Singing & Relaxing?

In life we are always looking for a good balance, whether that’s between life and work, the nutrition in our diet, how much we spend versus how much we make, etc.

Our voice also needs balance. A balance between muscle and airflow.

How can relaxation help us to find balance and become better singers?

It’s true that certain muscles are involved in singing.

If you would relax all your active muscles you would be breathing but not singing. The lateral CT (Crycothyroid muscle) for example needs to be active if we want to produce sound.

The intercostal muscles need to engage as well in order to keep supporting the airflow and not allowing the rib cage to collapse, and therefore your air support to collapse.

Apart from those muscles, there’s not a huge amount of muscle engagement involved in singing.

Work with Gravity

When you sing your tongue and jaw should feel heavy.

Depending on how high or low you sing, it will either be a passive pull-down or a more active pull as you get higher in your range (around the 2nd bridge).

This will help to relax the external laryngeal muscles, as well as the pharynx and tongue.

Only your soft palate will be rather lifted. You can feel this if you inhale and pretend you’re surprised about something. You should feel the soft palate (which is in the back of your mouth behind the hard palate) raise slightly.

Suggested Mantra: ‘Heavy tongue, heavy to jaw’

Breathe

As a child, my mom would always say ‘breathe’ whenever I was nervous or stressed about something.

You don’t have to trust something to try it, so I tried it, even though I didn’t believe it would help. But I actually didn’t know how at that time.

I wasn’t introduced to deep diaphragmatic breathing until I was 17.

And when I tried it first my belly would not move at all because I was only used to shallow chest breathing.

It didn’t take too long to retrain my breathing.

At some point, I noticed that deep breathing has become my default breathing. Whaaaat?

Mom was right, it helps to calm down. Research has shown that there are numerous benefits to good breathing techniques as they influence our physiology as well as our mind.

Diaphragmatic breathing is not only a great breathing technique to calm down but also to sing.

At the inhalation, the diaphragm pulls down and brings down with it the framework for singers, including the trachea and larynx.

This pull during inhalation allows for rich & full sound production.

In addition, the airflow can be controlled and kept steady if the breath is not shallow.

Suggested Mantra: Exhale - Exhale - Exhale

Qs

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