Singing – how many times did you hear that you’re tone-deaf? How many times were you discouraged by your surroundings and how many times did you give up dreaming about becoming a great singer? We have good news for all music lovers and fans of singing: everyone can learn to sing! So in what way can we harness our voice and submit sounds to appropriate key? How to mature really good voice and communicate with the world with singing which is something more than only decent experience? Get comfortable and read this article – perhaps you will come back to what you gave up earlier motivated by opinions from your environment.

Everyone can sing!

It’s really hard to discuss with music theory and experts of singing – yes, everyone can learn to sing. There was not only Jerzy Stuhr who knew it while performing the legendary song „Śpiewać każdy może, trochę lepiej lub trochę gorzej” at Opole Festival in 1977. The role of singing fantastically summed up Fryderyk Chopin saying that ‘We use sounds to create the music same as we use words to create the language’. A man is able to perfectly mature the voice, work on it not only musically but also in the form of personality therapy, care about its hygiene, nurture musical hearing, vocal range, check its timbre etc.

Steven Demorest, music professor from Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University in Illinois, USA, did research which prove that voice is an instrument like any other. So practice makes perfect – we are able to learn to play the piano while attending piano classes and persistently exercising and we are able to learn to sing on the same conditions as in case of the piano or any other instrument. Three groups took part in the research: preschoolers, sixth-graders and uni students. They had to listen to specific melody and exactly repeat it. Both first groups did the test very well but students didn’t. Reason?

At preschool and at school it is obvious to provide children continuity of communing with music, to organize extra classes but also these which are mandatory, programmatic. While uni students were affected by ‘use it or lose it’ effect – perhaps they dealt with singing completely well but for unknown reasons they lost motivation to develop themselves in this area. What’s more, according to prof. Demorest, singing improves verbal abilities, reading ability, it helps with learning foreign languages, it improves memory and definitely slows down brain aging.

Hearing vs voice – tensions

They don’t exist, if our aural-vocal coordination is correct. In theory each of us fulfils essential conditions to sing: we speak, we can hear ourselves, we have a determined timbre (one less, second more characteristic), we get sounds back from everywhere, but… can we submit every sound to the appropriate key in order to sing the melody 100% 1 to 1? If we have an appropriately matured hearing and a voice (vocal cords are muscles so working on them will certainly be effective!), we sure will able to do that.

It depends very often on what we had in common with music in childhood; if there was music played or listened in the background, or if somebody in our family fluently played some instrument or sang professionally. Dealing with music has an intense influence on forming  the singing potential. The sooner we start with working on musical development (music classes at preschools, rhythmic classes, easy feasting, singing with friends or family), the bigger probability to the fact that our hearing, sense of rhythm and voice will be at such development level that it will help us to sing, e.g. professionally.

Why is the singing more difficult than playing some instrument? Because no manual work supports it, e.g. during playing the piano we use specific keys for making a sound, and in case of a voice everything depends on our musical awareness, self-control and consistent work on using it correctly.

Singing – predispositions vs exercises

There are plenty of people who have outstanding predispositions to sing. They often don’t realize the fact that they work with their voice on already advanced level naturally without a need to catch up something. However predisposition is one thing, permanent work with improvement is something completely different. In spite of the natural ability to sing we shouldn’t rest on our laurels – the heart of success is in conscientiousness, motivation for constant development and practice.

Music education is a very complex process, therefore the sooner it will begin, the better, however it doesn’t mean that an adult person being at the beginning of the way to professional singing, won’t achieve wonderful results. Each of music abilities developes in time: the sense of rhythm, tone hearing, harmonic hearing etc.

The tone hearing is characterized in part by:

  • ability of noticing a tonic (central sound of 1st degree of a scale) in pieces based on major-minor scales which adjust music course,
  • tendency of finishing the melody on a tonic (1st degree of a scale),
  • feeling finishing the melody when the last sound is tonic,
  • feeling the lack of finishing the melody when it’s ending on the other sound.

In turn the harmonic hearing is characterized in part by:

  • spotting the melody,
  • distinguishing specific harmonic phenomena, e.g. two chords,
  • sensing functional diversity of degrees of a scale,
  • sensing the meaning of tonic and dominant.

Prof. Stanisław Kazuro brilliantly described a person with perfect pitch and relative pitch (requiring refinement):

‘A man with a perfect pitch will name sounds easily, without hesitation and infallibly, but he will make it irrespective of their mutual relation – just based on the peculiar memory of a  number of vibrations per second which determines pitch. A man with the relative pitch (that is relative) doesn’t need to name sounds immediately but he will be able to describe their mutual relationship. A man with the perfect pitch while hearing ‘d’ and ‘h’ tones will say: ‘it was d and h tone’. But impression of sixth doesn’t need to show up for him, if he won’t call his relative feeling or clear intellectual counting of interval. A man with the relative pitch while hearing the same tones will say: ‘it was a great sixth’. If he remembers some tones as ‘c’ or ‘a’, he will immediately compare them in thoughts already heard tones and will clarify his statement: ‘it was a great sixth d-h’. Second answer seems to be also a perfect pitch but an inner process of hearing is completely different’. 

A relative pitch can go through the motions of a perfect pitch but in fact they’re not the same – each of us is sectioned off which means we exercise by ourselves or with vocal teacher (the better).

Do you want to be in shape? Sing!

Vocal teachers often compare singing to physical activity: if you want to be in shape, exercise. What benefits can regular exercises and work on your voice bring to you?:

  • ability of correct intonation of the tone melody (diatonic or containing altered sounds) relating to the second voice (lower or higher), harmonic accompaniment or accompaniment based on wide tonality or going beyond the major-minor tonal system, not-constituting backrests for correct intonation;
  • ability of correct intonation of tonic or atonic melody relating to accompaniment in which big consonance and dissonane appear, however there is a lack of the functional references typical for the major-minor system;
  • ability of aural distinguishing the melody or the piece:

      – in a major or minor key,

      – based on the modal or highland scale,

      – atonic;

  • ability of reading out with a vista voice the melody based on the modal or highland scale;
  • ability of reading out with voice the atonic melody with intervallic method or with using feeling of tones appearing in nex parts;
  • ability of intoning chromatic marches in tonic and atonic melody;
  • ability of intoning one of the voices from bitonal piece with the second voice played on the piano by the teacher or reconstructed from a compact disc.

To create the sound, we should involve appropriate amount of air, vocal cords, resonators, diaphragm – all this let us make strong sound and stabilize it additionally. Remember that the vocal hygiene is very important:  don’t forget about emission, breathing exercises, dictional, don’t push your voice through when you have a sore throat or a hoarseness. Fear makes things look twice as bad as they are – sign up for singing lessons, don’t be afraid of a confrontation with an expert who’s there for you with professional mentoring and expect… quick results which will motivate you to self-improvement!

Do you want to learn how to sing? Great, because you… can! Everyone can do that!

Authors: Patrycja Sikora and Dariusz Chrapek