Singer’s Breathing and Breath Support

Written for Walton Voices by Zoran Milosevic
zoran.s.milosevic@gmail.com
01932 246 635

Choir rehearsals and singing lessons will often start with a breathing exercise, usually a variation of “inhale for 5, hold for 5, exhale for 15 seconds”. It appears to be a quite simple and straight forward drill, except … that it is not! Each of the three steps have their peculiarities that are not intuitive.
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Taking a Breath
Let us start with breathing in. We breath subconsciously, but at any level higher than casual or bathroom singing, breathing should be done in a particular manner. Breathing is accomplished by altering the size of the chest cavity, sucking the air in when the cavity is expanded (creating vacuum inside the lungs), and expelling it when the cavity is contracted. These actions are initiated automatically by nerve signals that the brain sends to the relevant muscles, be it the inspiratory (inhaling) or the expiratory (exhaling) muscles.
We can change the size of the chest cavity by following muscle actions:

• Using the ribs and their (intercostal) muscles to expand the upper chest
• Contracting the diaphragm, a dome-like muscle inside the abdomen, which flattens when contracted and so extends the lower chest cavity downwards. When the ribs open, the diaphragm simultaneously contracts. The diaphragm contraction is also assisted by relaxation of the abdominal muscles.

What is “Good Singing”?
Written for Walton Voices by Zoran Milosevic
zoran.s.milosevic@gmail.com
01932 246 635


Most people would agree that the underlying principles of all good singing are:

• Singing in tune
• Singing with a voice that feels free
• The voice is clear and resonant
• High notes are reached without strain
• The words are distinct, and both the meaning and emotion of the song are communicated.

It takes a lot of technical and artistic development to achieve the above. The three grand technical pillars upon which all singing techniques rest are usually quoted as:

• Singer’s breathing
• Breath (and voice) support
• Transition to singing from the speaking voice

At a higher level, however, elite singing involves many additional elements, much of which are encapsulated in the broad term of Italian Bel Canto - literally “beautiful singing”, but loosely translated as “a lyrical style of operatic singing using a full rich broad tone and smooth phrasing”. It is the 19th century vocal tradition passed down mainly from mouth to mouth. While some vocal pedagogues claim that they have a direct link to “the old Italians”, there is in fact no specific codified system or a delineated method of Bel Canto to simply follow. Bel Canto is based on beautiful voice function associated with beautiful artistic imagination, with many technical and artistic elements included that enable its execution. The advanced elements of good technical singing that are paramount to Bel Canto are:

• agility (moving the voice),
• sostenuto (sustaining the voice and the breath energy throughout a musical phrase),
• legato (binding one sound to the next) and
• colouring of the voice, or chiaroscuro in Italian, or good resonance balance.

​I tried to illustrate my understanding of the many underlaying facets of Bel Canto in the diagram below

In my previous article (here) I discussed the options for improving an amateur singer’s voice. In the few next articles, I will propose a series of exercises that will help in achieving this, but before we go deeper into the singing technique, I would first like to discuss how the vocal mechanism actually works.

All sounds that we hear are produced by oscillating pressure waves of the surrounding air. Therefore, to make a sound, we need (1) a vibrator - something that oscillates (the “source”), (2) a motor – the energy input that moves the source and causes it to vibrate, and (3) a resonator - something that converts those oscillations into an audible air wave. Examples of motors are the drummer’s hand, the breath energy in singing or blowing a woodwind instrument, the guitarist’s finger action, etc. Musial instruments’ oscillators are usually either the strings (violin, guitar, harp) or reeds/mouthpieces (clarinet, trumpet). For human voice it is the vocal folds inside the larynx that oscillate, and it is the vocal tract (the throat, the mouth) that acts as the resonator. Without the resonator the raw source sound would be little more than a quack. It is the resonator upon which depends the beauty of the musical sound, and so is true for the singing voice. The vocal tract is a Stradivarius hidden inside an elite singer’s body.

The prime and the most coveted skill for any singer is, of course, musicality, and the foremost are the ability to pitch the notes and the intervals correctly, to sight-read, and to memorise tunes easily. Armed with those skills, you can confidently sing in almost any choir, save the very elite ones. But there is also the issue of voice quality, and improvements in that department can offer you (a) more joy, (b) entry into the elite choirs, and (c) even a soloist status if you so desire.

So, how can a (male) singer improve his voice quality? (I address the “male” because: (a) men face tougher challenges, (b) I do not have sufficient knowledge of female voices; however, much of what is outlined here applies to the ladies as well).

But first: You will not want to sing opera? Right! This means that you will not need to project in a large hall and over an orchestra. And you will not need the stratospherically high notes, the elite voice’s sustainment and singing stamina. That greatly simplifies the task of making improvements to your voice. Singing opera is a tour de force, a singing equivalent of running a marathon with climbing, sprinting and weightlifting on the way. This is true for all voices, but operatic tenors exhibit almost superhuman ability when singing Belcanto, Verdi, Verismo repertoire (e.g. Puccini) or Wagner.