Humans
PUBLISHED
I have this daydream I like to revisit when I’m somewhere boring, like sitting on a train. I’m at a pub or a family gathering, and reluctantly, I’m encouraged onto a stage. It’s karaoke, they say. Be fun, I think. Then, to the surprise of me and everyone else in the room, I smash out a perfect rendition of Cher’s Believe.
As luck would have it, I was able to take this particular daydream for a spin last year when a friend’s hen-do led me to a dodgy karaoke joint in London. The microphone was forced into my inebriated hand, and I was off. The sobering reality was that even though I know that song like the back of my hand, some of the sounds I intended to make did not match what was coming out of my mouth. Devastated to learn that I can, in fact, not reach the dizzying heights of Cher’s vocal talents, it got me wondering: why?
Yes, I know she’s the Goddess of Pop, but we’re both human and we have around about the same vocal setup (genetic differences aside). Had I made different (read: better) choices in life, were I to have paid more attention during music at school, could I, convincingly, believe in life after love? I wanted to find out.
Talking in tune
If we ignore all the beauty and wonder that song has brought our existence, the physical act of singing, much like talking, essentially boils down to breath. When our diaphragm contracts, it makes space so that our lungs can fill with air. As the diaphragm boings back again, it pushes that air out. This can either be a quiet breath, or we can utilize our vocal cords to make sound.
Vocal cords, found in the larynx, also known as the voice box, are two folds of smooth muscle that vibrate as air moves past them. This vibration is what we hear as sound, and we can adjust pitch thanks to muscle groups that alter vocal cord length and stiffness.
We get a further bit of control over the way we sound thanks to everything from the strength of our breath to our tongue, lips, and teeth. Why not give it a try? I just took my upper body for a spin and made all kinds of weird noises.
The science of song
If we can get our diaphragm to do its thing, make sounds, and form words, then singing should be a breeze, right?
Not quite.
Singing employs many techniques to create different qualities and resonances of sound compared to everyday speech. You also need more air to get the job done. It can be a lot to think about all at once, but it really boils down to one key thing.
One analogy I like to use is bowling. You can take a whole bunch of people to a bowling alley, and almost everybody will know where they want to aim the ball, but not everybody has the motor coordination to get it there reliably.
Dr Sean Hutchins
“Singing requires a lot of fine motor control,” Dr Sean Hutchins, Director of Research for The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, told IFLScience.
“It's an act of movement, right? One analogy I like to use is bowling. You can take a whole bunch of people out to a bowling alley, and almost everybody will know exactly where they want to aim the ball, but not everybody has the motor coordination in order to get it there reliably.”
“Singing has a similar issue with it, where most people know what they want their muscles to do and know the right pitch to aim for, but in terms of being able to do it reliably, so that you can sing every note when you want to sing it, that's a bit more difficult.”
Singing as exercise?
As someone who does most of her singing lazily in the shower, singing as a form of exercise is a strange concept, but it’s true. Like any other activity that involves some kind of muscular control, it burns calories. It improves with training, and for those who do it properly, it certainly feels like a workout.
Audience members at our choir concerts probably don't understand that for us, singing is a full-body process – it's a bit like running a marathon.
Laura Simmons
“It's not exactly the same feeling as going for a run or bike ride or something like that, but I often joke that the audience members at our choir concerts probably don't understand that for us, singing is a full-body process – it's a bit like running a marathon,” IFLScience’s resident choral singer, Health & Medicine Editor Laura Simmons, told me.
“To sing properly with good technique, you have to engage your core muscles, and your leg muscles are engaged if you're standing as well, as it's important to maintain good posture. If you're holding music, then that's tiring on your arms too – a choral score for a big piece like Mendelssohn's Elijah can be pretty weighty, I can tell you!”
The good, the bad, and the wobbly
I asked the IFLScience crew “can you sing?”, and – in true IFLScience fashion – the first five responses I got were along the lines of “everyone can sing,” and “I feel that the implication here is can you sing well” (scientists and their caveats, give me strength). It slowed down my polling process, in which 10 said they couldn’t sing while three said that they could, but it raised an interesting point: what constitutes good singing?
“One of the main ways that we look at defining singing performance is the ability to hit pitches correctly,” said Hutchins.
