Posts Placeholder

How many times have I encountered a student who has been told something that isn’t harmful, and isn’t even really wrong, it’s just useless? “Leave your voice alone and it will take care of itself” (except when you do and it doesn’t). “You are grabbing onto your high notes. Don’t do that.” (OK, how do I do something else instead?) “You are not releasing the tone to turn over on the way up.” (I would love to do that. What does it mean and how does it work?) You are not using the breath correctly. If you had better support your sound would release and go into your head. (Really? I am already taking a big breath into my “diaphragm” and tightening my belly a lot for those high notes. It’s not working. Is there a better way to breathe than inhaling and exhaling?)

Inevitably, the student is being told……You are (fill in this blank with something that’s wrong).

When the throat gets tight on the way up and the student is clearly trying to sing as freely as possible and follow the instructions of the teacher, and the throat doesn’t let go, THE STUDENT IS NOT TO BLAME. THE STUDENT IS DOING THE BEST HE CAN. It is the teacher’s job to work the throat until it lets go spontaneously. It is the teacher’s job. 

Throats do all kinds of things on their own that we don’t want them to do and when there are ingrained habits in a singer it can be very hard to retrain the muscle responses to make them let go and move in a new way, but that’s too bad, because it is still the teacher’s job to deal with that, over and over until it changes. The student is not the person who is supposed to do the “figuring it out”, that’s the job of the teacher. The reasons people go to teachers is to fix problems, break bad habits, learn new good habits and feel free while singing. They can usually figure out on their own that there is something wrong. It is frequently the reason they seek training in the first place.

Years ago when I saw two female opera singers present a talk about women composers on Broadway. Their demonstrations of belt, pop, and rock songs, sung in their warbly opera voices, presented all the songs in the same way….. as if they were all written by Schubert. I commented to them at the time that the music wasn’t sung that way professionally. One of the women responded by saying to me that I was stupid and that, of course, the students knew how to sing the songs. I did not say so at the time, although I probably should have, that in that situation the teachers should have been paying the students, since they were educating the ears of the teachers. This mentality, that the students will figure it out, is one of the seriously awful things in the profession, as it not only tolerates genuine ignorance of what teaching singing is, it fosters the idea that this is a good thing, expecting the students to “figure it out”. The students know how to make the sounds………..yes, well, then why are they studying with you at all?

Be very careful about giving your students generic advice.

Just sing forward all the time and you will be fine.

Don’t worry about registers, they really don’t matter.

Be sure to sing as though you never had a jaw. Leave the jaw alone.

On and on. When the student does something like move the jaw in order to get a better sound or make a consonant, the student gets blamed. “There you go again, hanging on to your jaw. You have to stop that!” (Since it is part of speech to move the jaw and part of vocal acoustics to change the jaw opening to move the formant/resonance patterns, you are in big trouble if you don’t have a jaw.)

Generic teaching is kinda sorta teaching and it makes for kinda sorta singing in a kinda sorta vocal technician.

Do us all a favor, don’t go there!

There are a lot of “methods” out there. There are lots of people who teach singing using a method. (I have one).

If the method asks the vocalist to do something that throats do not do, if it teaches a vocalist to attempt to make a sound by doing something that we don’t need to do to produce it, if it says that any kind of maneuver is OK so long as you can manage it, my advice is to go somewhere else.

Many people who teach singing don’t know a thing about vocal function. Some people still (amazingly) do not know that we have a larynx and two vocal folds that vibrate to produce sound. There is all manner of confusion about what happens when we do make sound, particularly sung sound, and all kinds of mis-labeling of same.

It is well established that proprioceptively speaking what we feel and what is actually happening don’t have to agree. Said differently, it means that what we feel individually, subjectively, as we make sound, may have nothing whatsoever to do with what the body is actually doing. If we make up a theory about what is happening and decide that it’s “REAL” because we feel it (common behavior), and then we teach others to “have the same experience” (even though what we are describing is based on wrong assumptions), we can assume that we are “teaching” well. For well over one hundred years, that is exactly where the professional has generally been with few exceptions.

Even very good singers with excellent track records, who know exactly what is going on in their throats and bodies when they are singing, do not necessarily understand that their subjective experiences are not universal, and therefore not directly transferable to anyone else who sings or wishes to sing. Further, people who teach others to “retract the false folds”, “constrict the aryepiglottic sphincter” and “put the larynx down and keep it there” are actually tying their students’ throats in knots, causing them to disconnect from free emotional expression which is only possible in a throat that is vital, alive and moveable.

