BrianVollmer.com

Everything in the voice stems from having the throat,chin, and face  relaxed.    Whenever you see a singer with their veins bulging out of their neck or their face turning purple, you can almost guarantee that they are headed for serious vocal problems.

The vocal chords or “folds” are located in the Adam’s Apple or thyroid cartilage, which is more predominant in males than in females.  The Adam’s apple is the hard shell that protects the vocal chords from injury-like a shot in the neck.   The vocal chords are the most delicate stringed instrument in the world-more delicate than a violin string.  You have two of them.  They are attached at one end and open at the other, much like a tuning fork, and face with the open end forward, and are situated inside the Adam’s Apple.  The way they work is this:  Breath comes up from the lungs and when it passes between the vocal chords they vibrate together to create “sound”, which is really only vibrating breath.

When singers tense the muscles of their face, neck, or chin during singing (usually the result of “pushing” the voice) that tension is transferred directly to the vocal chords and they become too taunt or too tense.   They strike each other far more forcibly than they were meant to and swell up along the inner edges.  The swelling acts like a weight, and slows down the frequency of vibrations.   If your vocal chords have to vibrate at 1,000 times per second to hit a high “C” (I’m taking a guess here as to frequency of  vibration) and suddenly because of that “weight” on the vocal chords can only vibrate 800 times per second, you have a problem, but being human, what we usually do is to push even harder to force the note to happen.  The vocal chords strike each other even more forcibly and we end up with hoarseness.  This is the first sign of vocal abuse.   If you go down town  at the end of any weekend night and talk to the singer in the band, nine times out of ten they’ll be hoarse.   Not only singers get hoarseness however.   Teachers talking all day, foremen screaming down the line, mothers yelling at their kids, or anyone that abuses their voice can have this happen. It’s caused by vocal abuse!

Now, say that singer doesn’t allow the vocal chords a chance to heal.   Eventually the body sets up a defense mechanism to protect the vocal chords because the body is always trying to protect itself from anything bad happening to it.   If you decide to use a screwdriver all day long and have never used one before you get blisters on your hands.  If, however you decide to take up a trade which requires you to use that screwdriver everyday your hands develop calluses.  It’s your body’s way of protecting your hands.  In the case of your vocal chords, initially you get swollen vocal chords and then you develop these things called “nodes” or “polyps”   Nodes are like little pimples on the inside of the vocal chords.  Once you get the node it prevents your vocal chords from vibrating correctly and you lose the bottom and top part of your range and are left with three or four notes around middle C.  
Even if you go to a surgeon and they remove your nodes, they will keep coming back because you haven’t gotten rid of why they are there in the first place-vocal abuse.  Years ago doctors used scalpels to remove the node whereas nowadays they do it with laser surgery, but it is still not recommended to do so.   Even the simplest of operations can go astray.   Julie Andrews, one of the most celebrated singers in the world, had her nodes removed at Mount Sinai Hospital and never sang again.    Rod Stewart, who has had operations on his throat numerous times, developed a tumor from constantly developing nodes.

When man was first put on this earth he crawled, but over time we’ve evolved to the point where now we walk upright, so we can never totally relax the muscles in our neck.  However, we can alleviate much of this tension by incorporating the act of yawning into the act of singing, because when you yawn your throat is in it’s most relaxed state.   If you look at what happens when you yawn, the uvula (the little punching bag hanging down at the back of your throat) moves upwards towards the nasal passage and the pillars of the throat (those two vertical muscles at the back) move outwards.  You feel like you have a lot more room at the back of your throat-because you do!   Outwardly on your face the cheeks move up towards the eyes and the mouth becomes wide.  By incorporating the act of yawning into the act of singing we’ve taken the tension from around the vocal chords or larynx and put that tension at the back of the throat, away from the vocal chords.  If you ever watch anyone who really knows how to sing like Barbara Streisand or Tony Bennett, they usually have a pleasant expression on their face.  This is because when you smile and elevate your cheeks it helps to lift the back of your throat somewhat (although there is more to it than this).   This is called singing in “dummy face”, which means that just like a ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing from the upper lip upwards should move.  
A popular misconception taught by a lot of voice teachers is to get students to open their mouths. 
“Open your mouth! Belt it out!” they’ll command.

This is incorrect and once again not based on science or the anatomy of the body.   Remember that sound does not travel on breath-it travels on sound waves.   By opening your mouth and dropping your jaw you cause tension around the vocal chords.  If you don’t believe me, try this:  Put the palm of your hand flat on the front of your neck over the Adam’s apple and drop your jaw.  How do the muscles in your neck feel?  Tense?  Damn right!   Not only that, but if you drop your jaw and open your mouth you will be unable to lift your throat with that act of yawning or “dummy face” as I described above. 
Another commonly taught technique nowadays is mouthing the lyrics to get diction, ie making a round shape with your mouth to pronounce the vowel “O”.  Once again, this is incorrect and has no basis in science.   If you go to any voice specialist they will tell you that your vowels are formed by the position of the tongue.  It has nothing to do with the shape of the mouth.   For instance, your tongue troughs upwards on the outer edges on the vowel “O” and arches up ¾ of the way back on an “A” vowel.  Your consonants are formed with the tongue and the teeth, with the exception of “p”, “m”, “f”, “w”, “b” and “v”, all which require for the bottom lip to slightly touch the upper teeth.  The reason it feels like you have to move your mouth when you sing is because when the tongue changes shapes to form the vowel it requires muscles in the tongue to go into that shape.   The muscles of the tongue are connected to other muscles in the head and it feels like you have to move your mouth, but in reality diction has nothing to do with moving the mouth.

If you needed to move your mouth all over the place for diction, how would a ventriloquist speak?   No one talks like that.  When you see a newscaster on TV do they look like their mouth is contorting into all sorts of different shapes for good diction?

Bad diction is usually the result of two things.  Firstly, the singer does not stay on the vowel when they’re singing.  Only vowels resonate, consonants are gone in a thousandth of a second.   You can’t make a consonant loud or long.  It’s a percussive sound that is just “there”.  In classical music it’s a big no-no to go to the consonant as it kills the resonance.  You always hold notes on vowels, because only vowels can “resonate.”

The most common reason for bad diction however is dropping the final consonant on the word.  If you take the word “dog” for instance, and drop the final consonant, it becomes “daw” not “dog”.  Consonants surround the vowel to form the word.  To pronounce the final consonant is a matter of thinking it.   I know that sounds too simple, but if that wasn’t the case, you wouldn’t be able to talk.  When you talk you don’t think of what position your tongue is in to create the sounds, you just think the words and your body produces the sound.  This is because you’ve learned since you were a small child to talk.  When you “will” yourself to talk many things are happening in your body to create that sound.  The vocal chords are going into a certain position, as is the tongue, and air is coming from your lungs, across those vocal chords and then resonating off your hard palate. If I were to ask you to say the word “dog” ten times in a row, you wouldn’t suddenly be silent on the seventh time you said it!   Once again, this is because you have willed yourself to say it, or willed yourself to talk.  When you drop that final consonant on the word it’s because you weren’t thinking clearly about that final consonant.   If you were thinking about that final consonant (which forms the word) your body has to produce it!