Live Q&A with Dr. Matt Edwards

Tonight, absolutely happy to be here. Awesome! So, you know, we keep getting questions coming in. So tonight, we're going to drop a bunch of questions that are fun to go over for everyone. If you're a teacher, student, a singer of any kind, just sit back, drop us questions as we go, too. If you, if you see anything or or have a similar question, we'll look for your comments, okay?

So, the first question, just gonna jump right on into question number one. Question number one, here we go. What makes singing soulful? Right? You hear sometimes someone say, "Wow, that singer's got a lot of soul." Right? So, why don't we, why don't we unpack that? Jump into that. This question comes in from, um, I'm a, uh, I'm gonna mess it up, but, um, Omotoso. Yeah, I think that sounds about right.

Um, so yeah, this is a question that we could have deep philosophical conversations about, uh, you know, and really spend plenty of time, uh, on this topic. It's really hard to, uh, you know, put an absolute finger on and say, "This is what makes everybody sound soulful." Because what is soulful? I think that your definition of it could be different than my definition of it, different than, you know, any other voice teacher, any other audience member. And that's why, uh, some of us are drawn to an artist where somebody else isn't. We perceive that there's a certain amount of soul in this one person's voice where somebody else may not hear it.

The best guess of what we have that makes that big difference are the little variations in the way a singer uses the language. And we're actually getting a lot of this information and shedding light on things from the world of artificial intelligence. And to see the computer scientists, as you would know, Mike, you're in that field, are really working on trying to make those, uh, AI assistants like Alexa or like Siri sound more human-like, right? You don't want to ask, uh, Siri a question and then have her just read to you in monotone. It would be nice if she said, "Good morning, Matthew," and it had some inflection to it, right? So that way, we felt like Siri is more of a human and not just, you know, a robot.

And so, what scientists have been doing is scouring the world and taking examples of different vocal qualities to different people in different countries, of different cultures, who speak different languages, and asking, "What is this sound quality to you?" And so, for instance, if you hear somebody go, "Mmm," most people would assume that something kind of like painful or down low. It's not a good thing. If we hear, "Mmm," most of us would assume that that's probably a good thing. If we hear, "Mmm," well, so that's a bad thing. And if we hear, "Mmm," we usually know that's like a comforting thing or a good thing. And they're finding that like when they go and ask these, uh, respondents, they find 85% agreement on what these different vocal qualities mean. And that goes across all, you know, uh, ethnic backgrounds, language, culture, country. It seems to be universal.

And one of the papers I read, they said, you know, this kind of gives a lot of, uh, you know, credence to that idea that we all come from, uh, one language that then divided out into many. Because otherwise, why would we have cultures all around the world who perceive the same vocal qualities as having the same, uh, meaning to it, right?

So then they break that down a little bit more. And it's the way that people not only, uh, deliver the words, but the intricate parts of the words. Things like an onset. An onset is how you start a word. So saying, "Amazing Grace," is what we would call a clean onset. And that gives me one feeling of soul or of interpretation. But if I make it aspirate and go, "Hamazing Grace," that gives it a different feel. So the attack of each word gives us a perception of soul or of meaning of what's being said.

The same goes for the way that we end a sentence or a phrase, right? If I end it upwards, that means one thing. And if I end it downwards, it means another. So, "Doing Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound," that gives one meaning versus, "Doing Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound," says a different one, too. So it's the little inflections along the way.

We're also finding that it has to do with the way that the vowels are pronounced. That in traditional classical singing and choral singing, you go for these pure vowels. You're just trying to hold an "ee" as cleanly as possible. But normal people don't speak with pure vowels. If we did, a sentence, "Can you speak with pure vowels?" I'm just curious what that would sound like. "Soul fool." Okay. So when we have hyper-pronunciation of the words, and if we're really trying to get exact vowels, we lose some of the ups and downs of speech.

So this becomes a training thing, right? That we can actually train the soul out of somebody and they're singing. Where voice teachers have to be careful, right? That's kind of shocking to think about that that we could do that. But think about this: if we are learning through this research that people have some natural inflections in different emotional states of being, then one paper I've read classifies it as high energy emotional states and low energy emotional states. And we can categorize that a high energy emotional state has fast attacks, bright vowels, firm vocal fold closure, right? It tends to be at a quicker tempo. And we might hold out notes longer in those, uh, you know, places. And then on the opposite side of those low energy emotional states, like tenderness, or calmness, or sadness, where we're gonna hear more head voice coming into it, darker vowels, less vibrato, right? So we are finding that's just what people naturally do.

And if we train a person as a singer to sing only with pure vowels and vocalize everything, and then put them into a song that they wrote, we have the risk of them starting to try to put those pure vowels into their song, and that's going to end up making us lose some of the qualities in a voice that we perceive as being soulful.

So, what makes singing soulful is you using your natural pronunciation and your voice in a way that you would if you were telling this story to another human being and you really wanted them to empathize with you, to understand what you're feeling. If I say, you know, Mike and I both have three-year-olds. And you know, if I want Mike to empathize with me, I'd be like, "Mike, it's been a rough day today. Yeah, my three-year-old picked up the Thor hammer and has been pounding his brother in the head all day." No. Yes. But we're, we're getting through it. We're working through it. But you can empathize with that because you know that defeated feeling, right? "I know how you feel, man. Right there with you." That vocal quality, you can connect with.

So, if you're trying to sing soulfully, almost also what you want to do is start off by speaking the words and trying to get them into a natural flow of speech and thinking about how your inflection would craft, right? How does your voice raise up and down? Does it fall off at the end of sentences? Does it have an abrupt ending? Does it have an abrupt start? Does it smooth into the start? And just start speaking those words. So I could take, again, uh, since copyright law, we'll use "Amazing Grace," um, but we could sing, "Amazing Grace, how sweet." Right? And I can choose which words I want to emphasize. And I'm going to work it out in speech so it feels like the way I would talk to somebody else. And now I'm going to start putting it on pitch. And then as I put it on pitch, I want the pitch to enhance the story, not replace the story, right? Because if we start thinking too much about vocal technique and we start trying to place our voice in a certain spot or get a specific sound, we might lose out on the storytelling part.

