When he was three, my nephew went to his first NCAA Division I hockey game. When I asked him how it was, his response was, “The man skates real fast and runs right into the fence”. It’s hard to imagine peeling back the layers of the game any further than that, getting down to its foundation. Leave it to a three-year-old to wade through all the complexities to find the simplicity (and yeah, I fell over laughing).

It seems like you could take singing and do the same thing, doesn’t it? In a paper written by Dr. Sten Ternström, Ph.D. of the Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, he writes, “In performance, the choir singer refers to two acoustic signals: the own voice, or Self, and the rest of the choir, or Other. Intonation errors are found to be induced or increased (a) by large differences in sound level between Self and Other, (b) by unfavorable spectral properties of Other, and (c) by articulatory manouevres, i.e., by so-called intrinsic pitch. The magnitude of the errors would be indirectly related to room acoustics and to voice usage and textual content. When singing alone, singers from one choir use a vowel articulation that is different from that in speech and also more unified; it in also in some respects different from solo singing.”

What?

Let’s give it the three-year-old treatment: stand up straight, take a deep breath, sing words so that people can understand them.

Well THAT sure made more sense. And think about it, isn’t that what every rehearsal really is when you peel back all the layers? C’mon, none of these are new:

– Posture.

– Breathe from your diaphragm.

– Diction.

If you concentrate on this simple foundation, the rest of the singing will grow from there and you can always fall back on these if things get too complicate and weird. They always work and they’re never, ever bad things.

(My nephew would probably also say, “Try not to sing a wrong note”, but that’s a subject for another day.)