The Biology Behind Singing

 by Lily Eldrid

It was when I first started ‘belting’ in singing lessons many years ago that I realised my voice was a muscle and that the ability to hit high notes wasn't a divine right I had been given at birth. 

When I was younger, singing came very easily to me and I never really wondered why, until I started pushing my voice to places that I couldn't get to naturally. With the increasing Grades I was completing, I had to learn different techniques and styles to singing that my muscles were not used to;  belting and American accents required a harsher voice which I had never used before. It was a shock to little me that my voice physically couldn't do it. To develop my singing, I had to understand the anatomy that supported it, because singing is all science.

Your voice is a muscle,  just like the ones that you can sprain in hockey practice or tear on a long walk in the countryside. According to the National Institute of Health, ‘the sound of your voice is produced by vibration of the vocal folds, which are two bands of smooth muscle tissue positioned opposite each other in the larynx.’ Vocal folds are one of the parts of your vocal tract that can genetically make it easier for you to sing, depending on the size and shape of them. Although, the nature of what's to blame for someone's ability to sing is highly debated and not much research has been done to find out whether it is all genetic or a learnt skill.

In my experience, I might have had help genetically, but also have found that to become better at singing I needed practice and to learn new aspects of it. I discovered later that signing was one of those things that went with the mantra: ‘the more you put into it, the more you get out of it ’. In my estimated 9 years of singing lessons, my teacher has shared with me biological facts to help me improve my singing. There are many parts of your body you need to control, such as your breathing. We use two different breathing techniques; chest breathing and stomach breathing. This is all about whether you are using your diaphragm the most, or your ribcage. As a singer, you should try and optimise both, first pulling your diaphragm up which pushes your stomach out, and then taking a deeper breath so that your ribcage expands. The more air you have, the easier it will be to sing as you will have more durability. You can also control how much air you are letting out when you sing; this will make sure your notes sound constant and not wavering.

You can also use your mind to sing (no, I don't mean telepathy). I am not sure if this is a technique that everyone uses or if it just works for some as it is mostly psychological. My teacher makes me imagine the sound in my head, especially for high notes and operatic singing. We call this type of singing head voice and it helps me to envision the sound I am going to produce, picturing it near my forehead. For ‘American twang’ (singing with a strongly southern American accent), I picture the sound near my nose, but this also has to do with where you can physically feel the sound as American accents are already nasally. This has biology behind it as well, as the twang is the epiglottic funnel getting smaller as the arytenoid cartilages get closer to the lower part of the epiglottis. 

 In summary, there are many biological parts to singing, and this somehow makes me more fond of the activity. Singing is a part of us, the building blocks already being there to do it at the youngest of ages; even babies' first gargles are symphonies to some. It goes beyond languages; the purest form of communication. It's not man made, and that makes it more beautiful, more godly. Maybe my voice was a divine right. Maybe everyone’s is.