I just had this conversation with a student, I think it was, uh, yesterday. Was teaching. He says, "I know, but that's not a pretty sound." And I said to him, "Well, what kinds of songs and stories do you sing that are pretty?" Because this isn't somebody who plays love characters. And we had a long conversation that not every story is pretty. A breakup song isn't pretty. So I don't want a high note in a breakup song to be pretty. I want it to be intense, right? If I'm singing death metal and, uh, you know, we're doing some "Ride the Lightning" by Metallica, I don't want those notes pretty. I want them angry and intense, right? If we're gonna go sing some dance song like "Be Happy," I want my vowels to be bright and happy. I don't want them to be pretty. But if I sing "Your Song" by Elton John, which is the song, you know, my wife and I danced to at our wedding, that I might want it to be free, as pretty as my voice is capable of. But how do I get to that place? By singing those words to my wife and making her understand how much I love her. And when I do that sincerely, my voice takes on a different tone quality. And it's that tone quality that it takes on through connected, uh, singing, where I'm putting the language first, that's going to bring through the soul in a singer's voice.

God, it says a lot of what you're talking about is the emotional context and how that is conveyed or, um, you know, you talked about onsets, you talked about, you know, the way you phrase the emotional, um, feeling with the words. Um, now, you, I just, question, not to put you on the spot, but soul sometimes might people might think that it has some philosophical or religious meaning. So, um, someone says, "I was very soulful." So, do you think that has anything to do with it? Is there some big spiritual part to this question? Um, or do you really just, do you think it's just the emotional and the words that are being sung?

I think it depends on the person. I mean, we have MRI brain scans that show people in meditative states and the brain changes that happen. So, you know, whether you're religious or not, you can't not look at the science and realize that when people are in a deeply connected religious state of being and prayer and meditation, their brain waves are different, and their brain starts lighting up places. So now, whether that's an alien being something down at us, a God, a chemical reaction, I think that's what everybody on this entire planet is trying to figure out all the time. But, you know, there are people who really feel connected spiritually to the, you know, their art and the way that they use their voice. In fact, there's an entire spiritual path called the Path of Sound and Light. And the idea, if you read through the books, is that everything that we see is a vibration, right? Light is just vibrations. And everything we hear is a vibration. It's vibration of airwaves. So we see and hear vibrations, right? And so I'm sharing my vibrations with you when I sing. My vibrations leave my body as sound and they enter your ear. And so we are connecting on a very intimate, special plane through vibration. So there are lots of spiritual beliefs throughout the world. And I think that, yes, for a lot of people, soulful singing is connected to something spiritual and religious. And for other people, it's just deeply connected to who they are authentically. It's when they bear their soul, when they share their stories that most people aren't willing to get up in front of an audience and share.

Yeah, I think what I'm hearing you say is that a lot of it can be just the authenticity and and how truthful and honest the the singer, the storyteller is being in what they're saying and how they're communicating that, how that's being received then by the listeners. So, a lot of different thoughts on that. Anything else before we jump on to the next question?

No, just play, play and really try to deeply connect to what each word means and why you're singing those songs because that's one of the best way places to start if this is new to you.

Great. We have one question. Um, let's see. Uh, jump over to the chat. This one's from Jan and, uh, DeAngelo. She's asking, "If singing isn't soulful, is it really human? Aren't we spiritual beings having a human experience and not humans having a spiritual experience?"

Ah, that's a good point, Jan. I know, Jim. Yes, that's a good point. I mean, look, there's lots, and that's what I say, there's so many ways to, you know, look at this. But, you know, music, they think that Neanderthals sang, right? We believe that, uh, humans probably vocalized musically before they spoke language. And we believe that because after a stroke, uh, one of the first steps of getting somebody to talk again is to get them to sing. Because most people can sing before they can speak. And if we listen to babies, and you watch them entertain themselves, they entertain themselves by making vocalizations that have a wide pitch range, right? When they're excited and playing with toys, their vocalizations are going up and it gets really high and squeaky. And then, you know, when they've, uh, made a mess of their diaper, they get really angry. Their vocalizations do. When they're hungry, they get really deep and really intense, right? So, but the vocalizations that have pitch and time and tempo. So, yeah, there's a lot of people who believe this is connected to the core of who we are as human beings, singing this, and it's a spiritual experience for many.

Awesome. Great. Well, we went very deep on that. Thanks, everyone for sticking with us. We're gonna jump on to the next question. We have, um, let me switch over to that one. Okay. So, "I would like to know if it's even possible to develop my voice on my own." This comes from Chuck. And we get this question, uh, more often than I like to share, but we do get a lot, uh, voiceless.com people will submit and, "Hey, can I, do I need a coach? Um, how does your program work? So, or can I just study on my own? Do you have a course or any of that?" So, um, but I do, I always recommend, um, it's always best to work with a coach. And just my quick answer on this is, you want those outside ears, right? So, Matt, I don't know exactly how you're going to answer it, but the best thing about having a coach is they can listen to you very differently than you can listen to yourself. So, and, and then the experienced coach, uh, that knows a lot about voice training, can guide you and give you exercises and point you on the path. So, that said, Matt, what do you have for Chuck on this one?

Yeah, a lot of what you said. I mean, ideally, every athlete has some sort of a coach or a personal trainer, right? And singers are vocal athletes. So, what's an athletic activity? Anything that goes above the normal responses we should expect from our body. So, you know, we can walk. Everybody can walk. Once you want to start running, though, you're starting to move your body beyond its normal responses, right? We are designed to run to a certain extent, but, you know, when you start getting into these crazy marathons, you know, that's when you definitely are reaching out to a coach because you're trying to get your body to do something that's extraordinary. We're all designed to speak and all designed to sing. But if you're trying to, you know, really whale out big high tenor ballads, you're probably going to need to get some specific training to coordinate your muscles and your larynx and your vocal tract to make that happen.

