Insufficient breath energy accounts for the rest of the breathiness that I hear in my students’ voices. Often new students assume an overly relaxed posture and fail to use good support of their breath. They need to learn how to manage their airflow by balancing the resistance provided by the expansion of the intercostals muscles and the controlled rise of the diaphragm (see Appoggio in Correct Breathing For Singing). When trying to eliminate a breathy tone, many singers will attempt to force the sound out in order to get more volume, pushing instead of supporting the voice, which only masks the problem and creates tension in the neck and shoulder muscles and an unsteady flow of air. Thinking in terms of “allowing” or “letting” more air out, rather than “pushing” more air out sometimes makes a significant difference both psychologically and physically. The notion of letting more air out often helps a student to relax and control the breathing mechanism better. There is an optimal balance of muscular involvement that needs to be achieved for singing. A singer must remain neither too relaxed, nor too tense. Once support improves, breathiness generally lessens.
Some students produce breathy tones only when descending in pitch. They tend to relax their breath energy because the pitch demands are not as high going downward on a scale. The laryngeal muscles may also become lax.
Some singers find that physical fatigue from inadequate rest makes it impossible for them to find the energy needed to support their voices and coordinate their bodies well enough to produce a clear tone. Better sleeping habits tend to immediately improve this kind of breathy tone production.
Insufficient hydration (dryness) can also temporarily create a breathy tone in a singer’s voice, as the vocal folds do not function optimally when they lack sufficient moisture for lubrication.
Some singers use a breathy tone in an effort to imitate the vocal stylings of their favourite singers. If the students’ vocal role models are singers like Britney Spears and Mariah Carey, who employ breathy, raspy, scratchy sounds for artistic effect, they may, either consciously or unconsciously, adopt the same tonal quality as their own, viewing it as both desirable and marketable. Emulating or learning to sing in the same fashion as their idols encourages the development of poor technique, and is potentially detrimental to the vocal apparatus. It may take months or years to help students understand why this tone is undesirable and to unlearn these bad vocal habits.
Of course, there is a place within contemporary music where breathiness may be acceptable. This effect, when intentionally but sparingly used, can add some thoughtfulness, sweetness, drama, sexiness and intimacy to a song, and can be an intentional effect to increase artistry.
However, many of these famous singers are unable to produce a clean, focused tone due to poor singing technique. They sing each song on their CDs with the same unfocused tone. If this is the only way in which a singer is able to sing, then he or she lacks good technique and should not be considered an ideal vocal model. He or she may make a good living with this style of sound production, but success and popularity are not necessarily synonymous with vocal talent, correctness and healthiness, and students of voice should be cautioned to avoid imitating these tones. Just because a singer may have a pleasing, albeit breathy, tone, does not mean that he or she is singing well or correctly, and it doesn’t mean that he or she isn’t being limited by this tone production choice, if indeed it is a choice. Again, this should not be the only way in which a singer is able to sing.
Prepubescent girls and those who are in their early teens may not be able to fully eliminate breathiness from their voices, as there may be a physiological (medical) explanation for this tone – the mutational chink – that will require maturation to make disappear completely. Although I tread lightly with the voices of younger students, it is possible to safely and gently help to improve the singing tone of these maturing voices, in spite of the mutational chink phenomenon, since some of the breathiness is also attributable to improper singing technique, including inadequate breath support and energy and poor attacks or onsets of sound.
Using gentle glottal onsets, achieved by singing notes in staccato, twang and energized whining (like a baby) in the upper middle and upper range may be effective. Some teachers find that lip and tongue-tip trills help to even out breathy (as well as pressed) phonation. Also, forward consonants, like “b” and “v”, may help to focus resonance or tone during onset/staccato exercises. Eventually, once tone clears up, these consonants can be removed from the exercises. Using front vowels, particularly the [i] and [e] is generally not recommended for young female voices because they force a firmer adduction (closure) of the vocal folds and thus a higher air pressure on the young instrument. However, in order to produce a balanced training of the voice, these vowels, which occur regularly in both speaking and singing, should not be altogether neglected, even by the young singing voice.
I have had success with removing much of the breathiness in the middle registers of some of my young female students by having them make excited statements like “Whoo hoo!” and “Oh no!” in a range of pitches that would fall within their upper middle register. From these exercises, I will often move onto having the young singer say a variety of English words, formed with different vowel sounds, at specific pitches. (They always seem surprised that this “pitched talking” sounds a lot like singing, but doesn’t feel as difficult!) Once these students begin to become aware of the mechanism that maintains clarity of tone during speech at these higher speech-inflection pitches - they can invariably produce a clear “calling” voice, which suggests to me that the problem of breathiness is often more a matter of psychology than biology - they almost immediately find it easier to produce the same clear tone during the extended vowels of singing. Sometimes just seeing how the vowels that they train with during their lessons are applicable to the singing of songs (i.e., with consonants added to create meaningful words) helps them to make the body-mind connection.
Breathy tones in young singers may also be caused in part by their growing bodies. There tends to be a fair bit of inconsistency in their placement – where they focus their tone – because growth, including that of the vocal apparatus, may occur rapidly. One week, placement works, and the following week, it doesn’t. A mere millimetre of growth in the larynx can significantly affect the voice. Often the simplest methods of achieving good tone and placing resonance in the mask or masque (the bony structure of the face), such as humming and the use of more resonant consonants, are the most successful ones with this age group. Once these pre-adolescents are beyond puberty, the problem with inconsistency generally disappears.
Additionally, young singers often lack coordination between their body alignment, theactuator (the lungs and breathing system), the vibrator (the vocal folds) and theresonator (the vocal tract). As they gain better awareness of their postural balance, their breathing becomes more efficient, which in turn helps them to phonate and resonate more efficiently.
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