Voice analysis guide

Intonation is pitch accuracy. You might be familiar with people saying that something sounds “false” or “out of tune”. Basically what they mean is that the sound that is created isn’t “precise” but just around the pitch that is supposed to be sung. Intonation might be flat (right below the pitch we were aiming to sing) or sharp (right above the pitch we were aiming to sing).

We offer these tools to help you track your intonation:

• Pitch Accuracy Test - sing through the major scale and see how many notes you can hit
• Voice Analyser - record an audio with your voice and see which notes you hit on a chart

Breath management simply means your ability to adjust your breath to the tone quality (falsetto, chest voice, mix, etc) you’re producing or the length of the phrase you’re singing.

For example, if you’re singing short phrases, there will not be a need for big breaths in - that would only block you and restrict you. The same way when you’re singing a long phrase, you’ll need to prepare and have an estimation of how much breath you should take in at the beginning and how you should divide it along the way (not using it all at once at the beginning of the phrase).

Remember:

• When breathing in, relax your abdomen (belly) to let the breath come in and keep your shoulders relaxed and low.
• When breathing out, let your body do the work first before you engage your abdominal muscles. That means, do not immediately squeeze your belly muscles - that will create unnecessary strain and tension and you will end up pushing the sound.

Constriction (strain in the voice) is the feeling of closing of your throat that you might get when you sing. It might occur at any moment during singing, depending on what happens in your body. Very often constriction happens when we sing higher notes but there are many reasons and moments for it to occur.

Technically what happens is that our false vocal folds (membranes on both sides of our throat) that sit right above our true vocal folds start closing due to excessive tension, usually created in our belly but also in our jaw or tongue.

It’s a natural and protective reaction of your body that occurs when something falls into the “wrong hole”. Our body “closes” the throat to protect our lungs from any particles (water, food) falling in. It occurs also when we need to perform a heavy, physical task like picking up a heavy object.

Try it and notice the space changing in your throat.

A vocal register is a range of tones in the human voice produced by a particular vibratory pattern of the vocal folds. These registers include chest voice (thick vocal folds), vocal fry, falsetto, and the whistle register. You might also hear about “mix voice” which is a mix between thick and thin vocal folds. Check this video to understand what it means:

Nasality is a term that describes sounds that sounds nasal - as if coming through your nose. And that is literally what happens when we hear a sound that’s nasal.

During singing our sound travels through our throat to our mouth and out. On its way, it can take other ways if possible. One of the ways is the nasal passage which has its opening at the end of our mouth. That’s also where the little flap that closes the opening is. We call it velum (soft palate). You can feel it by moving your tongue past your hard palate (roof of your mouth) all the way to the back until you feel the soft part.

During singing the flap can be open or closed. When the flat is closed (up), our sound has no other way out except throughout our mouth and the sound becomes oral. If the flap is open (down), the sound has an extra exit route and it gets divided between our mouth and nose and we hear the sound being nasal. How nasal depends on how low our velum (soft palate) is.

Tip: When singing, pinch your nose with your fingers closing it and then opening it again. Listen to the sound. If you hear a change between opening and closing, that means your sound is nasal. If no change occurs, your sound is not nasal.

Twang is a common name for a certain change occurring inside our voice box (larynx). That change is the movement of the epiglottis. What is epiglottis? It’s a flap of tissue that sits beneath the tongue at the back of the throat. Its main function is to close over the windpipe (trachea) while you're eating to prevent food entering your airway.

When using twang we will not close the throat fully but only partially, making the throat narrower. Due to that narrowing our voice “shoots” out through our throat, into the mouth and out. The sound that is created is bright and loud without effort increase. We can adjust the brightness and loudness with the degree of the narrowing in the epiglottis. It is an essential feature of opera and belt singing (very big and loud sound used in a musical theater but also others like: pop and rock).

Onset means literally the way you begin the sound. In singing, we distinguish 4 different types of onsets:

• Glottal: the air and sound begin at the same time. It has very distinguished, sometimes sharp click/ blop at the beginning as when saying “are” or “is”
• Asprit abrupt: We begin with air and then we hear a little pop sound when the voicing begins as in “how”
• Asprit gradual: We hear the air and then the sound slowly blends in, so the popping sound doesn’t happen anymore, as in “hey”
• Simultaneous/ smooth: The air and the sound start at the same time, so we do not hear any sharp beginning or that popping sound like in the previous onsets.

Offset is the way we end sounds. The same rules and principles apply as in onset.