Now, there are always people who are innately gifted in different ways, right? You've seen that. You know, you go and watch a group of middle school kids playing basketball, and there's that one kid who's tearing up the court, and you just can't believe the kid's playing like he is already in eighth grade, right? There's something about him genetically that he, something he won the lottery, go on the genetic lottery, and it's all just designed and it's coming together and they're coordinated, right? Some people just, they have that natural talent. And it can happen the same with singing, too. There's, you know, it's unfair. You get that really gifted singer that doesn't have to practice, doesn't have to study. But there's then there's the other 99% of us, you know, that do need a coach, right? And then a lot of those ones who are naturally gifted and don't need a coach fizzle out because it came so easy to them that once they start running into any difficulties, it destroys their world because they were so used to it just coming naturally. And then once something doesn't come naturally, it's really hard for them to wrap their mind around and it can be really defeating and have a really tough, yeah, yeah, psychological toll on it.

So, Chuck, there are lots of things that you can learn on your own. And look, I come from, you know, a lower-income family where I couldn't afford voice lessons. I had to, you know, I scraped ceiling paint to get voice lessons and mowed yards and everything else under the sun, right? And, you know, there are things if you just can't afford a coach that you could learn on your own. I think if you watch enough videos about breathing, you can start to learn, uh, you know, man, breath management techniques that will definitely help you sing longer phrases. But that's not necessarily going to take care of any tensions that are in the way, right? You could watch some of the videos I've put together about, like, with the MRIs that show you how your valves work, and you could start trying to do some of the tongue twisters and get your tongue more agile. That'll probably give you some good improvements. But if you're trying to do any kind of special, you know, resonance, like a belt resonance or a classical resonance, that's going to be kind of tough to do without another set of ears to listen to you and help nudge you in the right direction and guide you, right? You can definitely read up on body mapping and take some online courses to gather a better body map so you understand how everything lines up and improve your alignment. But that doesn't necessarily going to take care of making, uh, the connections between that body mapping idea and how you apply to sing. And so a lot of times you need that person to connect the dots. So, you know, there is a lot that you can do on your own, but you're going to get a lot better progress with fewer frustrations if you can work with somebody, right?

And everyone's path is different. I mean, you know, I have people that I've worked with before who I work for for three to six months, and they're able to sing the stuff they want to sing, and they're thrilled. You know, they like to do an open mic night. They have some simple songs they want to sing. They don't have any big goals of high notes or volume. They just want to, you know, feel better about their singing. Six months later, they're done. And it's a small investment on their part. Then I have other singers who are pursuing a professional career. I have some military singers that I work with in the military bands, and they're on tour throughout the year. They're going to be doing this for 20, 30 years. And they're constantly training their voice because they know that the voice changes with age, their performance conditions are always changing, the rep that they're trying to sing is always changing. And they know that the only way to be able to do their job at that high of a level is to continue training.

Now, a lot of singers look at celebrities and they go, "But they're singing, they don't have voice lessons." That's not so true. In fact, there are quite a lot of teachers or, uh, singers out there who have coaches that you will never know about because they pay top dollar to keep it private. They're teachers in New York, LA, $300 an hour easily, and they don't advertise their client list. You may not ever find out what their name is. But the producers who work with the artists and know, uh, who those people are, they know they're discreet and they can keep it to themselves. And they take artists in there to get help. There's also a lot of speech-language pathologists who are what we call singing voice specialists. And they work in some of the world's best voice care clinics, like Harvard's Voice Center, uh, you know, the Philadelphia Ear, Nose, and Throat, where Dr. Satelloff is, Duke Voice Care Center has some great people. I mean, there's many great voice care centers in this country. And they have speech-language pathologists who understand the singing voice. And when a singer gets injured, the speech-language pathologist retrains them how to use their voice and will address some of the singing issues that they hear along the way. So they're getting coaching and adjustments that's just coming through on the medical side through a speech-language pathologist. So don't, you know, be fooled into thinking that these pros don't have people. Ariana Grande has somebody. Selena Gomez has somebody. Adele has somebody. You know, the singer of Lamb of God, the death metal man, has a voice teacher. Sara Bareilles has a voice teacher. Lots and lots of people do. And so there's no reason not to find somebody to help you.

Yeah, so I think it's important though, Chuck, you, you may not be ready for one today, and that's okay. We're not, I absolutely suggesting you have to have one to get started. There's plenty of things and early on, even as a young singer myself, you can make a certain level of progress by grabbing another instrument like a guitar or piano and teaching yourself some rudiments of scales and music theory and, uh, working your voice up to an octave or an octave and a fifth and learning your voice on what it can do, what it can't do. So that then, um, you have some, maybe you develop some questions of what you want to learn. Because some of the discovery in any learning process initially is trying to understand where you are. And once you understand where the beginning is and where you are, you, you can then uncover, "Oh, I don't know this," and "I didn't know that." But you didn't know you didn't know that. So it's important sometimes just to get started somewhere, even if it's not with a coach today, maybe we'll be a coach tomorrow or next week. Um, and then there's also, with everything that's going on right now with online learning, there's a lot of great digital courses. Matt's made a great one for us called "How the Voice Works," that's got some grace, uh, great just knowledge, uh, to consume and understanding. So you can, you can get a real grasp of the instrument. Because the tricky thing about learning to sing is you can't see inside your own voice. Um, and even then, your own inner ear, um, the, the perception that we have of our own voice is different than that what others have of it. So there's a lot of different things that you, you know, will have, you'll overcome as you go, uh, learning about how to sing. Um, but definitely drop us any more questions if you have some, or you need a great place to get started. Um, sometimes coaches will just work with you for a couple sessions to give you a base so you understand where you are in the process.

