by on

feelingsLately, I’ve heard a couple of people say regarding politics and the news that we live in a post-fact world where feelings are what matters. As a musician, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, reading about, and generally paying attention to emotion. I study this condition we are all suffering from called “Being Human.” I have to in order to do my job, to be expressive, to connect with others, and to accurately convey my own experiences in relatable ways.

So here are the two things you need to know about your feelings:

  1. Your feelings are important.
  2. Your feelings are irrelevant.

Welcome to the paradox, Alice. Let’s head down the rabbit hole.

Your Feelings are important

  1. Your feelings are real. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. If you feel scared, you feel scared. Physiologically in the body, when the fight/flight/freeze response is triggered, there are things that start happening. Your muscles tense, your breathing tends to get shallow and high in the chest, adrenaline starts coursing through your body, your heart races. If you’re feeling in love, you get a dose of dopamine in your brain…or maybe oxytocin. When you feel at peace, your body will relax, your breathing will deepen and slow. If you meditate, you literally change your brain waves from alpha or beta waves to gamma waves. Feelings are real things. It isn’t just in your head, it’s in your whole being.
  2. Feelings do not have to follow rational or logical reasoning. They might be logical and rational. A large truck almost runs you off the road, and your fear response kicks in…that makes perfect logical sense. They can also make seemingly no sense. You might just suddenly feel sad one day for no apparent reason. You go looking for the cause to try and fix it. Maybe you track it down to a stray thought that popped into your head about your childhood cat that you were reminded of because of a similar looking cat in a Facebook video you saw before your commute. Maybe, you just got hit with a wave of sadness. We can always invent a backstory to explain our emotions. Sometimes that’s helpful, but it doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day, rational or not, you have to feel your feels. You’ve got those chemicals in the body. Find healthy ways to work through them.
  3. Your feelings tell you about your experience of the world. While your feelings don’t have to have any rhyme or reason, sometimes they can give you powerful insights into your core beliefs. I think the best way to explain is to share an example from my own life. Last year, I went to one of the protests in Baltimore after Freddie Grey’s death. Hundreds of people were chanting, “Black Lives Matter,” and I felt incredibly uncomfortable, anxious, and scared. I asked myself, “What about the circumstances of this event evoked this response from me?”I’ve long held a deep belief in the value of all life, and my feeling were coming from that “All lives matter” place. It was also coming from my empathy, feeling the anger from the crowd that I felt was somehow directed at me. Rather than being reactionary, though, I took time with my feelings to feel them and a new feeling started to come forward…I was feeling guilty and responsible, using my anger to mask my sense of culpability. It’s so natural to go on the defensive if we feel attacked that we often don’t even notice it happening. When I got home from the rally, I did some research on the Black Lives Matter movement. Turns out, it started as “Black Lives Matter, Too.” I have kept educating myself, learning about myself, trying to know myself and my experiences. Now, I’m much more comfortable saying and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement,  and engaging in dialogues about race and reconciliation. This work is my way of trying to be a better human being on this earth.

Your Feelings Are Irrelevant

  1. Your feelings are real, but they aren’t true. The only truth to any feeling is the fact that they exist in your body and mind. They do not have to have a bearing on the actuality of the reality. That politician you hate isn’t evil because you hate him or her. That time that you saw a sketchy man walking up quickly behind you and felt scared? He wasn’t necessarily a threat. This doesn’t mean that the politician is good or that the man wasn’t a threat. By all means, listen to those gut instincts. Especially if it’s an immediate threat, do what you need to manage your sense of risk. BUT! If it isn’t an immediate threat, do your research and do your self-reflection. So when that man is following you, walk faster or duck into the public store. And when the politician makes you scream, “SATAN-INCARNATE!!! BE GONE FROM THIS FOUL EARTH!,” take a deep breath, and go start looking up their record, find primary sources and documents, look at news media and op-ed pieces from as many perspectives as you can, evaluate ALL of your sources. Then, come back to tell us, “SATAN-INCARNATE!!! AND HERE’S ALL OF THE PROOF I’VE FOUND THAT THEY’RE GOING TO BREAK THE SEVENTH SEAL TO THE GATES OF HELL!” Or tell us that we’re all blowing things way out of proportion.
  2. You are the only one feeling your feelings. You are walking around in your own little skin bag, coursing with hormones, provoked by the sensory input from your two little eye-windows and all those other sense. All of that input is getting filtered through the sum of your experiences. You wear your own brand of tinted glasses. But we are wired to be social creatures. We look for reassurance that we aren’t crazy seeking out people who share our feelings. It leads to confirmation bias where we are more likely to accept things that reinforce our narrative. We all suffer from it because we’re all fighting the lonely. But we are also all equipped with a part of our brain that’s dedicated to empathy, to identifying and feeling what other people are feeling. We can find cohesion by self-selecting input to confirm our world view, but we can also build social bridges by engaging our empathy, trying to connect and understand others.
  3. You can’t control what feelings come up, but you can control what happens when they do. It’s hard, and it takes practice. So much of the physical reaction that goes through our body is out of our conscious control, but we can control our breathing. The breath is our point of conscious interjection into our emotional state. That’s why people tell you to take a deep breath when you’re upset to help you calm down. Learn to identify what emotions feel like in your body. Learn to breathe deeply and interject your consciousness into the physical emotional experience.

