Singing Tips Using Imagination

You are born with the impulse to sing and you want to sing well. Nearly everyone has the physical equipment from birth, but you may have problems in actually finding it.
Your Body Is Your Voice

Your voice is a musical instrument, and it is all in your body. In music education generally, but most especially in vocal training, body awareness is crucial. The problem is that you can’t see or touch the voice as you do with a clarinet or piano. The parts of the instrument are all buried inside you. So how can you get access to them?

One powerful way is to use tricks of imagination in vocal training. Here are a just a few of many that work with young singers –and sometimes with adults too. (Of course, all the basic rules of posture and breath management apply in these exercises.)
Singing Posture

To get an erect but easy posture before singing, pretend you are a string puppet. Now between thumb and forefinger hold the string attached to the centre of your puppet-skull. Gently pull your body up until `straight and tall. That’s the singing posture. Now let the puppeteer hold the string and put your hand down.
Abdominal Breathing

For correct breath management keep shoulders still and suck in air so deep that you feel “pear-shaped”. Or swell the belly until you feel “like a giant balloon with a tiny head and chest sitting on top”. Keeping eyes closed at first helps you rely on the kinaesthetic sense to know if the breath is where it should be.
Improving Vocal Resonance

When you warm up your voice the back of the mouth may be rather tight or sluggish. Open it up in your singing exercises by imagining you are easily holding a whole apple in the back of your mouth. Notice how “rounded” the tone becomes!

Enhance the resonance even more. Lift the “ceiling” of your mouth to feel like a huge tall space, like a cathedral. Now let your voice fill it. (For youngsters with no experience of a cathedral you might substitute another more familiar building.) Exploring the voice with this in mind leads towards a ringing tone quality.

To develop good forward placement of the voice, make “trumpet lips”. By flaring the lips to feel like the bell on a trumpet, you can project the voice much more strongly without straining to increase volume. Try it. On an easy note sing moderately loudly “two tunes to you” with lips in normal speaking position. Now repeat at the same volume using “trumpet lips”. Notice the sensation of much greater sound even though you didn’t try to amplify it!

Extending VocalRange

Developing the upper vocal register (or “head-voice”) is often quite a task for singers with little training. The singer should not think of the higher notes as goals to climb to and to reach for. (You can often see beginners physically doing that with tense necks, lifted chins – terrible for the voice!). A more helpful image is required. If singing ascending scales, from the start imagine you are standing on the highest note. With a rope you are drawing up your voice in a bucket from the bottom of a well. This tends to put the singer in a far more commanding mental position from the start.

You might be learning a song and come to a rather challenging high note. Prepare for that note by imagining you are a bird hovering above and looking down on it – before you sing it.

In developing the low register (chest voice) firstly remember to keep the volume fairly soft to prevent damage to the larynx. Young children can pretend to be big, tough pirates and sing “Yo-ho-ho”. Or be an elephant and using a low key sing the song “Hey-dee, hey-dee ho/the great big elephant is so slow…” You can also use the bucket-in-the-well technique in reverse, lowering the voice down to the depths.
Getting the Feeling of the Song

The rhythm, dynamics and mood of a song are especially helped by imagination. A smooth rise and fall may come from the thought of a swallow swooping and skimming over the surface of a lake. At a more leisurely pace imagine you are a pelican gliding on the thermals. A darting and scampering piece may fit the image of a mouse hurrying to find food and get back to its hole before the cat sees it. A choir singing undulating tunes like The Skye Boat Song often benefit from pretending to ride up and over one sea-swell after another. Of course devices like these may initially lead to excessive accents, exaggerated tempo and so on, but you can always back off a little later.

While it has its place, theory can stifle vocal development, especially in the early stages. Imagination makes singing lessons more effective, as successful singing teachers know. Why not invent imaginative singing exercises of your own? And perhaps go even further and enlist drama as an aid.

The copyright of the article Singing Tips Using Imagination in Music Education is owned by Stephen Crabbe. Permission to republish Singing Tips Using Imagination in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.