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Adding colour to the voice and your performance is often seen as the last step in preparation to perform - however it is an intrinsic part of the formation of sound and communication.
So how and why should we add colour to the voice?
Singing is the simple balance of phonation, and resonation.
Phonation is ‘the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration’ (Wikipedia) whilst resonation can include amplification and filtering the sound.
It is possible to tell the age of someone and what emotion they are communicating through sound alone of their voice, without sight of their facial features or physical gestures - so we know that the voice is a powerful and intricate communicator, and the brain adept at understanding very subtle differences in tone.
A study Read Here published online in American Psychologist recorded 24 separate human emotions in brief human vocalisation. This does not include the longer passages of speech etc, just short noises. 24. I still find this number incredible despite having read it several times!
These noises are created by instinctual things we do when talking/responding to situations. If I explain technically that they can be made by creating more inward space around the vocal tract, raising our soft palate, increasing or decreasing nasality, that helps in technical terms to describe what might be happening. But I think what might be more helpful is to provide an example of 2 scenarios that are similar but will have different sound responses to communicate different emotional responses..
‘ow’: hurt yourself, accidental papercut, self pity
‘ow’: hurt, your sibling gives you a dead arm, you are annoyed
These sounds show pain of very different types, and will be using different spaces to make the sound and communicate different layers of emotion to the listener. Have a go at making the two sounds yourself, what can you feel that is different in your breathing, posture, throat, to help you act out the scenarios and make the sounds different?
Most exciting, here is the link to the emotion map where you can hear the different emotions as recorded by researchers: Listen Here I love that each sound has a % of several emotions showing the variation possible!
As singers we aren’t aiming at displaying 24 emotions in our singing (not all at the same time/in the same aria thankfully!) - but this should also explain why your voice will not sound like someone else’s. You can’t possibly hope to match the percentages of each emotion to deliver an identical performance in sound and communication.
So we’ve talked about the different spaces the sound will resonate in due to emotion - how/why is this important when we sing? If you agree we should have Thought:Breath:Sing then you need to think the emotion/s, breath into that space with those certain parts of your singing space more open or more closed, then sing.
Some examples of Emotion in Singing:
Happy music requires more space and upper resonance. Why? Because this is what we do naturally when we are happy, as observed in normal life.
Our Faces are animated, our eyebrows are raised, we smile, we breath into those upper spaces naturally and with ease.
To help, get your pencil and draw a smiley face over your music/lyrics. Do you have to smile? No. But a smile or brightening the face is the simplest way in to acting that emotion, plus it usually magically adds other things to our voices that are very helpful (automatic space made and widening of the pillars of fauces, etc) .
Here is an example of a voiceover artist demonstrating their Happy/Bubbly voice, you can hear animation in her face and the upper resonances added by her acting happy in order to play the part for her script..
Happy/Bubbly Voiceover artist Advert
Music that is romantic requires more richness. Why? Because when we are being more romantic, we use a sing-song smooth voice with softened changes in pitch, and a rich tone.
For my example for this sound in speech I have chosen a Marks and Spencer advert in which several actors start talking with one emotion, then change to the now famous Marks and Spencer ‘This is not just…’ sensual voice. As you listen, can you hear how they change the shapes and spaces they are using to show us the new emotion?
This Is Not Just...M and S Advert
The actors are deliberately speaking with a smooth legato melodic style of speech. The voices are using a mid level of tone not too high or two low, although using those areas occasionally), and full bodied resonance, in that sounds relaxed. They are opening into and using the full depth of their body to add richness to the sound they create, with relaxed muscles/joints to further allow resonance (the opposite to help clarify, would be a small closed off sound, something like a nasal restricted tone that is small and thin with reduced resonance).
In summary: The emotional content of the music you sing should be a main starting point in your practise so that you are singing into the spaces that you need to connect the text and emotion to the music. Technical proficiency in singing includes the use of emotion and colour, and cannot be disconnected.
To add colour, we must study and think of how we might act out and speak the lyrics. Perhaps using words or emotion faces drawn on our music can help guide us when studying, a bit like Stanislavski who wrote how actors should prepare their scripts. Notice where we naturally move our anatomy, where we close the space and open it, to help us guide the voice to add colour.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog post about adding colour, what will you add to your practice? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.
As always, this is a discussion you can take to a trusted teacher or coach and use in your own practise with guidance and lots experimenting.
Adding colour is something highly personal, which will be different for every singer depending on their individual anatomy and interpretation. But it’s definitely something you can experiment with no matter your stage in vocal study.