If you understand what the body can do directly, what it does indirectly (in response to something you are thinking) and what the interface between those two things is, then you can work to effect a change, through exercises, over time, that produces different, authentic, consistent vocal behavior. If you do not understand these things, you will be less than effective, and possibly even harmful. If you don’t know how the vocal mechanism responds to pitch, vowel and volume (and to a certain extent also, to changes in vocal quality) you can waste a lot of time trying to sound the way you want (or the way your teacher wants).

Need help with that? Come to Shenandoah in July. (www.ccminstitute.com)

What is natural singing? Think you know? Ask any two singing teachers and you will absolutely get two different answers. Ask 100 singing teachers and you will get 100 answers. Ask 1000, the same.

Natural singing depends on what you consider to be natural vocal behavior. If you want to measure what is natural, do you look at normal healthy speakers who do not sing? Healthy singers of any style, age and level of experience? Do you look at professionals or those without training? Do you look at the difference between normal and average? Do you decide what a high level professional normal is and use that as a baseline?

Believe me, there would be a thousand arguments on these topics and in the end, no one would be any better off after all the haranguing stopped. So, for the sake of expressing something concrete and perhaps meaningful, let me try here to describe “natural singing”.

Natural singing means that the vowel sounds don’t distort. They sound true to themselves across a person’s range. It means that the mouth and jaw don’t do great huge extended movements all the time, but perhaps they move more on high notes, loud sounds and during exaggerated emotional expression. It implies that there is an easiness to pronunciation and pitch accuracy without fuss. It implies that breathing is solid, consistent and not obvious. It assumes that the sound is clear, not nasal, not noisy, not breathy. It assumes that the sound of the voice is recognizable and unique. It generates resonance (or specific acoustic enhancement) but without seeking to do so in an exaggerated manner. It is smooth and flowing but can also be detached and choppy, as needed. It has vibrato, not too much or too little, except when vibrato is not wanted.  Kids sound like kids, young adults sound like young adults, older adults sound younger than their actual years.

If you want a good example of opera singing that is about as natural as you could ask for it to be, go on YouTube and look for Rosa Ponselle singing Carmen. You won’t have to look hard to find many different mezzo’s singing Carmen with all sorts of over-darkened, weird sounds that have little to do with how we actually communicate. That’s where we have gone in recent years.

The further away we travel from clean simple sound-making, no matter what style we are singing, the further away we get from honest, direct emotional truth and clear communication. If you are someone who really doesn’t care about naturalness, and there are some who think that singing SHOULD be manufactured, you won’t understand any of these arguments.

Everyone who studies with me for any length of time is going to learn to sing as naturally as possible, following the above guidelines. They will always sound like themselves while they increase their freedom, strength, expressiveness and stamina. They will always be the people who decide what kind of sound they want to make and will learn to discern the difference between a distortion for artistic sake and a distortion caused by poor technique. They will expand in every vocal direction without having to sacrifice anything, but they will also understand that all of this takes work and time to learn and dedication to maintain.

Natural singing. Natural expression. Natural communication. Even in a very heightened communication in a big space with a large audience, you don’t have to throw these things away.

Many times in a lesson I ask a singer to describe something. In fact, generally, I ask a lot of questions in lessons. I want to know what the singer knows, what they understand, how they use what they have taken from singing and from lessons with other people.

Sometimes people come in an tell me they have taken lessons for 5, 10 or even 15 years. When they sing, they look and sound like they have never set foot in a voice studio. Some of them sing very poorly. They are all caught up with a certain kind of resonance, or a special way to “place the sound” or some idea they have about how to “vibrate the tone in the masque” or stay on pitch. I want to know what the singer is focused on while trying to create those things while singing.

Other people can come in and say, “I have never studied singing”, but can do a whole lot of things and be very comfortable. They have both freedom and control and they sound very good. They don’t fuss over making sound, but they can make it and comfortably so. Those people are highly skilled vocal technicians, even though they have never studied singing at all.

The folks who don’t do too well sometimes don’t really know what lessons are supposed to give you. They have not been taught what a trained voice is supposed to do or to be, and they don’t have reasons for why they do any exercise. They just do them because someone told them to. If you don’t understand what a vocal exercise is supposed to do for your voice (your sound, your throat, your artistry), and you do it anyway, it can still do you some good, even if you don’t know why, as long as you do it correctly. But when it comes to using it in a song, you may have little success.