“To be able to sing the actual notes that you're intending to sing. That's probably the foundation of good singing ability.”
“If you're not hitting the correct note, or somewhere reasonably close to it, nothing you sing is going to sound good. There are other factors that go into what we think of as high-level singing, things like timbre, inflection, and motion, but all of those come after being able to hit the right notes.”
In most circumstances, any kind of singing practice or training will help, and that can be self-directed practice, like singing along with something in the car, in the shower.
Dr Sean Hutchins
The happy news, as I would come to discover, is that this puts me in one of two camps that typically lead to poor singing performance, and it’s one that is reversible. There is, however, another contributor that’s much harder to overcome.
Pitch imperfect
For some people, the problem with singing begins before they’ve even thought about taking a breath. It’s connected to a rare condition that’s written in their genes, and it means that whereas another person can differentiate subtle changes in pitch with ease, they might never hear it at all.
The result is a kind of mistranslation of how the song should sound, so that person singing isn’t even aiming for the right notes to begin with.
“There is a small percentage of the population who are known as congenital amusics,” said Hutchins. “It's estimated somewhere between 1 and 4 percent of the population has this selective pitch perception deficit. They are unable to, for example, hear the difference between up to about a semitone. That obviously leads to a lot of singing deficits.”
For these people, it’s unlikely that training will improve their singing performance because it impacts their ability to perceive music. As Hutchins mentions, however, that’s rarely the case. For my fellow dodgy karaoke singers and me, the problem far more often boils down to something else.
Standing in the way of control
“Around 35 to 65 percent of the population have that problem of getting their voice to do exactly what they want it to do,” said Hutchins. “Most of the time, when you hear somebody who's not singing well, it's not a problem with their ears. It's a problem with how they're coordinating the muscles that control their voice.”
The good news?
“In most circumstances, any kind of singing practice or training will help, and that can be self-directed practice, like singing along with something in the car, in the shower. Or it can be singing with a professional vocal teacher. Any kind of practice is going to be good.”
As with any skill in life, there are always going to be people who are naturally more gifted than others, and the specific tastes of the time will decide if people are more appreciative of Andrea Bocelli or Dave Grohl. Upbringing can also play a pivotal role, as singing ability can improve rapidly when we’re attending music classes as kids only to drop off when we stop training as young adults. So, as for the big question…
How can I learn to sing?
At the end of the day, the entire discussion boils down to one important point: if you want to sing, just do it. Studies have shown that the arts can have beneficial effects on our wellbeing, even if we’re rubbish, and oftentimes it’s the very act of being made to feel not good enough that means people didn’t develop the motor control needed to sing well in the first place.
Singing, in my view, is one of the purest forms of self-expression we can access as humans.
Laura Simmons
“What happens to a number of people early on in their musical journey is that they will sometimes get feedback that they're not particularly good singers, which can happen to anybody who's just starting out in something, but many people will take that as a cue not to sing,” said Hutchins.
“It actually used to be a lot more common among music teachers 50 years ago or so. I hear from people who are a little bit older than I am that they were told not to sing during music classes and performances.”
“As it turns out, that's the one way that you can make sure somebody doesn’t become a good singer. For the vast majority of people, they're not going to have any issue in getting better, and sometimes that growth can be quite rapid if they really stick to it and enjoy it. If it's something that you like, and you want to be better at, just go ahead and do it.”
And as for whether all those vocal workouts are worth it? Perhaps Simmons can sell you on that one.
“Singing, in my view, is one of the purest forms of self-expression we can access as humans,” she said. “The feeling of creating music with your whole body is hard to describe, and for me it also reaches another level when I can perform in front of other people and you feel the reaction in the room and see the emotions you're evoking in the audience – it’s unmatched!”
“There's literally no feeling like creating music with other people, in my opinion. It's a great social activity, and you build this real camaraderie with the other choir members, especially when you're performing live. It's great for mental wellbeing in my experience – it's definitely not something I'd want to live without.”
If you’ll excuse me, I’m off for a shower *grabs shampoo bottle mic*.
This Curious Questions feature first appeared in Issue 36 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. To access exclusive CURIOUS content first, and receive the quarterly digital magazine, become an All Access Member.