Great. Anything else, Matt?

Oh, that's great. Cool, cool. Okay. So we'll jump on to the next, uh, one. Um, and this is always a, a fun one. "I want to know how to do certain riffs." And this comes from Riley. And my short answer is scales and practice a lot of scales. Riley, look up the pentatonic scale. There's a major and a minor pentatonic scale. It's one, two, three, five, six. All right? So let's say I turn on my, uh, keyboard here. So the pentatonic scale.

[Music]

And then the third scale you want to start learning about is the blues scale, right? Because what artists are doing is they're fiddling around most of the time with some variation of those different scales to make up their riffs. And they're not necessarily starting at the bottom or the top. Sometimes they start in the middle. Oh, yeah. Down a little bit, up a little bit, down over, you know, all over that scale. But what you want to do is start getting, um, accustomed with how far away notes are. And so that way, your riffs are clean, right? Getting accustomed to making those different leaps and skips and jumps, knowing where the core pitches are. But then the next thing, what I would suggest, part of me, is, um, you go over to YouTube and you find some artists that you really like. And then if you look for the little gear icon on the bottom of the YouTube player, and you click on it, you're going to see that you can slow down the speed or speed it up. You can drop it all the way down to 25% of the speed of the original. And 25 or 50, they have some amazing technology that keeps the pitch there, but just slows it way down. And you can start to break down the riffs. So you can sit there using your little 15-second back mark, let it play, jump back, at 25, jump back, and just break it down into chunks. If you hear them doing, "Hey," you just want to get that little flick. And then eventually speed it up. So you'll take it down to maybe 25 to really hear the intricacies of it. Move it up to 50 as you're kind of digesting it. If you have a keyboard nearby, I would start trying to, uh, you know, transcribe the riffs. So get maybe some sheet, if you know how to write out, uh, stuff on a staff, good staff paper, and sit down at the keyboard and write down the notes that the person is doing. If you play more by ear, that's fine. Just start learning it on the piano so you can have a physical sensation of the distance between the pitches. And this is one of the things that I find that, yes, you can learn to riff by ear. Ideally, we want you to get to that point. But for those people who can't, what I found is really helpful is doing this physical playing of the riff on the piano. Because then they feel the kinesthetic awareness of their fingers moving at different distances, at different intervals. And then it's easier for them to find those different distances and intervals in their larynx as they're jumping around. It also improves their pitch accuracy because they're actually locking it in and going, "Oh, it's there to there to there," instead of just trying to wander around, right? So some people can just wander. Other people need that. You do you. But you're then going to take, after you've slowed it down to 50%, move back up to maybe 75%, and then eventually move it up to 100%.

I wouldn't try to find the most complex riff possible. I would look for even little licks along the way. And every day, if you sit down and try to do at least one, if not two to three of these a day, and you commit to it for a month, you're going to be way better at riffing, right? You can't help it because you're actually doing the work, breaking down the riffs and getting it into small, digestible, bite-sized pieces that you can stack together. And along the way, make sure that you're listening to lots of different singers, right? If you love Ariana, don't just listen to her. Go listen to some Whitney, right? And get into listening to Whitney Houston. Go listen to Yolanda Adams, right? Go and listen to other people who, you know, have a slightly different style and steal like an artist, right? One of my favorite books by a guy named Austin Kleon, but he talks about how no art is ever made in a vacuum. We all have influences. So if you want to be a great riffer, you got to start gathering multiple influences, not just one. You want to try to look for 10 to 20 singers that you love and start learning all of their riffs. And then as you learn the riffs, you might start deciding that you want to combine a little bit of person A's riff with a little bit of person B's styling. And then you get an A and B combo. And as you play with that A and B combo, it'll start to just morph into your combo. And then the more that you do that, you're just going to start coming up with ideas on your own. And you're not going to feel like you're borrowing anymore. You're going to be just creating on your own. So anybody can do it. It just takes time. It takes diligent practice and work and a commitment to sitting down, doing the listening, and getting all those riffs on your voice.

Absolutely. Motor skill development. And I think the scales Matt's talking about, these are half steps, whole steps, minor thirds, right? And then, and all the different combinations of those that you have to practice and literally drill into your voice and into your muscles and instinctually into your mind so you can hear what you want to riff before you do it. Uh, and so lots of practice, lots of practice. And I don't know, Matt, maybe we can have, uh, breaking down the riffs, Natalie Vice, maybe? Yeah, we should have her. We should have her on. Do some wrecking. There's a couple other people. Great, great. Okay. So, Riley, hopefully that, uh, answers that one. Let's jump on to the next. Question I have. Let me find it here. Oh, here it is. Okay. Uh, oh, great. "I want to know how I can better my voice by bettering my posture." This comes from Maddie.

You know, as I'm like hunching over for the show, check your posture. Check everyone. How are you sitting right now? How are you breathing? Okay. Yeah. Check on him. Body check. So most of us had our posture in a pretty darn good spot when we were young, and we were learning to walk, because if you don't balance your body, you fall over. So you can learn anything soon, you know, as you're getting older, how to balance it. And then our body starts growing rapidly, and we get our muscles stretching out, and then we can become uncoordinated. And then as we become uncoordinated, or some muscles grow a little tight on us, or we gain a little bit of weight, things start dragging in different directions. We find ourselves with bad posture. That's how we end up in that spot. So we have to get to the root problem of posture, which is tense muscles or weak muscles that are not engaging or are over-engaging and getting in the way of allowing your body to align.

And this is where practitioners of, um, Alexander Technique, uh, can really come in handy. Uh, you know, they can get in there and help you realign your body, uh, and get into a much better spot. Same with Feldenkrais practitioners. They do some of the same work. So if you feel like you really want to dive deep into posture, seek out somebody who does Alexander Technique, body mapping is another one, or a Feldenkrais. A lot of yoga practitioners are really good with this as well. So you can seek out a yoga instructor or a Pilates instructor. Especially what's good about yoga is you're learning to stretch all of those muscles, uh, you know, that connect all the different points of your skeleton. And as you stretch, it's going to be a lot easier to return to that natural balance. And what a natural balance is, it's a lined up of what we say are six points of balance.