The process of taking lessons is supposed to teach your voice to do things that it would never do it on its own. Those things have to be done correctly and for long enough for them to become automatic responses that you don’t have to think about. The exercises should add in things that are “missing” to balance vocal function, they should correct vocal flaws, they should enhance things like range, endurance, power, flexibility, accuracy and, while doing so, bring out the uniqueness of your voice, making it instantly recognizable. It is supposed to get underneath the expression you want to put into the sound so that your communication is given to the audience in a straightforward and powerful manner.

As with any situation in which you are learning new skills, you need to be able to ask questions. Why is always a good thing. Why am I doing this exercises and not that one? Why is this exercise so difficult? Why is this correct, what’s good about it? What is also good. What is the reason for this exercise? What is happening when I do this? Is that going to help me sing the way I want?

After you have studied with a good teacher regularly for about two years you should feel like you have much more control over your singing and much greater ease and satisfaction. You should begin to understand what skilled singers have in their toolbox in order to meet the needs of the music fully and in order to grow as artists. You will begin to glimpse what it means to sing in a healthy way, no matter what kind of music you sing, and you will start to know what deep satisfaction in singing is, even if it isn’t a lasting experience at first.

Mindless singing isn’t for professionals or professional amateurs. Knowing what you want your voice to do and then getting it to do that is a learned skill for most people. If you take lessons and don’t get what you need in a reasonably short period of time, stop. Go someplace else.

 

The further you delve into something the more you understand it broadly and in detail. It’s as if everything has a counterpart to the universe which runs (as far as we now know) from sub-atomic particles to multi-verses of billions of galaxies. It is truly so that the very tiny and the very vast can be reflections of each other.

When you sing with blissful ignorance, thinking of nothing at all except the song, there is a kind of sweet innocence to it that is, in itself, complete and perfect. It asks nothing and needs nothing more than to be what it is. When you listen to a great vocalist who has developed artistry over decades of study and work, and you hear in that singing enormous detail, uniqueness and expression, then you must acknowledge that this, too, is complete and perfect, but in an entirely different manner.

It is easy enough to pit one thing against another. Humanity does that across the board every day. It takes some vision to see opposites as being connected on a continuum, running from one scale to another. Ultra-violet isn’t in opposition to infra-red, it’s just on the other end of the spectrum. Opera isn’t in opposition to rock and roll, commercial music isn’t in opposition to art song, folk music isn’t in opposition to jazz. Each kind of singing has its own dignity, its own parameters, it defining world.

The philosophical discussions about what is good and what isn’t can be useful if they are  used to illuminate rather than denigrate. Maybe I like Madame High Notes more than Madame Loud Voice, but I can still appreciate that both of them are fine artists with something to say. Maybe I would rather listen to Mr. Foggy Throat more than Mr. Squeezy Sound, but I can understand that they are both interesting vocalists with their own unique style.

If we were capable of this kind of discernment, it would be easier to discuss function without blowing a gasket. We can actually agree that something is functional or it isn’t, since we (should) understand how human beings make sound. If, however, we confuse what the voice is doing with what it is, and what the artist is expressing with what the voice is expressing, as if all of it was one big gloppy thing, we are bound not only to be confused in our philosophical discussions, we are also bound to circular arguments that go nowhere useful.

It is absolutely necessary to separate out the ingredients of singing into objective elements, as we would with items in a recipe. A cake isn’t a bunch of ingredients when we eat it, but if we didn’t have the ingredients in good proportion before we starting making the cake, it might never turn out to be edible, let alone delicious. A fully developed vocal artist is a whole bunch of things that ultimately combine to make something yummy. Sometimes those things are deliberately cultivated as skills and choices and sometimes they are blessedly “just there” because they are.

Wisdom is knowledge correctly applied. Knowing something can be useful or not, depending. Making use of that knowledge in a way that makes it better, more available, more abundant, more itself, is always useful.

Let us all strive to be wise in what we discuss and how we discuss it so that everyone can share in the communication. I can still like what I like that’s different than what you like, but I can appreciate that your liking it is just fine.