I know it’s hard right now. There’s so much rancor in our public discourse that just glancing at Facebook or turning on the news for a few minutes can trigger waves of indignation, of anger, of disgust, of anxiety. We need calmer heads in the game. We need agents of de-escalation to improve our public discourse. The first step always starts within you.

by on

Recently, I had a student ask me for an overview of singing. So often in voice lessons, we work on a little tiny piece of the singing puzzle, and it’s hard to keep track of how it connects with the big picture. I’ve tried to put into words a succinct overview of how singing works, the major components involved, and how they connect together.

In physics/science, there’s the idea of a universal theory…one theory that explains the whole of the universe. It’s incredibly elusive. Relativity and quantum mechanics helped explain so much, but scientists have been working to reconcile/unify the two theories ever since. I’m sure you already know this. An overview of singing is a lot like pursuing a universal theory. Even for me, my understanding of singing and the voice has continued to shift, deepen, and grow over the years. What follows isn’t the only theory of singing. It isn’t a complete theory of singing. And I will continue to change and adapt it as I learn more.
I think of singing as a four part system. The first part is the breathing. Breathing works as an ever flowing cycle of inhalation and exhalation. Stopping the cycle immediately introduces tension into the body, specifically into the throat and upper chest to hold air either in or out. So the goal is to keep it moving. We have the inhale half of the cycle. This is the point of relaxation and expansion throughout the body. Then, the exhale half of the cycle. This is where the abs tone to help isolate the diaphragm which drives the breath.
In more detail, both the inhale and exhale cycle have two main halves based on air pressure. When the lungs are empty, the pressure of the air outside the lungs is greater than on the inside. Just releasing tension in the body allows air to flow into the lungs without any effort since the air pressure wants to find equilibrium. From equilibrium, we can consciously expand the rib cage and lung cavity to draw additional air into the lungs. In the exhale, provided we’ve loaded up the lungs with air, the air pressure in the lungs starts out greater than the air pressure outside the lungs. So little effort is needed for the air to flow out, we just need to relax and let the ribs collapse. Once we’ve reached equilibrium, the muscles in the body begin to contract to drive out the air from the lungs.
As singers, we need to become masters of the breath. The inhalation process, the relaxation and drawing in air, often becomes accelerated, relaxation has to happen much faster than normal and the amount of air drawn in much greater. The exhale becomes slowed down into a slow, pressurized stream. Depending on how high or low the note is, it might require more or less pressure/air, but overall there is a need for a steady, constant, continuous flow of air. When done right, the sound should feel like it is lifted/pushed from deep in the torso rather than lifted out from the throat (particularly in the upper register).
The next major piece of singing is the vocal folds. The vocal folds provide the resistance to the flow of air by closing together in the throat, vibrating the air as it moves through. If the vocal folds do not move close enough together, the sound can be breathy. If they press together too hard, the sound can be strained and tense. There is a sweet spot where the resistance from the vocal folds couples with the pressure of the air working synergistically.
Sometimes, students have trouble differentiating between the muscles that work the vocal folds and various other muscles in the throat and neck. The throat and neck should stay relaxed, isolating the majority of the work to the vocal folds. Building an awareness of the different muscles, and the capacity for individuation so that only the desired muscles are working takes time. In addition, the vocal folds work off muscles, muscles that must be strengthened through use, practice, and time. Sometimes, there is work that can’t be accelerated and just takes time and practice.
Here is a video of a singer’s laryngoscopy which will give you a clear visual of how the vocal folds work during singing:
The last major piece is the resonator…all of the holes in the head, neck, and upper chest that increase the power of the vibration like the body of a hollow body guitar. So many things can have an effect on the resonance: The shape of the throat, mouth, the placement of the tongue. Tension in the neck, tension in the tongue, tension in the jaw. Even things like the lifting of the eyebrows…all of these can have an effect on the sound. This is the most difficult aspect to give an overview of. There are so many tiny muscles that can have an influence, and every student is different in their habits and patterns. The best I can say is that, for me, there is something I call the “zero space.”
The zero space is a way of being/singing where there is no expression. I place my body into the most relaxed position possible, seeking an effortless effort where my breathing is perfectly coupled with the vocal folds resistance. The resonators are shaped in a way to maximize sound and minimize tension creating the most relaxed sound possible. While there are a hundreds of moving parts…hundreds of muscles involved, it is a very distinct feeling. A very singular thing. At it’s core, singing is just one thing: that connection of breath to body. From that space, I can add expression, but the zero place is the starting point for me.
This brings me to the fourth part, expression. On of my guiding principles as a musician is that good technique is always in service to great expression. Sometimes, I want to add some tension, add vibrato or straighten the tone in my voice. Sometimes, I want my voice to crack a little…cry just a bit. The benefit of the zero space is that it creates a platform for me to thoughtfully add this type of expression. It also gives me a default to go back to when my technique is getting in the way of me expressing something the way I truly want to.
I also want to add that the breath is the key to our emotional systems. Every emotion has a pattern of breathing. When we are angry, the breath tends to be high in the chest with a deliberate rhythm. Anxiety is high, shallow, and rapid breathing. So emotionally sad and choked up, the breath becomes uneven and unsteady. When I plug that emotional system into my singing through the breath, I can take that zero space into places that reveal my own humanity, and consequently, the humanity of others. Its always a balance between breathing in an emotional state and breathing for singing, but it adds a truth to performance that perfect technique can never capture.