So the first point is down at the ankle joints, right? And we, I did a whole workshop one time, uh, in the NATS intern program, where we had a physical therapist who came in and looked at people's ankles and arches. And she was able to show us how somebody has an arch that fell in, it would rotate one of their ankles. And then if the other one didn't, that would ricochet up, tilt their pelvis. As soon as the pelvis was tilted, then it tilted their lumbar vertebrae. And now the rest of their spine was out of alignment too. Then she would go through and tape up their arches or tape up their ankles and then get it into the more accurate place. And you would watch the rest of their body fall in line. And then when they would sing, everything would just release. So it truly can start down at your feet. Wow, that's amazing. It can even start into, with what shoes you're wearing. If you're, uh, you know, wearing any kind of a heel, you now have put your foot at a weird angle, which then makes your ankle, uh, joint have to balance differently. And that can ricochet all the way up, right? So even though that seems really far away from your head, it matters that you're grounding through the earth, moving up from that.

We have our knee joints. And we know that people will stand up, we're going to lock their knees, make yourself pass out, you know, or then we get a real casual, slouchy posture where the knees are, you know, real, or you get nervous while you're singing, then it shakes. Yeah, I know, I've been there, done that, right? And so those knees, uh, you know, we want to try to make sure those are balanced. Uh, there's an idea of plumb line posture, which isn't, uh, as widely accepted now. But they used to be the idea that you wanted your knees somewhere around in alignment, uh, with that ankle joint, right? The problem with plumb line posture is a lot of people end up trying to stick to it and they get stiff and rigid. That's why I prefer. Yeah, and you got to remember that plumb line posture actually came out of French military training manuals, teaching people how to carry a rifle as they march. So it was this military drill thing that started to creep its way into singing. And, you know, some people's bodies line up pretty close to that, and other people just don't. And they have to figure out how to line their body up, right? Their ears might be a little bit more forward. And then if they're trying to shove them back to line up with their shoulder, everything here tightens up, and we're in a bad spot, right?

We also, people have injuries. Like my wife has a twisted vertebrae in her neck from when she got thrown off of one of those, uh, uh, merry-go-rounds, right? And so she got thrown from a merry-go-round, damaged her neck. She now has a twisted vertebrae, a cervical vertebrae. So her neck is not always going to be forward unless they do a surgery, which is kind of dangerous, right? Which like she hasn't done it. But she can't get into anything that looks like plumb line posture. She's, it's physically impossible. So, you know, we have those different things. So we can't say that it's always going to line up exactly.

If we move up from the knees, we then get to the hip joints, and we got to look at how the hips are positioned, right? Your pelvis rotates on that hip joint. And if your pelvis is all tilted back, it can affect everything up above. It's tilted forward. So you want to try to balance it out. Then moving from that, you want to look at how that lumbar vertebrae down in the back and that thorax align. Are you getting real swayed back? Are you trying to stiffen it up? How's the balance of those thoracic vertebrae, which lie behind your rib cage, in relationship to the lumbar vertebrae, which are those lower back vertebrae? We want to see how those line up. Then you want to look at how your arm structure lines up. Are you bending your arms way forward? Are you pulling them way back? Both are not good, right? It can happen with a lot of people who, uh, weightlift and get obsessed with bench pressing. So you'll see somebody who gets obsessed with bench pressing, and all of a sudden their shoulders start really rounding down and forward. Work out your back muscles, right? They need to do some serious stretching to open up those pecs, and they need to do some strengthening of the muscles in their back, otherwise they're going to be out of alignment because their muscles are tied up here in the front.

Then finally, what we want to do is find the connection point of the cervical vertebrae to the skull. It's called the AO joint. So here's the skull, and that would be where the AO joint goes in, uh, base of the skull right there, right? And it actually lies right in between the ears. And so that AO joint is between your ears, and that's where you want your head. Yes, that little indentation. Yeah, you can't really get it. You can't really get there. And let's cut my head open. Yeah, right. But it's still, you can feel the little indentation. It feels good to massage back there, you know, especially, I was going to say, with all this computer time we're having to spend right now. You really got to be careful like you're not hunching over, like leaning into your computer, because that'll, that'll. Yes, right. And it starts putting that, I can't remember what the degree is of angle. It's like every 10 degrees adds like a pound of pressure on your vertebrae. It's something that when I read it, I was like, no wonder people have neck problems when they lean over all day.

All right, so you want to make sure that you're moving your head from that AO joint side to side, up and down. A lot of singers try to move it from the little hump that's right about their shoulders. That's the connection point between the cervical vertebrae, which are behind your vocal tract, and your thoracic vertebrae, which is what your rib cage connects to. But when you move that, you're distorting the space that surrounds your, uh, vocal tract. So here's what the cervical vertebrae look like. There you go. Yeah, it's going to say get it over there. So these, the white spot here, are your cervical vertebrae, and as you can see, right in front of it is the vocal tract. So if you're trying to move from way down here at that cervical-thoracic connection and you're bending this all over the place, you're directly affecting the vocal tract. But if you move your joint, which is more up, right there, and you're moving from that point, and this is fairly, uh, you know, stable, then you're not messing with your vocal tract. And this is really important for acoustic singers, classical. Which one? What, what number is right behind them? The, the larynx? Is that six or seven? Well, this one is, uh, so coming down from here, the second, third, fourth, it's like four and five. Four and five. Ten. All right. So, but those, uh, moving and getting your neck and your positions can affect your vocal tract. It can affect your larynx's ability to tilt, and your larynx has to be able to tilt in order to change pitch. So you can find out if your neck's all the way like this, you may start losing your high notes. So you have to realign your posture.

