Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 3, 2025
No voice-user should use such an effective means of preventing the very thing he should most desire, a full and free use of the breathing apparatus. Before carrying out the exercises suggested or others equally good, the student is recommended to be weighed, and especially to have the chest carefully measured. This can be done with sufficient accuracy by the use of a tape-measure.
In any case, the thoughtful must then regard the youth or maiden with feelings of the deepest interest, if not anxiety; and in the case of the voice-user, especially the singer, this period may come laden with the destinies of the future. The vocal organs, especially in males, undergo very marked changes in relative proportions and actual growth.
Both the tonsils and the uvula may become so enlarged as to be a source of awkwardness or more serious evil to the voice-user. They may, in fact, require operative interference.
The student can the more surely guide his own development, and meet the stress and storm that sooner or later come to every professional voice-user. Injured voices can be the more effectively restored. The physical welfare of the student is advanced a matter which I find is often neglected by teachers of music, though more so in the case of instrumental than vocal teachers.
The voice-user is a sort of athlete, a specialist whose chest muscles must be strong and not covered up by very much superfluous tissue in the form of fat, etc.
The fact that the stomach and other important organs of the abdomen lie immediately beneath the diaphragm is a significant one for the voice-user. This misapprehension is in all probability to be traced to the dependence of the student and teacher on tradition rather than observation on authority rather than rational judgment.
The degree to which any one succeeds in his earliest efforts to sing a scale will depend on the readiness with which he can use a variety of neuro-muscular mechanisms indeed, all those associated with the respiratory, laryngeal, and resonance apparatus. Fortunately for the voice-user, this apparatus has all been in use in ordinary speaking.
Certainly, the voice-user should, in order to gain volume, gradually increase the vigor of his practice, but exactly how to do this, and to what extent daily, are questions in which the advice of a sensible and experienced teacher is of great value, though the principle on which that opinion should be founded is clear enough.
The fact is, the voice-user should have control of his whole breathing mechanism, and use one part more or less than another, or all parts equally and to the fullest extent, as the circumstances require; and if the student has not already learned such control, the author recommends his practising breathing with special attention first to filling the upper chest completely, and then the lower.
Whether the voice-user respires, like others, to maintain the functions of the body, or whether he employs the breathing apparatus to produce sound, it is to be borne in mind that he uses the same physical mechanisms, so that the way is at once clear to consider the anatomy and physiology of the breathing organs.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking