BEING ON TOUR WITH THE VOICE BBC SERIES 3
I have recently returned from touring with The Voice BBC Series 3 (click to view). It was a fascinating journey. We heard 40 000 people all over the UK. Stage A involved hearing 10 people for 90 seconds each. Each room had a vocal coach and a producer. After we heard them all, unaccompanied at this point. we sent them out and had a chat about who should go through to the next round. In Stage B singers got a chance to sing two songs to a backing track. This session was filmed but not for Broadcast.
It struck me how important singing is to so many people. It is also surprising that very few people really have outstanding voices. On many occasions we only chose one or two at the most from a group of ten hopefuls.
As a vocal coach I listen to voices slightly differently to most people. I hear voices technically unless someone is so good that I am transporter artistically and musically. I was very surprised how many people sing in their ‘falsetto’. I do not mean the male falsetto or upper register. I mean a breathy quality where the vocal folds are stiff and lots of air is passing through them. It is a quality you often hear used by choristers. It is an easy tone to produce but it is not muscular. It is like sitting under your vocal folds with a hairdryer. It dries out your vocal folds and does nothing to build up your voice, the tone is feeble and breathy and does not carry. I heard many singers who potentially had good voices, but who did not know how to use their instrument. It was surprising that there seem to be a generation of people who believe that a breathy unconnected tone is ‘singing’. I put it down to listening to studio recorded pop tracks. In a way it was slightly frustrating as I wanted to take people aside and quickly show them how to muscle up and get their vocal fold together. However, unfortunately we were not able to coach singers at this early stage in the show. In Stage B we could work with people very briefly.
The way a person speaks has a lot to answer for in terms of their voice quality when singing. If you listen to old fashioned records, people spoke with lots of natural ’tilt’ in their voices. Tilt is a technical expression describing the tilt of the thyroid cartilage. As the vocal folds are attached into the thyroid cartilage, when the thyroid tilts (which feels a bit like when you are crying), the vocal folds are stretched and slightly thinner. This not only gives a voice more ‘warmth’ in the tone throughout the range, it also enables higher pitches. Just like a guitar or harp string is thinner for higher notes, so the human vocal folds are thinner for higher pitches. As our contemporary speaking sound, in my opinion, has much less tilt in it, many people find their head voice difficult to access. Especially women frequently speak in a quiet, breathy quality in this country. This shows up in an unconnected singing voice.
I was surprised how unconnected so many voices I heard were. Do we need more singing in schools? Are women apologising for themselves by not speaking with muscularity in their voices? It is worth some reflection.