The other thing that really matters too, uh, is that has a big impact, is anything below the rib cage that puts the rib cage into a weird position, right? Because the rib cage houses your lungs, and the diaphragm runs all along the bottom of the ribs. So if you're all crunched down, all of a sudden you're directing your lungs down and back, and your diaphragm is trying to move in that direction, and you're not going to be able to expand and take the full inhalation, right? If you're hunched over to one side, you have one lung that's compressed down here. Your diaphragm is not going to be able to move as much as it needs to in order to get a full breath and to have any control over the flow of air as you release it. So what we're really looking for with posture is anything that can get in the way of the way that you breathe and, uh, in the way of your vocal tract and your larynx up in the cervical vertebrae. But because everything is interconnected, we have to also remember that the lower body matters, and we want to make sure that we're paying attention to our hips because the sacral vertebrae that attach to the pelvis connects to the lumbar spine. So every time you move the pelvis, you're taking that sacral vertebrae with it, and it's going to mess with the lumbar spine. And anytime you do anything weird with your, uh, you know, ankles, knees, they can have a ricochet effect up to your pelvis, and it'll start to tilt it, and that goes all the way up to the spine and into your cervical vertebrae as well. Wow. So there's a lot you can learn about, about, um, your voice by improving your posture. So just do a quick body check again. Are you taking deep breaths right now? Are you shallow breathing? Are you hunched over your computer watching this show? Are you leaning back? I mean, there's a lot you can just, uh, check in with yourself there for a second. But you can better your voice a lot, just all those points that, uh, Matt just shared. Uh, so many different thoughts, um, to consider. Yeah.

So stretch, because stretching is going to help you overcome those weird postural things that might just mention, right? If you're sitting like this all day, you're actually scrunching down the muscles in the back. They contract to bring the, uh, back part of the cervical vertebrae closer together, which bends your neck that way. So you need to do the opposite and tuck your chin this way to stretch those muscles up. So if you have any muscle that you're realizing, God, that muscle is staying contracted, do the opposite and extend it, right? You optimally, to get a, a positive effect from a stretch, you need to hold it for at least 15 seconds, but holding it beyond 30 seconds doesn't have any positive benefit. So 15 to 30 seconds is your ideal spot. I was going to ask, what do you think about visiting a chiropractor? Is that advisable? I know some singers like to do that. They find they get relief, uh, from having an adjustment, things like that. So I think that's more like a quick fix, or do you see that as something that can be, you know, um, suitable for singers to, to use? To be honest, there's lots of things about the body that don't bother me, but chiropractors, uh, cracking my back freaks me out, and I've never done it. Really. And I actually, I'm one of the singers. I really like it because I do, uh, you know, I tend to work on a computer a lot too. So for me, it can instantly open things up. Um, but, you know, you got to go. It's kind of one of those things if you're not actually training, retraining with some of the body movement programs you mentioned, you still wind up with the same bad habit. So next month, you've got to go back in and, and it's more of a, you, you're more just treating the symptom, than rehabilitating or re-educating your muscles in your posture. So you don't need that. So, um, but sometimes it can be helpful. You can get, um, you can get a lot of relief if you are kind of stuck. So it's something to explore. Okay, cool. So we've got, uh, two more. Okay. Thank you, guys. Um, all right, this is a great question. How do I sing an E and a U vowel in chest voice? What is the tongue jaw position? This comes from Laura. So, uh, do you have any MRIs, or are we going to use a model? Unfortunately, I don't have the MRI today. That would have been a great time to whip it out. Uh, maybe you can drop the link into it if we do have it. You can do that at the end. Um, so this is, I think, uh, we're going to go with the simplistic answer tonight. That we have vowels on one side of, we have like a closely related vowel chart, right? And on one side are the vowels that have more of a high tongue position and more horizontal lips. And then on the other side, we still might have some, uh, horizontal tongue arching. It's not, it's going to be as much as you're going to see on the tongue valve side, which is where E lives. But on that other side, the lips become more and more part of it, and they can't be spreading anymore. They have to start moving forward, and that's where U lives. So E and U are on the opposite sides of this, uh, closely related vowel chart. When you're singing an E vowel, you're not going to have a whole lot of mouth opening because E has a lot of high frequencies. And any time that you start to narrow the vocal tract, you start producing more high frequencies. Anytime you enlarge the vocal tract, you're going to produce more low frequencies. E is a high frequency vowel. So in a high frequency vowel E, that tongue is going to arch up and get really close to the roof of the mouth, and there's only going to be about that much opening on the inside. Yeah, I mean, it's like if you just say E right now, and then say Ooh, and then say E again, just feel where your tongue goes. Yeah, right to the top. Yeah. And on your, your lips, just instinctually find the tongue position for an E. You're going to say "he" because that H, our body knows how to produce by getting that tongue arched up and blowing air over the curve of our tongue. And then the E falls right into that same basic position. So the H is going to get you there. It's almost the same spot. I was trying to think of what, what you could say that wouldn't be an E vowel after that. After the H, you do "ha," but you still got to get the tongue all the way up. Yeah. A is closely related to E, so those two are pretty close together as well, right? But that gives you a start up, a place. Then what's going to come out of your mouth if you have more of a, like I call it, like a one-finger mouth opening, like a pinky finger mouth opening, that's tongue behind the bottom teeth, and it arches up as if we're saying "he." Now, let's say you get that sound and you don't love it, and you're going, "But that's still not my E vowel." What you're going to do is listen to yourself. The way you're going to listen to yourself is you're going to firm your hands up and put them in front of your ears. And what's happened is when we sing, we have some sound that goes directly out, and then it'll come back at our head. This is going to block that. So instead, we're going to hear more of the full room sound of our voice. It also is going to amplify that full room sound. So it's louder than the internal sound of our voice. So in this position, you're going to get a much more accurate version of what you sound like. So let's say you get into that E vowel and it's like this. [Music] Not a good E vowel. At that point, what you're going to do, you're saying, "Well, my tongue is arched." It is. It's just arched back. So the way you're going to find your good E vowel is to start moving that tongue all around in your mouth. Just let it, just move and keep moving it until you land in a for your spot where all of a sudden the E comes into place, right? Because it's primarily a tongue vowel, we need to get that tongue moving around until it slides into the right spot for that pitch. Because there's a very narrow amount of space in the E vowel because of how high that is up towards the roof of the mouth, you're going to have minimal airflow in E. And one of the things I see wherever there'll be problems is somebody will be trying to sing an E vowel shoving all the same amount of breath as they would on an A vowel. Well, A is the most open vowel we have. Your tongue is relatively flat, and everything's elevated, and the air can just pour out. But if you try to move that much air through the narrow space created by E, you're going to end up creating tension that's going to be problematic. So also back off some of that breath pressure.

