Dear Les and Vocalisters:
Thens for your response, Les.
The exercises I presented were desinged to help find the male head voice and are not particularly useful for transcending the passaggio. Unless there is some form of head voice developed there is little chance of bridging the passaggio. There must be two sides to a bridge if it is to be a bridge!
Since most of the recent comments made by members of this email group were proposing falsetto as the best way, and in some cases the only way, to create a voice above the male passaggio I thought it would be alright to suggest some exercises that can help men discover the sound, feeling, sensation, etc of the head voice.
It has been my experience that this can best be achieved by exercises that involve adducted vocal folds with the resultant sense of breath resistance and that these exercises should be of short individual duration until the singer becomes more comfortable with the quality of sound produced (a noticeable ring in the tone) and the sense of the breath resistance that accompanies the head voice. For this reason I have used the "F" consonant as an onset consonant. You mentioned you use the "V" and I do as well. Both consonants are forms of each other.
I seldom use lip trills because I have found that most students close down their pharyngeal spaces on lip trills and tend to experience tightness in the throat. Of course, one can be trained to avoided this result but it is it my feeling that if a particular exercises needs that much corrective training it is probably not the most efficient of the many that can be chosen. Singing into a folded handkerchief or, as Titze has explained, into a straw of different diameters can achieve the same result without the tendency to close the throat.
The premise behind each of these devices in the front of the mouth is to restrict the airflow slightly above the vocal folds and, in so doing, to better balance the difference in air pressures above the vocal folds(Supra-glottal) as against the air pressure below the vocal folds (Sub-glottal). This reduces the intensity of air flow required to set the vocal folds in oscillation ("threshold pressure"). Reducing the threshold pressure on the vocal folds allows the folds to lengthen more easily (they are not required to sustain strong medial pressure to hold back excessive air pressure) and encourages oscillation primarily on the upper side of the vocal folds which is a primary characteristic of head voice.
Using closed vowels on the exercises mentioned, such as /u/ and /o/ or /i/ and /e/, induces a lengthened vocal tract. The longer vocal tract provides greater acoustic inertia or air column load on the vocal folds and this also helps balance the pressure differences above the vocal folds with the air pressure below the folds as well as acting as a positive pressure on the upward movement of the folds and a negative pressure on the downward movement of the folds.
The longer vocal tract, which is a natural part of forming these vowels, also lowers the first formant or peak resonance of the vocal tone bringing it closer to the fundamental of the phonated pitch. The effect this has on the head voice is to lower its inception point. Whereas the /a/ vowel might display the beginning of the passaggio for a baritone at about C#4, the /i/ or /u/ vowel will induce this first passaggio point on about Bb3 or even A3 for the same voice. With the passaggio so lowered it is much easier for the head voice to appear well within the range that the singer can produce with an extended chest voice. Extending the chest voice this high is not desired or encouraged but, because the singer is performing well within his already available range it does not seem excessive to have him produce a tone with adducted folds (as is found in chest voice ) but with only the upper surface of the folds in oscillation which, is by definition, a lighter mechanism that lives within the realms of the heavier mechanism without the need to resort to a completely different vocal fold configuration and would be the case with falsetto. -- Lloyd W. Hanson
|