Anyone can sing: Jordan Scholl at TEDxGuelphU 2012

Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me I once was lost but now AM found was blind but now I see so how many people here think they can sing yes a hand I saw it over there yeah perfect well actually I was kind of hoping for that because that's why it's so exciting for me to be here today not only is it a ridiculous excuse to wear this music lovers tie but it's also an opportunity for me to share my idea that I believe that anyone can sing and I won't lie it's met with a lot of skepticism throughout what I do I'm also a professional singer aside from being a scientist I'm also a professional singer and I travel all around Southwest Ontario I've been to Germany Spain and France I I love sharing music and spreading music but really this whole idea for this talk and this idea that anyone can sing and that Anatomy an understanding anatomy is so important in understanding the voice and being a better singer actually came from my first voice teacher who pulled out that Anatomy textbook and for the first time everything made sense something just clicked in me and I said oh my gosh that's how it works this might help other people so that's why I'm here today to talk to you but the thing is there are two different approaches to teaching the voice and to understanding the voice and I was talking to a friend of mine who sings at the COC the Canadian Opera Company and we were talking about how we learned how to sing initially and it got me thinking there was there's a sensory approach that's often talked about with singing it's this idea that you can feel the sound on the air whatever that means and and you put your hand on your diaphragm well I'm going to prove to you that's not the case but aside from that all these ideas of feeling the sound they're all great if first you understand your instrument so when I teach singing and I teach at an academy here in Guelph and I taught privately for a few years I choose the practical approach this idea of understanding your instrument I'll never forget the saying my third-year anatomy professor used with me and that was know your machine understand how it works and it empowers you to be able to use it to the best of its ability and that's what I'm here to do today with you is to empower you to use your voices to be able to sing even if you think you can't all right so my idea is that if you can talk you can sing and there's three key components that are involved in both talking and singing and they're breathing the sound source how we make the sound which is the vocal folds in within the larynx and then the articulate errs this resonant chamber that's above the larynx all the way to the opening in the mouth and we can change these things to change the quality of the sound it doesn't change our ability to make the sound so we can all sing but I'm always I'm always met with this but I can't sing well but hopefully I can change your mind on this so the first thing is breathing we all know that the lungs are involved in breathing we do it every day right we all breathe hopefully and so there's two parts involved inspiration or inhalation and expiration or exhalation and what I'm just going to do is I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the key anatomical components involved in these processes so when we're talking about inspiration we're talking about the diaphragm okay it's not this muscle you can put your hand on like this it's this muscle that's shaped like a parachute and your lungs actually sit right on top of it with your heart there and underneath it is your stomach in your liver and in your abdominal cavity so think about it if we contract the diaphragm down it actually flattens and we create more space above the diaphragm and what's above it the lungs so we're actually creating more space to take an air this is a lot like the parachute game used to play as kids right where you throw the parachute up that's like the diaphragm relaxing okay that's what happens when we expire but when we inhale it's like when we all would pull it we all run out and we'd pull and try and like play tug-of-war with the parachute well that's like when the diaphragm is contracted all of a sudden there's all this space above the diaphragm and we can see our right so that's just kind of what I want you to think about when we're talking about inspiration but how do we really regulate it well the sort of the unsung hero of expiration is the abdomen and this is sort of met with a lot of skepticism as well because I was teaching a lecture at guelph-humber this summer and I just kind of wanted to get an idea of what's out there what literature is out there available to the general population about the respiratory apparatus all the components of breathing so where do I go I go to Wikipedia obviously and I type in respiratory apparatus and you know we get the diaphragm the lungs the intercostal muscles but nowhere about the abdomen so I want everyone to sit sit on the front of your seat and I want you to really contract your your abdomen just really contract it and now take a deep breath right not happening right so already that shows you how important the abdomen is in breathing now do the same thing but this time relax relax your abdomen you can take a way deeper breath right if you're focusing on just relaxing you should actually feel you see your abdomen just go out a little bit so you have this six-pack muscle this rectus abdominis muscle and you have these oblique muscles that sort of wrap around and this is a lot like the structure of a corset man I'm sorry there's not never been a really good male version of the core site or I suppose maybe there is but you know the idea is that it's sort of this thing that wraps around and if we think of tightening that corset slowly we think of increasing the pressure against the diaphragm and slowly as it's relaxing we decrease the space for the lungs and therefore we're expiring at a constant rate we're not just going right we can actually sustain for constant times so when I'm teaching young children how to sing I'm sure everyone here is blown up a balloon right sort of intuitively what we do is we take a deep breath in and then we contract everything and we just create the steady stream of air and that's what you do when you're trying to get sort of a younger child or even someone who isn't as experienced in singing to really make that connection between how important the abdomen is for regulating expiration now I have a demonstration to really prove to you because I feel like I'm looking at and I'm seeing a lot of