The other side of multi-disciplinary interchange is that speech language pathologists (who don’t sing), medical doctors, and voice researchers need to be willing to learn from teachers of singing. Many in the community I have been in for nearly four decades do, but not all, and, sadly, many who are not in that community at all, could care less. That’s not a good thing in any way.

If you are an otolaryngologist and you have taken some classical singing lessons, you may think that you have a good grasp of how singing training works, but you could be very wrong. If you do not understand the things that impact vocal production that have nothing whatsoever to do with “classical” singing, you could be operating under an assumption that does not serve you, serving the needs of your patients’ voices, well. It is endlessly frustrating to me that my encounters with ENTs and SLPs is such that they are often no better off than their singing teacher colleagues, in that they think that all vocal training labeled with the mystical and all powerful word “classical” is good, is enough and is useful. That would be equivalent to saying that all ENTS are the same, that the ones who have specialized in working with professional voices are the same as the ones who have not, and that the techniques all ENTs use should be uniformly the same, regardless of the diagnosis of the voice disorder. It would also be like saying that if you correct speech, all singing will automatically be better, no matter how the singing happens, and that would just be absurd.

How to get through to the doctors and speech pathologists who think they know! Those of us in the profession who deal with the ones that are knowledgeable (and, thankfully, there are many excellent experts in the various disciplines who are), don’t have easy answers. We can encourage them to read, to take singing lessons, to attend conferences, to talk to their peers, but that doesn’t mean that they take that advice. At the voice science conferences, there is little “crossover” attendance. That means that the MDs arrive for the medical sections, the researchers arrive for the hard science research sections, the SLPs arrive for their presentations and the singing teachers for the pedagogy. Few of each discipline goes to the other disciplines’ presentations and it is only by doing so that there is REAL multi-disciplinary exchange.

If I can sit in the medical portions, the science/research portions, and the SLP portions and make myself try to understand what is presented, and gain a great deal by doing so, why can’t other people spend the time with the singing teachers, learning from them? I have no answer. I do know, however, that the number of people attending any singing conference who are otolaryngologists, speech language pathologists (who don’t sing), or voice science researchers, is very, very small. If you take a poll by asking people to raise their hands, sometimes there is literally one person who isn’t a singing-based attendee in a room of about 250 people.

If you are an ENT, a SLP, or a voice researcher, and this rings at all true for you, I know of a great course at Shenandoah University that happens every summer…………

We all know that change is very difficult. Most people don’t like it and getting a group of people to agree to make changes can be very challenging. Nevertheless, once in a while that does happen. A group, sometimes a large group, decides to stop the old and begin the new. It can be a painful thing to make changes, but it can also be the best thing, and it takes a lot of vision and courage to be able to know that and act upon it.

That the profession of teaching singing is in the midst of a sea change is a fact. Colleges are scrambling to introduce music theater degrees and include rock and pop styles in their programs. Educators are left to figure out for themselves whether or not they can teach rock and roll styles to their students with only Mozart and Strauss as life experience or training. Some succeed and some don’t. The students who don’t get to develop the vocal skills they needed while in college do not get to go back and complain after the fact that they didn’t learn what was necessary to get a job out in the world. They would be regarded as “spoiled sports” coming in “after the fact”. Too bad. If more of them complained they were not equiped to get work after spending thousands of dollars, even hundreds of thousands of dollars on their vocal education, maybe things at universities would change more rapidly.

In order to recognize the need for change, we have take responsibility for what is, as it is. We have to be willing to look at what works and what does not and decide to do something about what isn’t working. This does not involve blame, it involves evaluation. If you cannot  calmly evaluate what’s what, you cannot address it appropriately. As a profession we are trying to figure this conundrum out right now.

If we admit what is clearly so, that classical singing and CCM singing do not sound the same, we can then admit that it is highly unlikely that training for both styles should be the same. If we recognize that Dianna Damrau would not be a good Mimi in Rent even though she just sang a well respected Violetta in Traviata, then we would also be in a position to recognize that she can’t go back and forth because classical training and classical singing do not prepare you to do other styles just because. If that were true, all good opera singers would automatically be able to sing rock music and sound like rock singers and we all know they can’t do that. Still, the obvious evidence that the sounds made in CCM are different than those made in classical music have been ignored by some pretty big opera singers who have taken it upon themselves to make “rock” albums, “jazz” albums, and even to attempt music theater with mixed results. If you want to record “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific and call yourself a “crossover” singer because that song is from a Broadway musical, I guess you can, but you would be using the SAME VOCAL PRODUCTION in both genres so by my reckoning, you are just singing two different kinds of music in the same way. NOT crossover, from a functional place, in my opinion.

