Preface

This book has been written for the student or teacher of voice in the college or private studio, and it has four objectives. The first is to intentionally and directly train the singer’s aural awareness of his utterance of the word in song. The second is to describe the scientific theories of vocal pedagogy in a simplified and direct manner. The third is to suggest a phonetic system of teaching voice based upon the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The fourth is to offer an acoustic model of phonemic utterance that may be accepted as a standard of imitation.

The first objective—to intentionally and directly train the singer’s aural awarensss of his vocal utterance of the word—is the underlying thought within the chapters of this book. The pedagogy of this aural training is based upon two stable principles: that no disciplined phonation in song can be consummated unless it is aurally controlled and that voice training depends upon sensations developed through imitations of the sung sound aurally conceived.

The aural training is directed toward the development of the singer’s “phonemic awareness” and not toward the development of his “vocal timbre.” This training is based upon the empirical assumption that if the singer concentrates upon the timbre of the sung sound he frequently impairs and often destroys the integrity of the vowel. If he concentrates upon the phoneme he selects the appropriate timbre to match his intent. (See p. 232.)

The second objective—the description of the scientific theories of vocal pedagogy—is dealt with in the first four chapters of the book.

In this profession it is possible for a person to sing expertly without knowing why or how he does so. Refined physical and mental coordination is an athletic art, and most expert singers possess this coordination naturally. To such singers, the pedagogical theory in Part One, Chapters One through Five, may be less interesting. However, Part Two, Chapters Six through Eleven, is directed toward perfection in vocal performance and is written for everyone who performs publicly.

Courses in vocal pedagogy that are directed toward training teachers of formal disciplined song cannot be built upon the instinctive response of an individual to a singing situation. Therefore, all of the chapters in this book will best serve the student who intends to teach voice, institutionally or privately, by providing for him a physiological and phonetic approach to the act of singing. This scientific information will supply him with a diagnostic tool that, with maturation, will merge with psychological techniques. With the accompanying audio-visual tools, it will provide the experienced teacher with new methods of teaching the difficult processes of phonation, respiration, resonation, and articulation.

It will also serve the teacher or student who faces the arduous task of assembling and interpreting sounds of speech to conform to a similar utterance in song. The person who conducts such research invariably finds that speech sounds and sung sounds are by no means identical and that voice production problems within these two areas are quite different. In the speech act the word is all important, but communication in speech gives a leniency to nuance. In the singing act the word, the musical pitch, and the duration of the sound are synthesized and the singer is subservient to them. Therefore, the basic design of this book is directed toward bridging the gulf between the spoken word, which is familiar to the student as a communication tool, and the sung word, which is unfamiliar to him as a vehicle for aesthetic expression. Such bridging needs scientific implementation and must be presented dramatically if teaching techniques are to be taught properly. Information concerning the sung word and the analysis of many problems pertinent to each subject area are illustrated by both visual and recorded example.

The third objective—to suggest a system of vocal pedagogy based upon the International Phonetic Alphabet—embraces Chapters Six through Eleven. It has been designed to serve as a complete textbook for English diction. When the phonemic principles introduced within this volume are applied to individual performance of songs in a class-audience situation, textual intelligibility is not left to chance, it becomes the result of a logical design.

The singer’s only commodity is sound, and the vehicle for sound is the vowel. Therefore, the greater portion of this book is based upon an analysis of each phoneme and its migration within the singer’s vocal range of pitch and tonal intensity. A knowledge of phonetics is indispensable for an understanding of this work. Phonetics is a neutral tool in that it is adaptable to any method, be it precise or varied, and it is international in its functional utility.

The IPA provides an objective stability necessary for the analysis of speech sounds used in song, and the development of subject material Part Two is directed toward the establishment of phonemic concepts which are stable, permanent, and demonstrable. Such concepts endow teaching with objective evidence rather than subjective opinion. They also enable the teacher to link theoretical concepts with practical concepts—the scientific with the aesthetic—for, to each student, the word must eventually become beloved.

No attempt has been made in this book to analyze the phonemic character of the vowel aesthetically or to suggest preferred sounds. Quality judgments in song are a studio problem, and within this important dimension, the teacher’s directive and preference must be respected.

The fourth objective—establishment of an acoustic model of phonemic utterance that may be accepted as a standard for imitation—is based upon the psychophysical observation that what most teachers of voice hear as a change in vowel color is actually a migration of the phoneme, that the indiscriminate application of phonemic accuracy and misconception of vowel migration^* are major causes of poor textual intelligibility by the singer who must perform in a large auditorium or with instrumental masking. Such diction defects may be corrected by developing phonemic accuracy in the sung sound. To develop such accuracy, the model vowels have been designed by the author to serve as a standard sound by which the singer may compare all other vowel sounds at any pitch level or intensity. These acoustic vowels have been named the basic vowel and the quality alternate vowel.