people who aren't really convinced the abdomen is important in expiration so I'm going to call a volunteer up to the stage and I'm going to prove to you how important regulating the muscles of your abdomen are in breathing after my nap all right so I'm just going to get even move that way a little bit yeah you know just a little bit more just put this right there yeah all right so what I can do is when I inhale I get right now I'm contracting my six-pack muscles and I'm going to relax the sides the oblique muscles so that I can take a big breath in watch her you see your raise out thank you so you're now believer is that the abdomen is involved in breathing so let's go on let's talk about the sound source the larynx and the vocal folds contained at the top of the trachea and the throat and there's sort of a lot of mysticism about it because we don't feel like we have control over them but when I ask you a question and I inflect at the end of a sentence or I'm just really did see we're changing pitch of our sound or if I ask someone I'm like okay just say a note ah okay now say when a bit higher ah okay we just changed sound right we have this amazing ability this connection to our brain to change the pitch of our voices even though we can't see the muscles that are doing it okay but we can pull these these vocal folds apart we can stretch them we can relax them we do all sorts of things to them without really being able to see them this is the same all around the world the same to tone descent is heard calling for mothers mommy that idea is all around the world this is innately human this is something we do until we develop sort of this this pride complex that doesn't like our voices and we sort of shut away and we don't want to use that we talk in a monotone and but the idea is that you have this profound control over one of the most intricate parts of what makes us human finally the articulator is this resonance space this is everything above the larynx okay it's often referred to as the pharynx but it includes the roof of the mouth the tongue the teeth the lips and we can change all these we do it on a regular basis for instance the larynx when you took that deep breath in you probably can't see from here but when I took a deep breath in my larynx drops okay and guys this is really useful when you're shaving and you have that lowers straggly hair right over your your Adam's apple that laryngeal prominence it's called and if you just take a deep breath in you can get it no problem so if you can shave you can sing now also the tongue okay now I know a lot of people don't often think about it but just say some of these he'd hid had odd and think to yourself where's my tongue what shape is it in did you notice it changing and we all say different vowel sounds every day so we know that we have control over our tongue and what about our palate what about our the roof of our mouth well we all have gotten that annoying call from the telemarketers right or we've all yawned in class that you have control over how high your palate is or how low it is and it's the difference between creating more space for resonating or less right when we drop that that palate that roof of the mouth we're creating less space so it's like hearing ah versus oh right it's that difference just by raising the palate so I've sort of coined a term that I call the forward principle in size it's this idea of quality over quantity we can all sing okay but we can also all change the quality of the sound okay and so this is a Ford Focus vs. the Ford Model T the first affordable automobile and so what I want to do here is I want to look at go back and look at those three keys that we talked about breathing the power behind the voice it's like the engines in the car if we learn to develop this right we learn to develop this how we breathe then we can make our breathing more efficient and we can sing better but that doesn't change our bill liddie to sing it's just like the engines of the Ford model-t and the Ford Focus are very different okay that's not going to be argued but they can still perform their initial function their base function of going from point A to point B this sound source this this finite motor control right we have that control over our vocal folds changing them altering them and it's sort of like the brakes or the steering on a car right you're not going to see a Ford model-t whip around a corner at 60 kilometres an hour that's just not going to happen I don't even know can go 60 kilometers an hour but the idea is that they can still both cars the Ford Focus and the Ford Model T can still go from point A to point B the function for which they were designed for just like without really establishing that connection you can sing but once you establish that connection once you listen to enough music once you you sing enough you can be a better singer you can improve the quality and finally the shape right we talked about changing the shape with the tongue with the palate lowering or raising the larynx we can change all these things which change the shape of our instrument and that changes the quality of our sound it's like the shape of the vehicle aerodynamics all that stuff I don't know a lot about it but I know that the Ford Focus is more aerodynamic than the Ford Model T but they can still both go from point A to point B and we can still sing even if we don't have this finite control over the shape of our instrument so that's the Ford principle so now I want to ask you do you think maybe you could sing out I'm not going to make you saying if you raise your hand so just to kind of wrap up I want to just share in the best way I know possible sort of the closing point from all this so I'm just going to get the music to play or center awkwardly so I really do hope if you go you go home today and you're saying okay I breed every day right i-ight inflect at the end of a sentence right I do all these things and therefore I can say here's a little - I think you all might recognize slimy to the moon I'm gonna sing it - Skyy now hear me out you can too another word I know you wanna know we're not all Frankie Whitney you stand or modern-day but like a kid at the piano the keys are there so we can play if you can talk then here's the thing though you may down it trust me you can see thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 106,882

Rating: 4.8415213 out of 5

Keywords: tedxguelphu, ted x, tedx, ted, tedx talks, tedx talk, guelph, ted talk, jordan scholl, anyone can sing, guelphu, ted talks

Id: UIkisnEMa_0

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2012