Now, on the opposite side, we have now Ooh. The tongue does bunch up in the back a little bit. It doesn't arch up though like an E does. But an U is a lip vowel, and lip vowels require our lips to be highly involved. And if they're not, our body will compensate, and the place that it compensates is usually in your throat, around your larynx, and that makes things tight. So I'll see singers going, and their lips aren't, uh, you know, kind of rigid and wide, and they're not getting their U vowel. And all they have to do is bring them forward, and all of a sudden the Ooh comes into place. So again, you can use that morphine technique that I just showed you before, and if you have a weird U, move things around, get those lips back and forth, and then try to land into a better sounding U vowel as you listen to yourself. And, uh, if you want to see some of these MRI things we were talking about, head on over to my blog. My blog is edwardsvoice.blog, and you can look up, uh, MRI IPA chart. And there's a search box. Just look up IPA chart. It's not a beer. IPA is the International Phonetic Alphabet, and it takes you to a website. Uh, one of the California universities actually has a whole, a clickable, uh, vowel chart and consonant chart where they have different, uh, I think three or four different people that went into an MRI machine and made every vowel and consonant, and you can just press play over and over again and watch how the tongue moves to form at each vowel and each consonant. Awesome. So we can grab that link. That'd be great to drop in here for anybody that wants to do that extra credit. Um, Laura, hopefully that answers, um, your question on that. I will say, um, one of the, one of the tricky things with some of this, with these answers, we don't exactly know what your voice sounds like today. So some of the advice we're giving you, you know, it might, you might have jaw tension, there might be tongue tension, there might be some other tension in the way. So things, even though we're trying to help you and answer, it might not fully work for you yet. That's where a coach can definitely help. And then sometimes, um, some people develop vowels in the purity of the vowel or the strength in a vowel, um, at different times and different lengths of study in order to get it. So it might just be a must, uh, the, the muscle coordination might not be there yet for you. So, um, hopefully that helps explain it, and we'll drop those links in the MRIs where you can take a look as well.

Okay, last ques, I think this is the last question here. So where did it go? Here it is. Okay, cool. Last question for tonight. How do you release pressure caused by the tongue? This comes from Greg. Wait a minute. This is talking about that there could be extra pressure, extra tension. So if you've got that, Greg, check out what Matt's going to give you on this one. Now, what do you, what do you got? So, uh, some of the same things is like getting the tongue into the right position. So a lot of times, tongue tension isn't actually tension, it's a lack of coordination and agility, right? So we do know from plenty of research that there are certain positions our tongue needs to be in in order to form specific vowels. How to move? If we didn't have a tongue, would we have vowels? Now, what ends up happening though, is that sometimes, uh, people, you know, they, they might talk rather softly like this all the time, and they don't have an active tongue. And then they go to sing, and because their tongue has never been really active, they don't have a lot of agility in it. So then they go to sing, and their tongue doesn't really have the coordination to move up into that higher, uh, arched tongue position that you would want for a singer's E. And so then they perceive that as tension. You know, my tongue's tight. Well, the tongue is not necessarily tight. The tongue is trying to figure out what to do because you have an inaccurate map of it. You don't know what it's supposed to do. And so one of the best things we can do is to get you into your map. And so this would be one of those, again, go to that IPA chart, start learning what the tongue positions, uh, look like, because it matters. It matters enough. And, you know, my course, "How the Voice Works," I have a whole chart in the workbook to help people be able to just look at the chart, go through their vowels, and start figuring it out because it makes a world of difference. Um, you know, this is also one of those things that's kind of like, which came first, the chicken or the egg? So is the pressure caused by the tongue? Is the pressure caused by registration that's imbalanced, for which the tongue is trying to compensate? You know what my answer is going to be. And so what can happen is that we know in order to form a vowel, you have to have certain frequencies. And those frequencies are not produced by the vowel shape. They are originally produced by the vocal folds. And so if we're trying to sing an E vowel, the vocal folds have to create enough, uh, frequencies, what we call harmonics, to power that E vowel. And that requires a certain amount of that chest register that we've talked about, a thicker vocal fold production with a good amount of closure, uh, of the vocals. They can't be leaking a ton of air. If we, uh, you know, don't have that happening, and it's more of a breathy sound, trying to sing an E is tough. I can get it, but it's not going to be super clear. But if I just change up those vocal folds, [Music] the E vowel starts to come into play. And then as it does, I can start to hear that, that E needs some help, and then I can start to help it out and give it a little bit of love. So you're also going to want to check that registration balance, which we talked about on plenty of other of our previous shows. But go look at how to, uh, you know, balance out that mixed part of your voice. And then what I would say is, uh, anytime that somebody has this tongue agility problem, you want to start working on tongue twisters, and specifically isolating the movement of the tongue from the jaw. Because a lot of times when we, uh, are speaking, swallowing, the tongue and jaw moving together. But when we sing, if we're trying to get a certain kind of resonance, we need the tongue to move independently of the jaw. Because if the jaw is moving all the time, it's constantly changing our resonance. We want to minimize some of that movement. So you want to, uh, try to isolate the jaw by putting your hands on your cheeks and stopping it from flapping up and down, and then move your tongue. I like to start with the "ya ya." So you put your tongue behind your bottom teeth and you do this. You do it even without sound, just get it moving. Then you put sound to that. "I, I, I, I, I, I." Now, I've had a bunch of students, first weeks back at the university, I'm working with, you know, our new students, whole new crop of students, and they're like, "This, this seems like it should be so easy, but my tongue doesn't move." And they're watching their tongue like flopping around in their mouth. That's normal, right? That's what it's like when you don't have a whole lot of agility. What I'm showing seems easy, but it's not for a lot of people. So you're going to have to get that to free up. And then you start going through the various consonants like, uh, L's. You're getting help looking up behind your upper teeth. "La." Right? You can go through every consonant, play with them, try to get you. Those are the, those are the good ones. The Y's, the L's, G's. Perfect. Yeah, right. And then look up tongue twisters. I have a whole downloadable list on my blog, edwardsvoice.blog. You can go down there, look for tongue, uh, you look in the categories on the bottom, especially if you're on the desktop version, click tongue. It'll give you a whole bunch of, you know, various exercises to help isolate the movement of the tongue from the jaw. But specifically looking at the McCloskey tongue twisters. He was another, uh, pedagog, more on the speaking side of things, but a lot of singers use his work as well. And he developed all kinds of tongue twisters that work the articulation of the different parts of our vocal tract to help improve, uh, this kind of an issue. Yeah.

