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YOUR
REAL VOICE - the vocal ezine for real people
January 19,
2007
#34
FEATURE EDITORIAL
Use
the Room As a Body Part?
Yep....
that's exactly what I
mean. A young student of mine recently had an interesting dilemma
that caused me to see and experience something I've never known that I
knew before, but it has been quite a thrilling discovery for me!
My young student has a small body and a somewhat smallish voice.
In recent performances she did of Sally in the "Nightmare Before
Christmas" she wore a head-set microphone. The problem was the
rehearsals before the performance. They rehearsed in a large
chorus room with a piano, and the teacher and other students complained
that they could not hear her over the piano when she sang.
Because she would be wearing a microphone during the show, it wasn't a
problem other than the rehearsals. However, the complaining
during the rehearsals was driving her to push and over-sing, and she
was having trouble because of it. Imaging ruining a voice over
the rehearsals and not the performance! ARRRGH.... So I got to
thinking:
What DO I do when I sing in a big room versus a small room?
Everyone had always said to me "sing to fill the space" and luckily, I
intuitively knew what that meant and just DID it. My student did
NOT intuitively know what it meant, so I really had to get specific to
teach it to her. HOW DID I sing to "fill the space" and what the
heck did that actually mean? Great question!
Rather than think about how, I sang into three different rooms and then
considered how it felt different, and together the student and I really
examined what those differences were in the three different size
spaces. In the small room, I sang only considering the feeling of
the resonators in my body, meaning my bones and empty spaces.
When I got into a larger room and sang with the same feeling it didn't
quite work, so I sang the adjustment to fill the room and found that I
sang into the resonators of the ROOM, beyond my body and then felt the
"splash back" of the resonance bouncing off the room's hard surfaces
and coming back to me. When I understood what I had done, we then
went into the largest space and I did the same thing again: sang to the
resonating surface in the room twenty to thirty feet away and listened
for and felt the splash-back. The more I tuned myself to the room
to "feel" the splash-back off walls, the more comfortably I could sing
in the room. When I tried it with my eyes closed, it worked even
better. I had to shift my thinking about my body. Rather
than picture my own resonators in my body, I pictured the resonators in
the room and focused on those. It worked every time, with
absolutely no pushing or over-singing. With my eyes closed, the
more present I was to the room resonators, the better my voice
worked. Once I actually felt myself in the room, rather than just
in my body, the voice worked even better and the whole thing became
physically easier to do. I actually put less physical energy into
singing into the large room than I did the small room once I really got
the whole thing working in the big room. It makes sense because
there is SO MUCH MORE resonating surface in a large room than there is
in my body. By learning to take advantage of those, of course I produce
more resonance with less effort on more surface!
So the practice assignment for this issue is to sing into your
"extended body resonators" and try a few different size rooms.
Empty rooms without carpeting or furniture (that's right, singing in
the shower!) work great for this. Kitchens are also terrific, and
usually larger than a shower, because they have lots of hard
surfaces. Send any comments or questions to
info@sing-in-tune.com and I will be happy to respond.
info@sing-in-tune.com
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