Woods Hutchinson

The Voice, a Waste Product. It is one of the most curious things in this body of ours that what we regard as its most wonderful power and gift, the voice, is, in one sense, a waste product. So ingenious is nature that she has actually made that marvelous musical instrument—the human voice—with its range, its flexibility, and its powers of expression, out of spent breath, or used-up air, which has done its work in the lungs and is being driven off to get rid of it. It is like using the waste from a kitchen sink to turn a mill.

The organs that make the human voice were never built for that purpose in the first place. Unlike the eye and the ear, nature built no special organ for the voice alone, but simply utilized the windpipe and lung-bellows, the swallowing parts of the food passage (tongue, lips, and palate) and the nose, for that purpose, long after they had taken their own particular shapes for their own special ends.

The important point about this is that a good voice requires not merely a large and well-developed "music box" in the windpipe, but good lungs, a well-shaped healthy throat, properly arched jaws,—which mean good, sound teeth,—clear and healthy nasal passages, and a flexible elastic tongue. Of course, the blood and the nerves supplying all these structures must be in good condition, as well. So practically, a good voice requires that the whole body should be healthy; and whatever we do to improve the condition of our nose, our teeth, our throat, our lungs, our digestion, and our circulation will help to improve the possibilities of our voice. There are, of course, many exceptions; but you will generally find that great singers have not only splendid lungs and large vocal cords, but good hearts, vigorous constitutions, and bodies above the average in both stature and strength.

How the Voice is Produced. The chief parts of the breathing machine that nature has made over for talking purposes are the windpipe, or air tube, and the muscles in its walls. In the neck, about three inches above the collar bone, four or five of the rings of cartilage, or gristle,—which, you remember, give stiffening to the windpipe,—have grown together and enlarged to form a voice box, or larynx.

Looked at from above: position A, in quiet inspiration; B, in singing a low tone; C, in singing a high tone.

The upper edge of this voice box forms the projection in the front of the throat known by the rather absurd name of the "Adam's apple." This grows larger in proportion to the heaviness of the sounds to be made, and hence is larger in men than in women and boys. When the boy's voice box begins to grow to the man's in shape and size, his voice is likely to "break"; for it is changing from the high, clear boy's voice to the heavy, deep voice of the man.

Inside of this voice box, one of the rings of muscle that run around the windpipe has stretched into a pair of straight, elastic bands, or strings, one on each side of the air pipe, known as the vocal cords, or voice bands. These are so arranged that they can be stretched and relaxed by little muscles; and, when thrown into vibration by the air rushing through the voice box, they produce the sounds that we call talking or singing. The more tightly they are stretched, the higher and shriller are the tones they produce; and the more they are slackened, or relaxed, the deeper and more rumbling are the tones.

This is why, when you try to sing a high note, you can feel something tightening and straining in your throat, until finally you can stretch it no tighter, and your voice "breaks," as you say, into a scream or cry.

All musical instruments that have strings, are played, or produce their sounds, upon this same principle. The thinner and shorter the string, or the more tightly it is stretched, the higher the note; the heavier and longer the string, the lower the note. But no musical instrument ever yet invented can equal the human voice in the music of its tones, in its range, in the different variety and quality of tones it can produce, and in its wonderful power of expression. The human voice is a combination of reed organ, pipe organ, trumpet, and violin; and can produce in its tiny music box—only about two inches long by one inch wide—all the tones and qualities of tones that can be produced on all these instruments, except that it cannot go quite so high or so low.

All the musical instruments in the world, from the penny whistle to the grand piano, are but poor imitations of the human music box. The bellows, of course, of the human pipe organ are the lungs; while the tongue furnishes the stops; and the throat, mouth, and nose, the resonance, or sounding, chambers.

Just as a violin, or guitar, has two main parts,—a string, which vibrates and makes the sound; and a box, or hollow body, which catches that sound and enlarges it and gives it sweetness and vibration and quality,—so the human voice has two similar parts—the vocal bands, which make the sound; and a sound box, or rather series of three resonance boxes,—the throat, the mouth, and the nasal passages,—which enlarge and soften it and improve its quality.