Now, is it true? I didn't give you any heads up on this, but is it, it's true, right? The, the tongue is the strongest muscle in the human body, maybe in relation to its size? Size, right? Yeah, obviously your legs are probably stronger than that, but, tongue cannot press forward. Density, density-wise, I'm talking muscle density. Yeah. Nothing powerful. It is. And it's pretty big. I mean, if we go back to the model, I mean, look how big it is compared to the, um, rest of the vocal tract. That's the tongue. All that red right there. That's pretty big compared to everything that's down here. Your vocal folds are that little tiny spot right there. That's vocals. And that's your tongue. Tongue is significantly bigger. And so, yeah, the tongue can get in the way quite a lot, can cause a lot of problems. But if you improve that tongue agility, most of the time those problems disappear. Great. Well, good. So let me check the chats. If you have any questions that came in, um, um, I don't see who this one's from. Can my students use a Chromebook? Um, yeah, we're on Facebook right now. I think they can use the Chrome browser. If you're talking about the voice lessons app, if you're talking about our, our software platform, yes, we do support the Chromebook. Use the Chrome browser, you'd be good to go. Um, let's see. Anything else on here? Yes, for sure. The time is one of the most difficult parts, and sometimes some, some coaches don't even talk about the tongue movement. Um, but it can definitely be one of those things that, um, it can take, it can tongue-tie you a little bit sometimes. If you're talking about online lessons, possibly, just know that, you know, your video is trying to pro, your computer is trying to do a lot of processing to run video and sound at the same time. So some of those Chromebooks might really struggle to kind of keep up with both. Um, you know, it might just degrade the quality a little bit. It's going to depend. I haven't played with them enough. Um, but you can get it on the blog. Definitely. You should be able to do the MRIs from a Chromebook without a problem, and you can do "How the Voice Works" from a Chromebook as well. Great. Yeah, and I was saying also our platform does work on Chromebooks. So if you are looking to do that, um, you can do that. So, okay, cool. Yes, Dorothy. I don't know, maybe we can dedicate a show at some point to the tongue, um, and we can go find out what are all of the, the current debates about the tongue. Um, I, I know some coaches think it's the, it's the root of all evils, right? So I mean, it can definitely mess things up. Um, and you gotta have, you know, for me, I'm a big registration fan, so you want the registration free first, because, uh, sometimes the, the tongue is, you know, it's above what's happening at the vocal fold level. So, um, guys, this is, um, been a good show. Some great discussion. Thanks for everyone for tuning in. Um, Jan, thank you. Rachel, Dorothy, thank you so much. And, uh, all the questions that we have, some really good questions. So thanks for everyone for the learning you're doing, for your curious minds seeking the truth. We're happy to help answer these questions, and even if we didn't forget it all the way, hopefully we give you enough to digest, give you more things to think about. And, um, Matt, any final words? No, I think just explore. So many people focus so hard on getting it right that they don't just play, right? And a lot of our greatest guitar players that people idolize, they just picked up the guitar and started working with it, and they started playing with it and experimenting, and they came up with really cool stuff. They got some lessons along the way, maybe, and then they just experiment and experiment, experiment. And so what I would say is, you know, don't be afraid of taking the same approach with your voice. Experiment. See what sounds it can make. See how your tongue moves, how your lips move, and what sounds result from that, and you might be surprised what you discover. Yeah, I mean, you only, you only need four chords to have a, a pop song. So just pick a simple progression and do some exercises, have some fun, do some riffs. There's a lot of different things we talk about tonight, you know, check your posture out. So, and if you are curious, I will drop the link to, uh, the "How the Voice Works" course. It's how-the-voice-works.com. We'll drop that link in there too. We still are offering an amazing, uh, launch, uh, special on that course, and it's four and a half hours of content, Matt, some of just the, the golden gems that we put together. So, um, yeah, we hope everyone can learn from us. And if you have questions, if your teacher, you have questions you want us to answer, drop those in too. If you're a singer student, drop those in as well. Um, we do this every Thursday night, and, uh, we've got a fun season lined up. We've got several interviews coming up. So I'm super excited. Everyone, hopefully, as you're returning to school, if you are going back to school, you're being safe. And everyone, just stay safe. Follow your local suggested, uh, guidelines. But, uh, wear a mask and stay home as much as possible. So, all right, everyone, have a great week. We'll see you. Good night. Bye.