A strongly biased advocacy of aural self-awareness.
Boston Singers' Resource News Bulletin, January - 2004

By Susan Larson

Not so long ago, I was sitting around with an old colleague, knocking back Tall Chai Lattes and grousing about our voice students. They don’t practice. They won’t learn to trill. They have tantrums when it isn’t perfect all the time. And so on.

“How do I get them to be in the moment?” I lamented. “The poor dears flounder around in woulda-shoulda-land so they can’t really even notice what they’re doing right now. I have this one student- very talented of course- when she loses her thread she always says ‘I was listening too much,’ So I tell her hey, it’s music, you get to listen.”
My colleague primmed up her lips in disapproval.

“I forbid my students to listen,” said she. “Singers have a distorted concept of what they actually sound like, because they hear themselves inside their own heads as well as outside.”

“So much the better,” said I, “ they get to hear themselves twice.”

“Singers who listen drop their support, close their throats and hold their voices inside,” she protested.

“Sez who?” I said. I pressed my case, disregarding all the warning signs of an imminent Voc. Ped. food fight.

“You know what I think,” I said“I think voice teachers invented this ‘you shouldn’t listen’ rule to keep their students helpless and dependent on them. Are singers total morons, or parrots or robots? Do they always need some teacher to tell them how they sound?”

“Singers need their teachers’ ears.”

“Sure, but all the time? Forever? Come on.”

The debate turned ugly. Then it turned personal. We dissed each others’ teaching philosophies, musicality, personal vocal flaws, looks, and singing careers. A door might have been slammed.

Singers have opinions, and singing teachers have dyed in the wool opinions. Even in the teeth of good scientific evidence, we tend to cling to received wisdom handed down from the golden age of vocalism, whenever that was. Well, we’re entitled to our opinions, fact-bolstered or not. But– for a singer to turn off his or her ears….I thought that was too bizarre.

However, the debate about listening or not listening to yourself still divides the academic vocal ped world; there was a forum on this very topic in the NATS Journal of Singing just this past year. Did any of the honcho voice teachers support my opinion? I dragged all my Ped books and NATS journals off the shelves and rifled through them to prove my point.

The late great pedagogical patriarch Oren Brown says (JOS Vol 58 No 3 2002 p. 229) “One does not ask how it sounded, because no one is able to hear one’s own voice the way it sounds to someone else.”

On the other hand the equally venerable and still teaching Richard Millers says in his book “On the Art of Singing,( Oxford University Press, 1996, p 274), “Singers are sometimes told that they cannot hear themselves sing. This is ill-directed advice, because the singer not only hears what is being sung but quickly learns to make assessments of the variety of sounds of which he or she is capable. Not only do singers hear themselves sing, they constantly assess the sounds they make during singing in order to bring those phonations into accord with the tonal ideal to which they have given their allegiance.”

Paul Kiesgen, Chairman of Voice at Indiana University, hits the offers this in his article in JOS (Vol 59 No 2, 2002 p 135) when he says, “Perhaps the question should not be whether or not to listen, but rather how to listen. Further, listening can be combined with other forms of sensory feedback to produce the most accurate assessment of the sound possible.”

This sounded sane to me. To arrive at a rich, functionally free, expressive, in-tune sound, we recruit our sonic imagination and memory, and then add some sensory input: sight (mirrors, videos), kinetic sense(muscle memory), tactile sense(vibratory sensations), and yes, goshdarn it, hearing. Why shut off that crucial source of valuable information? Why risk crooning your way through “Fruelingsglaube” when your pianist is tearing through“Er ist’s?” We need all the data we can get, and it’s my opinion that singers have enough RAM to handle it all.

But what about singers’ famous inability to hear themselves as others hear them? That’s certainly true. But! Only read on.

One evening I was enduring some ribbing from a clarinetist friend about singers’ inability to count, stay in tune, sight read, stuff like that. I was on the defensive, reminding the guy that unlike instrumentalists, (or “musicians” as he kept calling them), singers had to read vocal notation (which is unreadable, being organized by syllable and not by the beat); and what’s worse, we had to sing lots of hard words in many languages, and sometimes act and dance and fence and wear hot heavy costumes.

“Besides, I said, “Singers’ instruments are inside our bodies, and we can’t hear themselves as others hear us, so it’s all so much harder for us. So there.”

“That’s crap,” said he. “Instrumentalists (actually he said the “m” word again) have the exact same issue. Wind and brass players, and probably string players as well, hear sound from inside just as much a singers; our ears get the sound from bone conduction. ”

“And yet you manage to arrive at some working notion of what you sound like?” I said.

“No problem. You Listen. You listen inside and you listen outside and you triangulate from that.”

No more excuses, singers. Listen up. Take charge.

I continue to believe that all our senses and brain power can be used in the studying and performing of music. We need every scrap of feedback we can gather, just to figure out what we are making in the way of a sound, and, like, what key we’re making it in.

I grant you that hyper-critical listening, like all negative thinking, can mess you up. That sort of listening usually comes with spoken commentary during the rests: “die Lindenluefte sind erwacht, Scheiss!…” “Crudele! “CACA! Ah, no, mio bene,” and so on. You can dig yourself quite a hole doing this.

Or a singer could listen only to the sound inside her head, or only to the sound in the air. Too much ‘inside’ listening can cause our energy to suck back and not reach our audience. Usually we have to train ourselves to do more outside listening. The problem is that the inside sound is louder, but we learn to favor the feedback from the spaces we are in.

Miller (op cit p 274) says ”Many singers have intonation problems, not because they have unmusical ears, but because they rely too much on internal sensation and not enough on external listening…feeling and hearing vocal timbre are combined for both aesthetic and functional purposes.”

I have an (undocumented) opinion that too much ‘outside’ listening can cause a singer to come off his center and over-sing. Concentrating on outside sounds alone might cause a singer to ignore the inner signals and lose good resonance.

Conscientious voice teachers have gone to great lengths to train their students how to separate internal and external hearing. Those who favor ‘inside’ listening put down rugs and hang tapestries in their studios to kill external feedback and stifle (in my opinion) all the fun. Some in the ‘outie’ faction has been known to employ the notorious ‘HearPhones’ (earmuffs with sound-collecting channels leading direct from mouth to ears) to boost of the ‘outside’ signal so that it is lounder than than the inside one. I know it’s weird, but no weirder than turning your studio into a sensory deprivation chamber.

I actually witnessed the break-through moment of a bottled-up, nearly paralyzed soprano who put on the phones. She sang two or three notes into them. She stopped dead; her eyes got big and filled, her mouth dropped open. She processed for a silent minute. When she began to sing again her voice was, for the first time, functionally free, and just pouring out of her like molten gold. What did she hear?

The fact that we can all commit ‘wrong’ listening does not mean listening is wrong. Listening is good, it’s trainable, it’s useful and best of all folks, it’s fun. One student of mine, singing well and listening, and described the sensation “it’s like hearing an echo.” Inside and outside signals making a sort of reverb chamber?

Without informed and dispassionate listening can we ever do more than just whistle in the dark? If we don’t listen to ourselves singing, why should anybody else? Who among us, when our music-making is going the way we dreamed it could, has not had that momentary thought:

“Wow, I sound really good!” Coming soon: “Should singers think?’ and “Can singers learn to sing compound meters?”