Singing in Tune: The Ear has an Accomplice

Françoise Lombard

We have all learned that a good ear is the first condition for producing the right sound. Progress in the field of listening education has taught us that sound vibrates throughout the body and produces physical sensations that can be felt other than through the ear.

The body is one big resonator, made to vibrate from head to foot.

To sing in tune we must trust our ear, but we must also be awake to the bodily sensations created by different levels of sound. Music vibrates within us and moves within the body in accordance with the frequency of the sound and the quality of the tone. Vocal exactness is based on the use of these two elements. However, we are far less accustomed to listening to physical sensations produced by the movement of sound in the body.

Interferences

If, as choir members, we sing out of tune or are not sure of the exactness of our singing, it is often because we do not know how to identify landmarks – the bodily sensations that could help us feel where we are.
In choir work, it is sometimes difficult to hear ourselves properly, so we start to sing louder or cut ourselves off from the others in order to concentrate better. This prevents us from receiving the sounds, from letting ourselves be penetrated by them, from letting ourselves be carried by this music that is vibrating inside us. Such an attitude can cause problems of homogeneity and interfere with the group’s vocal team work.

Listening is a determining factor for choir members and musicians, because sound is passed through listening. To dare to listen and to listen to oneself freely gives us the opportunity to develop all of our potential, all of our talent. In fact, both verbal and musical expression, as well as communication in general, are very much influenced by our listening capacity. Many movements, invisible but concrete, occur within us and these have a determining impact on our voice and on our articulation of musical and verbal language.

Listening Education

For several years I have been giving workshops that teach listening with the body in order to feel and understand what happens when we speak or sing. This work facilitates and enriches vocal and musical study. Listening Education offers a series of exercises in sound simulation, uniquely via the voice, that permit us to observe how we listen. For listening is partly personal and subjective, since we all react differently to acoustic messages.

In the workshops, we learn to play with sounds, to follow them in space, to let them bounce in the body, in order to learn how to improve the way we send out sound. We also learn to listen to others at the same time as listening to ourselves. We become sensitive to and conscious of the vibration of sound in the body. This helps us to better recognise and remember melodies, since vibrating landmarks are lodged inside the body itself. And so the ear has found a new collaborator!

The development of listening contributes to enlarging the resonance of the voice and to enriching its tone, since it improves the ability to hear and produce harmonics.

Music is an interior act

The perception of sound in the body helps us to know ourselves from inside and to deepen our self confidence. The choir member feels more and more comfortable in his instrument, which creates relaxation and a feeling of well-being. The sound of the voice, thus liberated, goes out more easily and the heart finds more space to express itself. Choral singing offers us the pleasure of vibrating together. We can only fully enjoy this pleasure when we use the capacity to listen and to let the other voices sound inside us.

That is how, by the natural phenomenon of resonance, polyphony can be alive in us … without disturbing us. On the contrary, it opens us up to a dimension of music that increases our pleasure.

Excerpts of an article that appeared originally in “Chanter: la revue du chant choral au Québec”(1995).