VoSci Articles

Your voice type is like your vocal fingerprint – unique and personal. But what exactly is a voice type, and how much should it influence your singing journey? This comprehensive guide will help you understand vocal classification, its importance, and why it shouldn’t define your entire singing experience.

One of the most common requests that voice teachers hear is that singers want to improve their head voice, more technically known as Cricothyroid Dominant Vocal Production (CT Dominant). Anecdotally, I would say 90% of all students start lessons with this as their primary technical goal for lessons. What a great goal! But what is head voice? How can we strengthen our head voice? Should we strengthen our head voice?

I don’t think it will surprise anyone on this site that when I am teaching I am focused on “the basics”, even with my most advanced students; frequently more so with my most advanced students. And to be fair, I think it is the part most of my students like the least about my teaching methods, and who can blame them? When I say basics, I do mean the basics… scales, intervals, messa di voce, anatomy isolation drills, and so on. It’s not really that they are incapable of singing basic intervals or scales beautifully or even that they struggle with beautiful crescendos. It is the unending quest for perfection in the building blocks of singing. I believe that the more you practice the fundamental skills of singing, every day, every way, in the rain, on beautiful days, the more artistic options are available to you to create beautiful moments. At this point, I don’t think it is likely that I’ll change my mind barring some incredible research.

Singing Straws have gained enormous popularity over the last few years. For those of you that have not come across the wonder of these straws. They can provide you a healthier, stronger, and more balanced voice instantly at least according to the companies that sell them. The general idea is that the straw provides resistance which helps balance the vocal mechanism. You can even customize your experience by using different lengths or diameters of straw and even by partially submerging the straw in water.

I found myself curious how well AI would be able to cover the main ideas behind teaching a student to sing, so I asked it. For this article I am using the most well-known generative AI platform ChatGPT by OpenAi. To prompt the system, I set my expectations with the system using a few questions and answers before asking the AI to write an article on “How to teach singing”. From there I asked a series of follow up questions based on the answers provided. I compiled everything into a single document and asked the AI to rewrite the article to improve readability. The article below is part of the response as presented by ChatGPT 4.0 with some minor structural changes to improve readability further. Additionally I have added some commentary throughout, I hope you find this article both educational and entertaining.

The human voice is a remarkable instrument that requires meticulous care to stay in tune and ready for performance. Vocal health is essential not only for singers and actors but for anyone who relies on their voice for work or daily interaction. This guide will journey through the essentials of vocal care, touching on lifestyle, diet, hydration, common vocal pathologies, and the influence of medications on vocal performance.