The Craft of Singing
Garyth Nair
The answer to those critical questions on the home page anchor in discovering exactly how those great singers produce those rich sounds. By “exactly produce”, we mean how they physically make them – on any given phoneme, what is the position of the jaw, where is the tongue, how open is the mouth, how is the tongue shaped, etc.

Garyth Nair calls the study of these elements

PHYSIOACOUSTICS

the study of the relationship between what a singer does physically (physiology) and the acoustical end result that the audience hears.

Amazingly, relatively little research has been done on the subject of how great singer's produce their language sounds --- even less has been written about it.

The following series of pages will introduce the reader to the subject of physioacoustics and why it is so critical for the singer and the teacher to understand it.

  • Vowel Centricity (see right side of this page)  – our vocal study, voice research and vocal pedagogy is Vowel-Centric – consonants constitute half of the phonemes we sing. Where is all the information about how to perform them correctly?

  • (coming soon) Great Singing is not Speech – let’s put this one to rest once and for all

  • (coming soon) Great Singing is not Speech II – some more information and some graphics to back up the point

  • (coming soon) The open mouth and the relaxed jaw – a basic tenant of bel canto vowel production

  • (coming soon) You cannot make a speech consonant with an open mouth and relaxed jaw – or can you?


(coming soon) Spectrography and the quest for great consonants and vowels


VOWEL CENTRICITY
Our view of Singing
– both in Research and Vocal Pedagogy –
is Vowel-centric

Most the work in both the voice studio and the research laboratory concerns vowel production. How often do you encounter a discussion of how to produce consonants that are rich enough to cohabit with our best vowel sounds? Yet, half of all the phonemes we sing during a song are consonants.

Our Consonants Destroy Our Vowels

Simply, the result of our vowel-focused vocal production is that our brains are forced to rely on our speech habits for the neuro-muscular instructions needed to sing our consonants.

The moment we use a speech-based consonant, the physical and acoustic (physioacoustic) setup of our instrument collapses. When we attempt to move to our next vowel, we cannot accomplish the radical change to the physical setup we employed when we were only singing vowels in our warm up. The end result is a speech-based vowel, and this is why we cannot maintain those that beautiful “wam-up” vowel tones as we perform the complete text of a song.

This website is dedicated to improving this lopsided scene by helping singers and teachers develop the same kind of close attention to the resonance of consonants as we routinely pay to our vowls. Until we concentrate on all our phonemes, we will be never able to sing like our star models.



ANSWERS