The power of the vowel...

A concept that has come up several times recently in both speech and singing students is the power of the vowel.  The vowel is what a singer lengthens for singing.  The vowel carries the breath and the resonance.  If you want to be louder or clearer, it has to be the vowel in the word that gets louder or clearer.  "p,t,k,v,b,g,d" simply doesn't have any real sustaining ability.  "m,n,l,ng,s,z" are sustainable but have limited resonance.  How do you make a vowel clearer?  You 'think" it clearly.  How about louder?  You got it - "think" it louder.

Two students come to mind from this week.  One is a young bass/baritone.  He has only been  in lessons for a few months.  His voice still has that reedy post-puberty quality.  A few weeks after he started lessons, he was cast in a comedic tenor role in his high school musical.  So lessons have been a crash course in head voice singing.  He came in last week and he had been working on making some of the spoken lines louder at home.  His inclination was to increase the energy in the consonants.  The effect of this was to make his words almost impossible to understand.

The second student is an adult who records books on tape.  In her reading, when she wanted to emphasize a word, she emphasized the consonants, which had the effect of diminishing the word.

English is a particularly difficult language in some respects; not the least is the fact that a lot of the vowels on the page do not sound like they look.  The vowel sound in the word "the?"  Looks like an "e", but sounds like an "uh".  So when you want to lengthen the vowel, you go by what it sounds like, not what it looks like.  How do you lengthen a vowel?  You breathe into it.  Why would you want to?  To gain resonance, either for speech or singing.  Go ahead, try it - it's actually kind of cool...