These phonemes have been modeled after the Jones cardinal vowel. They are not intended to be preferred sounds but have been acoustically “placed” by experiment to provide a “home base” from which all vowel migration may occur and to establish phonemic accuracy. The location of these vowels upon a formant chart is the result of many years of research devoted to analyzing the sung phoneme in various pitch areas. Careful consideration was given to the physiological changes accompanying each vowel migration. The results of the research are to be found in the basic and quality alternate vowels, Fig. 101, p. 240, the Vowel Migration Chart, Fig. 103, p. 234, and also in the radiographs that form the kinesiologic analysis of Chapter Ten. Tools of interpretation are needed to fully understand and apply the exact position of these phonemes in their dynamic vocal environment. Such tools are presented visually in the book and as sound on records supplementing the book so that both voice teacher and student may more readily interpret them. They are the vowel formant and its movement within the sung sound; the formant chart; vowel migration and the migration chart; cavity-coupling laws and cavity-coupling; the laws of cavity resonators and their relationship to lip-rounding, lipspreading, tongue-fronting, and tongue-backing. Such tools have been used by phoneticians for the analysis of vowels for many years, but rarely has the voice teacher used them as they are presented in this book. Here they are used as a means of vowel placement in three pitch levels and as a tool for interpretive vowel migration within the art song. A thorough understanding of these acoustic tools brings to the singer an intelligibility of text that is most rewarding.

Much of the voice science information found in acoustical and anatomical texts is not pertinent to the act of singing. Contemporary writings by biolinguists and bioacousticians are not directed to the voice teacher or the college student, whose scientific vocabulary is inadequate for interpreting complex scientific terminology. Such writing best serves university doctoral candidates in voice science.

Such a work as this should serve all methods of voice culture, implementing all of them with audio-visual tools so that both student and teacher may visualize the physiological act of singing and use such an act as a point of departure for their own methods or tonal preferences.

No text of voice culture or diction would be completely useful without audio-visual materials; therefore, this work has been supplemented with numerous illustrations and with recordings that will serve as guides to clarify various vocal techniques advanced with each chapter. Such audio implements are not available for any of the texts on voice culture or diction presently used by the vocal profession. Within such texts, a gulf separates the written and the spoken or sung word; this gulf has long been the underlying cause of a misinterpretation of the physiological vocal positions that this work purports to establish. Such ambiguity of the written word results from the fact that research evidence (anatomical and acoustical) is unavailable to both author and reader, and vocal misinterpretations often arise from a misunderstanding of a written phrase.

Singing is a demonstrable art, and its pedagogy has long depended upon illustrative sound for interpretation of conceptual problems related to the complex act of singing. An audio-visual text presents both physiological and acoustical evidence of each sound uttered by the singer that is related to phonation (basic tonal production), respiration (breath support in song), resonation (the placement, focus, and point of vocalic sound), and articulation (the physiological analysis of the vocalized sound within a spatial environment).

The proper way to use this book as a teaching tool is to present each chapter in sequence. This method is preferred because concepts are developed progressively from chapter to chapter. For example, suggestions for coordinating respiration (Chapter Two) with phonation (Chapter Three), a most important and difficult phase of voice teaching, are to be found in Chapter Three. Neither student nor teacher will fully understand Chapters Nine and Ten without first having understood the previous chapters. The need for studying the chapters in sequence was demonstrated during use of the manuscript by the author in classes in vocal pedagogy at the doctoral level at Indiana University School of Music.

The Science of Vocal Pedagogy is designed to be used as a textbook. The material in it is used as a two-semester course of study. Part One, “Theory,” is used during the first semester for undergraduate as well as graduate courses. Part Two, “Application,” is used during the second semester in graduate courses in which studio techniques are developed as each class member teaches a high school student. Part Two also comprises the core of the drill material for a one-semester course of English diction. In this class each student must memorize the two songs in Appendix One, and sing them from a stage. Each song is recorded by two microphones, one placed in front of the singer, the other at midpoint in the auditorium. Evaluations of diction are made from the remote microphone. The criteria of intelligibility is the Evaluation Chart of Appendix One.

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^* Vowel modification and vowel migration are synonymous in usage but varied in concept. In singing both are controlled by auditory feedback. For a detailed explanation of the differences between vowel modification and phonemic migration, see p. 222.