You would naturally think that the strings, or cords, were the most important part both of the voice and of a musical instrument; and in one sense they are, as it could make no noise at all without them. But in another sense, far more important are the sounding boxes, or resonance chambers. The whole quality and value, for instance, of a Stradivarius[32] violin, which will make it readily bring ten thousand dollars in the open market, are due to the skill with which the body, or sound box, was made; the quality of the wood used; and, odd as it may seem, even the varnish used on it—the strings are the same as on any five-dollar fiddle. This is almost equally true of the human voice. While its size, or volume, is determined by the voice box and vocal bands, and its power largely by the lungs and chest, its musical quality, its color, and its expression are given almost entirely by the throat, mouth (including the lips), and nose. The proper management of these parts is two-thirds of voice training, and all these are largely under our control.

How a Good Voice may be Developed. If the nasal passages, for instance, are blocked by a bad cold or a catarrh or adenoids, then nearly half the body of your violin is blocked up and deadened; half your resonance chamber is destroyed, and the voice sounds flat and dead and nasal. If, on the other hand, your throat be swollen, or blocked, as by enlarged tonsils or chronic sore throat, then this part of the resonance chamber is muffled and spoiled, and your voice will be either entirely gone or hoarse; though perhaps by driving it very hard you may be able to make a clear tone.

If you have an attack of inflammation or cold further down, and the vocal bands swell, or the mucous membrane lining the voice box becomes inflamed and thickened, then the voice is lost entirely, just as the tone of a violin would be if a wet cloth were thrown across the strings. But disturbances in the voice box, or larynx, cause only a very small percentage of husky, poor, or unmusical voices.

A far commoner cause, indeed probably the commonest single cause of a poor, squeaky, or drawling, unmusical voice is careless and improper management of the mouth and lips. In the first place, you can easily show that such marked differences in sound as those of the different vowels are all produced by the mouth and lips. If you will prepare to say the vowels—a, e, i, o, u—aloud, and begin with a, and then hold your mouth and lips firmly in the same position, you will find that all the other vowels also come out as a. If, on the other hand, you begin with your mouth and lips in the rounded and somewhat thrust-out position necessary to say o, and try to repeat the rest of the vowels, you will find that you cannot say them at all, but only different forms of o. When you have convinced yourself of this, repeat the vowels loudly and clearly without stopping to think about the position of the mouth, and notice how your lips, the tip and base of your tongue, and your soft palate and throat all change their positions for each successive vowel.

If you will try to sing the scale, beginning with a comfortable note about the middle of your voice range, and letting your mouth take the shape for that note unconsciously, you will find that, as you sing up the scale, you change the shape of your mouth, lips, and tongue at every note, thrusting the lips and mouth further forward as if to whistle, narrowing the opening and closing up the back of your throat for the high notes.

On the other hand, as you sing down, you tend to open the mouth and lips more widely, to drop the bottom of your mouth—that is, the base of your tongue—toward your throat, and your chin down toward your chest. Again you will find, just as in the case of the different vowels, that you can sing any tone clearly and musically after putting the mouth in precisely the shape that best fits that tone; and learning how to do this is a most important part of vocal training.

What we call words are simply breath sounds and voice-box sounds chopped into convenient lengths by the movements of the tongue and lips and throat. So when we come to the question of clear and pleasant speaking, or, as we term it, articulation, the lips and tongue have almost everything to do with making the difference between a clear, musical, and refined enunciation, which is so easy to understand that it is a pleasure to listen to it, and a slurred, drawling, squeaky, nasal kind of speech, which is as hard to understand as it is unpleasant to listen to.

Few of us can ever hope to develop a really great singing voice; but anyone who will take the pains can acquire a clear, distinct, and pleasing speaking voice; and perhaps half of us can learn to sing fairly well. But to do this, we must first have good, healthy, well-developed lungs and elastic chest walls, which can come only from plenty of vigorous exercise in the open air, combined with good food and well-ventilated rooms. We must have a healthy stomach, which will not fill up with gas and keep our diaphragms from going down and enlarging our chests properly; we must have clear nasal passages, good teeth, well-shaped mouths and flexible lips, which we are willing to use vigorously in articulating, or cutting up our voice sounds; and we must have good hearing and a well-trained ear. In short, the best way to get a clear, strong, pleasant voice is to have a vigorous, well-grown, healthy body.