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Americans can’t sing because . . .

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We don’t know how to control our “vocal muscles.”
 
In a series of pitch-matching experiments, nonmusicians were pretty good at adjusting an instrument to match a specific note, suggesting that they could hear it just fine. They had much more trouble, however, imitating the same note with their own voice. The authors suspect that poor motor control of vocal muscles is partly to blame—findings that reinforce the idea that almost anyone can learn to sing.
The good news from the scientists?  Almost anyone can learn to sing.
 
Now please don’t flame me about that line “poor motor control of vocal muscles.”  Here is what the abstract of the study says:
The pattern of results across experiments demonstrates multiple possible causes of poor singing, and attributes most of the problem to poor motor control and timbral–translation errors, rather than a purely perceptual deficit, as other studies have suggested.
It looks like our profession will live or die based on if we can effectively communicate the joy of singing, doesn’t it?
 

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  1. My youngest daughter is an excellent case study in this. She has a beautiful voice and knows how to use it at 12 years old. Actually, she has two different voices, her “proper” voice and her “pop” voice. Her proper voice she uses when she sings with the Peabody Childrens’ Chorus. It is a pure tone (albeit a bit “breathy” but she is working on that); a quintessential childrens’ choir voice. When she switches into her pop voice, such as when she is singing along with the radio to songs that make my head hurt, it becomes pure nasal. Everything is unsupported and raw, the exact opposite of how she was singing just two minutes earlier when the radio wasn’t on. Her facility to switch back and forth is remarkable. She’s not hurting herself with her pop voice, it is just a completely different sound. Kids sing what they hear, and too often they hear the likes of Rhihanna, Kesha (I refuse to use that silly dollar sign in her name), Katy Perry, and a multitude of other “perfomers” that couldn’t get through a single verse without being autotuned to the extreme. 

  2. We are not a singing culture at this point. When I was a kid, we sang every day in elementary school as the classroom teacher plucked out a few songs; but in recent days my own children only sang in Music Class once a week with the music specialist.  When I was a kid we all sang, a cappella or with someone’s guitar, at family gatherings after supper, but, for whatever reason, we have not done that while my kids have grown up.
     
    I’d been thinking about this topic a lot, because on Sunday I heard a pastor say in a sermon (about the decline of the mainstream Protestant churches in the US) that “young people don’t like to sing with the organ.” I believe this statement points not to the organ, per say, but indicates younger people not being able to find their voices, match pitch, etc after a diet of listening exclusively to contemporary music on the radio.  I’m not interesting in bashing new songs! I really like some of the new music I hear, but as we here all know, the physical act of singing cannot be replaced by electronics.
     
    A young father joined my church choir this past year. He loves the cameraderie, the community of being in the choir, and the rewards of being part of something bigger than himself. However, he had not sung since elementary school, so it has taken him a lot of work to be able to match pitch and contribute vocally. His presence has given me hope for the future of my choir, all choirs, and has also helped me understand the challenges.
     
     

  3. A fundamental reason here in the USA, and one much to be lamented, is the pervasive coarseness of pop culture, which poisons 
    young people, especially males, with the notion that singing well is sissy-business. In European and Scandinavian cultures
    this is far less the situation. One has but to attend a well-filled church in southern Germany for a Sunday morning mass to
    understand this. And in the more northern areas, where church attendance is now so low, there are nevertheless plenty
    of symptoms that younger people are not afraid to sing, no sissy stuff here.  As one who embraces most liberal social attitudes,
    I’m not unaware of the aural poison of most pop music  these days. What to do? Educate continually, not forgetting to point out
    that most pop music is delivered at a level which is physically damaging to one’s hearing, to say nothing of the crappy content.
     
    It’s not ALL bad, take the remarkable musicianship of Alan Jackson, for instance. But it’s mostly ALL BAD. 

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