You may have wondered why I haven’t touched on the subject of intonation or singing in tune, earlier. Just like resonance intonation is a product of all the lessons that have been discussed in earlier weeks.
I have deliberately left this till last as I feel that too much focus on purely that issue doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of being out of tune and if anything can create more problems. If you have considered all of the earlier lessons then on the whole your intonation shouldn’t be a problem. Intonation is about listening to others and yourself, hearing the phrase you are about to sing in your head first, breathing properly, supporting properly, using your tongue, jaw and lips appropriately, clearly enunciating the words, holding long vowels, placing short short consonant, and considering the emotion of the text.
There are around 57% of people who say they can’t sing yet only 3% really can’t as they have a condition called “amusia” which is the inability to recognise pitch. Amusia is either a genetic condition or a trauma response and at present there isn’t a cure. As of yet all the people whom I have met who have said they are tone deaf aren’t. A simple test for that is to tell them you will sing or play two notes (which you will make different but of course not tell them this) sing and ask if they felt they were the same or different. Tell them to not overthink it and just instinctively let the answer come. If the answer comes back as the same then they could be tone deaf.
That then leaves 54% of those who say they can’t sing to actually be able to sing. We are after all surrounded by music and even in the womb the foetus can hear at 3 months old. Even if we don’t consciously listen to music the brain absorbs it as the brain absorbs far more than we know about. It decides what we need to focus our attention on and the rest it stores away. On the whole people can only focus on around 5 or 6 things at a time.
If we learn from very young to access the musical ability within us then the neural pathways that enable singing are strengthened. Unfortunately a lot of children are told in school that they can’t sing, they then don’t and believe that so those neural pathways don’t get strengthened. I believe that in a child the “singing” part of the brain and the voice box develop at different rates and that if that isn’t synced and they are asked to sing it might not come out so nicely. If at that point a child is told they can’t sing then on the whole their musical development stops. Psychology takes over and we stop trying to sing, why after all would you open yourself up to ridicule to do something you have been told by adults you can’t.
I have proven that I can teach people to sing who are in that 54% group and the biggest problem to overcome is the psychological barrier of “I can’t sing”. So far it has taken me around 4 hours of private tuition per singer to get them to a stage where they can sing a verse of a simple folk song in tune. The most fascinating of that was that they could actually tell me that it was in tune before I told them so.
Exercise
How do you deal with people who say they can’t sing? How do you deal with people when you hear somebody sing who is out of tune?
