Learn to Sing: The Singing Chronicles

Welcome to a brand new series of articles entitled The Singing Chronicles. Whether I am listening to the performer on stage or the lady walking down the street, I cannot help but notice that the soul wants to sing. I have taken some time away from writing vocal articles to analyze how other people approach singing in their everyday life. Hopefully you will find this series helpful and insightful no matter what level of talent you possess! Who knows, it may give you the spark that ignites the "learn to sing" fuse within you. Without further adieu, let's gets started!

I have been studying vocals and singing in general for quite some time, but never had I taken the time to actually pay attention to how people go about singing in their everyday life and how others respond to it. It seems crazy to think that one who is so involved in vocal study would miss this obvious foundational principle, but apparently it was not crazy enough for me - and this could possibly be the case for you too. Let me tell you, I was amazed at some of the things I discovered...

I never would have guessed that people sang so much! The next time you are out running errands or shopping in general, pay attention to how many people you find singing in public. It could be a sub-cultural phenomenon, but I would muse that this principle crosses sub-cultural boundaries. From the faint hum and whistle of a classic rock tune to the obnoxious bellowing of the newest hit to the silent cry of the wounded heart, singing flows from every crevice of the human soul. Singing is everywhere. Singing is part of how we function as human beings. And from my best guess, we all desire to sing somehow. In fact, we will go to great lengths in order to do it.

We use singing in order to express varying emotional and psychological states. Daniel Levitin, author of the book The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, argues that music can be clumped into six separate categories: joy, comfort, religion, friendship, love and knowledge¹. Playing off of this, singing will also be clumped into one of those six categories. While his explanations are neutral in terms of emotional state, we can properly identify that emotion is heightened when we add singing into the mix.

For example, take the musical category of "love". When singing about love, emotions can be expressed in a variety of ways: happiness in new found "love", sorrow in lost "love", ambiguity in unrequited "love", excitement in playful "love", etc. Each category has a unique way of expressing itself in terms of vocal sound. We add different types of emotion to the different types of love we are experiencing. As such, singing, and music in general, makes itself a window into the soul.

When you learn to write, you convey your thoughts, feelings and emotions through the technical use of your hands. When you learn to type, you convey your thoughts, feelings and emotions through the technical use of your fingers. Singing uses the exact same method - you are still conveying your thoughts, feelings and emotions, yet you are doing so through the technical use of your vocal cords. By looking at singing through this lens, it is easy to see how one can say that singing is as easy as speaking or writing or typing.

Hopefully you have found this material to be insightful in some manner. You see, we must rightly understand where singing originates in order to rightly understand how to approach it. As I build on this series, we will continue to look at the foundations of singing in order to translate them into the methods of singing. Until then, keep your vocal cords loose and sing your heart out!

1. "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature" Daniel J. Levitin, 2008