lloyd, isabelle and all my friends at vocalist,
i studied with a teacher who kept saying 'forward placement' like a
mantra. not being able to get anything that seemed 'forward' to me, my
sound kept getting brighter and brighter as my head kept tilting more and
more forward. realising i would soon be looking directly at my sternum if i
kept studying with her, i moved on.
what i have found in singers and teachers who are fixated on the concept
of 'forward placement' is that they, generally speaking, tend to produce
overly bright sounds. conversely, those fixated on 'covering', 'back and
up', etc. tend towards woofy, unintelligable sounds. both factions seem to
think a choice of one or the other has to be made. in any reading of hines
or miller, the term 'chiaroscuro' will pop up as an ideal in classical vocal
production indicating dark and bright in combination is desirable.
looking at drawings made from x-rays ( sideview ) of the position of the
tongue in relation to the rest of the mouth and throat, it seems to me that
the tongue divides the vocal tract into two adjoining pockets. in my
experiments (nice way of saying 'goofing around with' ) with tuvan throat
singing, i have discovered that the key to producing these sounds is making
one vowel, usually 'oo', in the throat pocket and another vowel, usually a
fluctuation between 'ee' and the french 'u' sound, in the mouth or lip
pocket. in doing this, the tongue seperates these two pockets a lot more
than in normal phonation. in using gram50 to analyse what happens, there is
activity 0-600hz. and 1500-2400hz. there is nothing much above 2400hz.
and it is absolutely blank between 600-1500hz. so, basically what i have
done has been to take two existing parts of my voice and isolated them by
removing everything else.
'duh', very simply, drops the larynx very low. isabelle, i was curious
to see how much change this would produce in your larynx height as the
'forward placement' singers i have come across seem to have a slighlty
elevated larynx. allowing the larynx to raise shortens the throat pocket
reducing the potential for depth in the sound ( miller said something about
the 'scuro' of the voice showing up as a strengthening of the voice in the
500hz range. ).
what my experimenting with tuvan throat singing has shown me, is just
how much one can adjust these two pockets in 'normal' singing to balance the
sound of a particular vowel. my 'oo' vowel, for example, shows much less
activity in the range of the singer's formant than the rest of my vowel
sounds ( it has a tendency to have too much 'brooklyn' and not enough 'valley
girl' in it ). by combining a 'brooklyn' throat pocket with a 'valley girl'
mouth pocket, i am now able to get a fuller 'oo' vowel. do i think of all
that when i sing 'oo'? of course, not. that combination produces a
different 'oo', as if it were from a different part of the country. so, i
just imitate it until i can't remember how i used to do it.
mike
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