Dear Les and Vocalisters:
Thens for your response, Les.
The exercises I presented were desinged to help find the male head
voice and are not particularly useful for transcending the passaggio.
Unless there is some form of head voice developed there is little
chance of bridging the passaggio. There must be two sides to a
bridge if it is to be a bridge!
Since most of the recent comments made by members of this email group
were proposing falsetto as the best way, and in some cases the only
way, to create a voice above the male passaggio I thought it would be
alright to suggest some exercises that can help men discover the
sound, feeling, sensation, etc of the head voice.
It has been my experience that this can best be achieved by exercises
that involve adducted vocal folds with the resultant sense of breath
resistance and that these exercises should be of short individual
duration until the singer becomes more comfortable with the quality
of sound produced (a noticeable ring in the tone) and the sense of
the breath resistance that accompanies the head voice. For this
reason I have used the "F" consonant as an onset consonant. You
mentioned you use the "V" and I do as well. Both consonants are
forms of each other.
I seldom use lip trills because I have found that most students close
down their pharyngeal spaces on lip trills and tend to experience
tightness in the throat. Of course, one can be trained to avoided
this result but it is it my feeling that if a particular exercises
needs that much corrective training it is probably not the most
efficient of the many that can be chosen. Singing into a folded
handkerchief or, as Titze has explained, into a straw of different
diameters can achieve the same result without the tendency to close
the throat.
The premise behind each of these devices in the front of the mouth is
to restrict the airflow slightly above the vocal folds and, in so
doing, to better balance the difference in air pressures above the
vocal folds(Supra-glottal) as against the air pressure below the
vocal folds (Sub-glottal). This reduces the intensity of air flow
required to set the vocal folds in oscillation ("threshold
pressure"). Reducing the threshold pressure on the vocal folds
allows the folds to lengthen more easily (they are not required to
sustain strong medial pressure to hold back excessive air pressure)
and encourages oscillation primarily on the upper side of the vocal
folds which is a primary characteristic of head voice.
Using closed vowels on the exercises mentioned, such as /u/ and /o/
or /i/ and /e/, induces a lengthened vocal tract. The longer vocal
tract provides greater acoustic inertia or air column load on the
vocal folds and this also helps balance the pressure differences
above the vocal folds with the air pressure below the folds as well
as acting as a positive pressure on the upward movement of the folds
and a negative pressure on the downward movement of the folds.
The longer vocal tract, which is a natural part of forming these
vowels, also lowers the first formant or peak resonance of the vocal
tone bringing it closer to the fundamental of the phonated pitch.
The effect this has on the head voice is to lower its inception
point. Whereas the /a/ vowel might display the beginning of the
passaggio for a baritone at about C#4, the /i/ or /u/ vowel will
induce this first passaggio point on about Bb3 or even A3 for the
same voice. With the passaggio so lowered it is much easier for the
head voice to appear well within the range that the singer can
produce with an extended chest voice. Extending the chest voice this
high is not desired or encouraged but, because the singer is
performing well within his already available range it does not seem
excessive to have him produce a tone with adducted folds (as is found
in chest voice ) but with only the upper surface of the folds in
oscillation which, is by definition, a lighter mechanism that lives
within the realms of the heavier mechanism without the need to resort
to a completely different vocal fold configuration and would be the
case with falsetto.
--
Lloyd W. Hanson
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