense of modal voice as you get higher.

I also like “ng” because we have no strong opinion about how it should sound, so there’s less desire to actively manipulate the sound.

Goal

Small voice communicates how well our folds are working. If they feel totally immovable, then that means much more gentle warm up time in needed or maybe even some vocal rest. If they feel pliant and willing to move throughout the range, then that’s a good sign.

It also reminds us that we don’t need lots of vocal weight while singing through the passaggio. By maintaining the small voice, we find new pathways through our range that don’t involve really heavy singing.

Sing on [u]

Begin on an “oo” fairly low in your voice and sing an upward major scale. Because its formants are tuned lower than [a], it will flip to second formant (F2) tuning earlier than an open vowel like “ah”. That’s good since it will be in a lower part of your voice.

This flip is around the primo passaggio for men. For women, it will happen very low in the voice. You’re essentially moving into “middle voice” lower in your range.

If it doesn’t flip, you will have the distinct feeling that the vowel is becoming more and more distorted. It will also feel heavier and harder to produce.

If the flip happens, it will feel like the bottom has fallen out from underneath the vowel. That’s not to say that it stops sounding deep, but there is a distinct feeling change. As you perfect this, you’ll notice that the vowel actually sounds brighter while still maintaining its [u] character.

And here’s the beautiful thing: you barely have to do anything to let the flip happen. Just maintain an [u] tongue and lip position, and it should just work. Of course, it’s always easier said than done.

Goal

First, that flip is THE flip just in a lower part of the voice. Mastering it is essential. The [a] vowel flips higher in the voice, but it will be a lot easier to find that higher flip if you’ve already found the lower [u] flip.

This corresponds to what Pablo Elvira told Jerome Hines in Great Singers on Great Singing:

“This is only one of the problems that the oo vowel solves … it’s already covered. But if you do ” – he sang an ascending scale on an ah vowel opening more and more as he went up – “then you have to teach him how to break that passaggio. But if you use the oo, it’s already there”

Note on [u]

The [u] vowel must have sufficient depth. We Americans tend to pronounce our “ooo” very shallowly (closer to “eww”). One way to find the deeper sound is to make the vowel first without using the lips. Use your fingers to prevent your lips from forming the rounded shape then make [u].

Hard, no? When you get to something that feels as close as you can, then add the lips. That’s the [u] we’re looking for.

Sing More Coloratura in General

I’ve been singing loads of Messiah recently, and it’s been great for identifying bad habits and sticky places in my range.

Even if you just do scale plus 9th exercises, do it with a metronome so that you don’t change tempo unconsciously. Try fast and slow speeds. Slow doesn’t necessarily mean easier.

Trick Yourself

Sometimes we need to approach it indirectly.

Closed then Open Exercises

Begin on a pitch with a closed shape (closed vowel, nasal consonant, straw, etc.) and then open to a vowel that’s been giving you trouble.

For example, Berton Coffin describes the open mouthed hum where you drop your jaw, place your hand over your mouth, sing a pitch, and then remove the hand.

Goal

Remember that high impedance vowel and consonant shapes help the folds to phonate? By finding that easier onset the folds will continue to open and close in that pattern even if you open your mouth.

From there, you can get the sense of what a well-sung note on a pitch feels like. Learn to prepare that feeling as you approach difficult areas of your voice.

Singing with earplugs

That’s it. Put earplugs in or cover your ears with your hands.

Goal

You’ll sound like a radio DJ to yourself because all the brilliance is blocked, but I promise you that you will get a very strong sense of what works and what doesn’t.

You’ll also hear how your voice transitions from one zone to the next. Find the gentlest path.

Is that all?

No, but I have to stop somewhere because there are so many ways to approach your passaggio.

But these exercises have helped me personally learn more about my voice and how to manage moving through the different zones of it.

One final thought: train your ears. Begin listening to singers and disassembling exactly what you hear. Eventually, you’ll begin to hear techniques and choices instead of loudness or beauty or whatever adjectives transfix you now.

Your precision in perception will help your precision in action.

In Bayreuth

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Currently I’m in Bayreuth, Germany visiting friends Andrew Zimmerman and Susan Maclean. I’ve seen several performances so far (dress rehearsals, which are basically full performances without curtain calls). That the weather has been temperate and not the perpetually rainy stuff of legends has been the cherry on top of an already terrific trip.

Tonight is the premiere of Parsifal with Susan as Kundry. To say I’m excited is an understatement.

Pictures!

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The Festspielhaus from a distance

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Bust of Wagner in the gardens

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View of Wagner's grave and Wagner museum during the grave ceremony on Monday marking the beginning of the festival

Back to Baritone

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For the past 4 months or so, I’ve been moving back to my baritone rep and really liking it. So I decided to switch back, and it’s taken me this long to figure out how to write about it.

It Feels Good

When I switched to tenor I really believed that it was appropriate, but after a year and a half where I’ve performed in a higher tessitura and recorded myself and made every attempt to make it work…it just hasn’t. It’s not that I was awful as a tenor. It’s just that I feel better as a baritone.

And that’s it. I could make technical sounding arguments both for and against singing tenor, but I don’t want to do that. I feel better as a baritone. The whole experience feels more like a massage for my throat. I like it, and I’m happier singing as a baritone.

Am I Just Being Lazy?

When my teacher and I talked about it (and, yes, even though Andrew lives in New Mexico I still consider him my teacher), we talked about the difference in effort between tenor and baritone. Tenor is more vocally strenuous than baritone. It sits higher – relatively speaking and in general– for longer than baritone equivalents.

However, as Andrew pointed out, it shouldn’t feel like it is “300% more difficult”. That’s about what it felt like.

I’ll still practice tenor repertoire occasionally. By singing high, I learn how to sing high. By singing something so challenging, I feel like my technique and strength have improved. It’s like vocal weightlifting. I am now bringing that to my baritone repertoire, and I feel like I’ve never sung as well. Suddenly, it takes more effort to sing as a baritone, but it feels like the right kind of effort.

And some songs’ “higher” keys feel better. Just because baritones are lower doesn’t mean we need to sit in the nether regions of our voices all the time if something might fit better.

Why Did This Post Take Me So Long?

It’s taken awhile for me to write this. I’ve been afraid that this makes me look incompetent or foolish because I was so certain. And I wrote some things during that time that I plainly disagree with now. Yet the nature of a blog is that it never forgets, and the longer you write the more this becomes evident.

For context: these posts about “tenor or baritone” stuff have consistently been my most viewed and commented upon material by people who have stumbled across the site. I need to acknowledge that my circumstances have changed and that this may affect the way my prior content is perceived. Or I could just delete the offending posts and move on.

However to delete those older posts outright would feel wrong. I deleted a few when I combined Beginning Singer and iansidden.com, and I wish that I hadn’t. It just goes against – in my opinion – the beauty of blogs as a “log”. But I do need to clarify and adjust some of the things I wrote. So I will write a follow up and embed a link to it in those earlier posts announcing that some of my opinions have changed.  This will take me some time to get finalized.

In the meantime, I’m practicing a lot and loving it. I’m learning new rep, and I’ve begun working with an accompanist here in PA. There’s also a ton of music to check out in the Northeast.

Thank you for reading.

About the image: This is my first attempt at using the Open Source Inkscape program. If you can’t afford or don’t want to use Illustrator, then it’s pretty nice.