What Are Vocal Dynamics?
- Projection & Agility
- Precision In Vocal Dynamics & Articulation
- Learning To Listen Closely
What is Vocal Dynamics? Vocal Dynamics is the control of your voice. This includes: belting, movement, muscle use, vowels/ phonetics.
This tells us that singing is more like a science than a unique skill. Your approach and history with what you’ve listened to help decide how your voice develops.
Watching live singers can help you visualize certain techniques.
Make sure to practice as this helps you develop your control and understanding of vocal dynamics.
Projection & Agility
Belting is the action of pushing for notes towards the end of your chest voice while singing. Belting is a skill that you have to build your muscles to improve with.
We use our soft palate muscles as an amplifier for our sound. Doing soft palate yawns help you build those muscles so that pushing no longer strains the vocal cords.
That being said, we want to look at the slope and movement of a song. We want to ask ourselves what level of push the song uses at the beginning to the end.
Use your voice strategically and only push where the singer is pushing. This will help reduce the chances of straining by belting for long periods of time.
Jennifer Hudson is known for her belting power and fullness. Vocal training and belting exercises have helped her maintain control over her high chest register. Allowing her to do many riffs and flowing crescendos while singing.
Precision In Vocal Dynamics & Articulation
We have 7 main muscles we use for singing. These include: the cheeks, nose, lips, jaw, tongue, soft palate, and stomach.
Try to use song mapping where you physically write down what muscles you will use at what part in any song. This helps you to keep your singing consistent.
The muscles are important as they help you with your breathing and tonality control. This goes hand in hand when pushing, or trying to sing quietly.
Another thing to keep in mind is the limited number of vowels in the English language. We have a, e, i, o, and u.
If we naturally use these vowels, we are already engaging our cheek, jaw, tongue, stomach, and lip muscles.
Try over enunciating vowels while singing to have a song sound more fuller. Simply pull up the lyrics and circle all the vowels so you know where you need to open up in a song.
Learning To Listen Closely
Always build on what you’ve already heard. When listening to a song the first time we may not catch all the techniques or dynamics being used.
That’s why it takes us a couple listens to sing more accurately with a song. The more time you spend rehearsing a song the more likely you are to hear the muscles, overenunciating, slope, slides, vibrato, etc.
It may take a moment but as long as you are consistent with hearing where these techniques need to be used, you will do just fine.
Eventually you’ll be able to duplicate things with your voice from only needing to listen to a song a couple times.
When working with music, you are always in the process of training your ear. The ear, being one of the most important senses in music, can be your ace to comfortable singing.