Change takes place slowly if it is in an area where things have been the same for a long  time. When things suddenly “flip”, though, it becomes necessary for people to get on board with the new quickly  because the old is no longer seen as being traditional but rather stodgy or limited. We are close to that tipping point. It won’t be very much longer until the tide finally turns. The young people seem to understand this better than those who have been around a while.

Don’t let change catch you by surprise, unprepared. Don’t let yourself be lulled into a sense of security about what can “never happen”. Take bold steps, do what seems scary, and learn some new things about singing and teaching singing. The times they are a changin’ and you can be part of that change now. If you aren’t, it could be that it will pass you by. Change really can be very good.

For a very long time I stayed away from talking about classical singing using my method, Somatic Voicework™, because I had had so much trouble in that community over the years. I decided it was easier if I just stuck to talking about CCM styles and stayed away from all things classical. It’s time now to own up and tell the truth.

Somatic Voicework™ is just as useful for classical singing as it is for any style. Since I stopped taking technique lesson at 29 and have managed to keep my own classical singing going since then, the thing that kept it going was Somatic Voicework™. I have spoken to numerous classical teachers of singing who have informed me that Somatic Voicework™ has helped their classical singing and teaching immensely. It is based on function and as long as you understand the difference in function between classical music and other kinds of styles you can use it very effectively to work either way.

If you don’t understand the difference between function and style, and many people do not, then you would not be able to tell the difference in how to use the exercises and make them work either way. You will be confused on both sides of the equation. You can’t blame that on Somatic Voicework™.

Good classical singing has specific parameters functionally and clear boundaries musically. It is up to each individual to figure out what they are, through training and life experience and to do something with them such that you meld skill with artistry.

If you are someone who needs a way to anchor your thoughts about voice into a codified, organized approach that does not invalidate traditional classical vocal pedagogy in any way, you would be interested in Somatic Voicework™. If you want to hear good classical singers using these tools to sing in other styles as well, come to Shenandoah in July and join us for our 11th year of Somatic Voicework™ training. You will meet people from all over the country and several foreign countries who will be there to have fun, learn new things, and share in an atmosphere that is open, friendly, and supportive. Go to www.ccminstitute.com for further information.

I recently attended yet another “operatic” master class lead by a noted Metropolitan opera mezzo. At one point she told a young soprano “Don’t act on the high notes, just focus on singing them, and then go back to acting after they are over”. Well, I guess it works for her.

She said some other pithy things like start your support before you begin the note. (huh?) Maybe contract your abdominal muscles before you make sound? Who knows? She was big, as are so many others, on “singing as if you have no jaw”, a comment I detest. First of all, we can’t possible imagine that. Second, the poor people born without jaw bones (there are some) have to have serious surgery, or surgeries, as it is nearly impossible to function without one and third, if you had no jaw you could not articulate or even speak intelligibly. Really, a stupid thing to tell a young singer.

Then she said things like “sing freely” but “don’t move anything”. (Again, huh?) She suggested that the vocalists had to release from the roof of the mouth (the hard palate), and, since this a boney structure, you simply cannot do that. Never mind, she wanted that from several people.

This is what I wrote about a while back about “losing common sense” when it comes to singing. What the instructor has learned to do, she has labeled, probably because she got the labels from her teachers. What she thinks she feels and what she is actually doing may have little to do with each other. Then, she teaches that. OK, right. Master teacher. Master.

I also observed several other less formal master classes and in at least one the master teacher had very little to say to the lovely young soprano other than general platitudes and asking for a lot of repetition of the high phrases. I remember that as a teaching tool……having me sing the high phrases over and over doing a little crescendo here and a little less consonant there. Never taught me a thing, since I could already sing high notes easily and had quite some variability up there, even at 18. I remember singing in a master class with a very famous teacher (big voice) who told me that the soft high notes I was singing were very difficult. She did not ASK me if they were difficult, she told me they were. Since they were not and had never been hard to do in any way, I thought she was giving me very odd instruction. Was there something about what I was doing that was hard but I couldn’t tell that it was hard??????? Perhaps I had not yet learned how to make them hard. I needed more skill!! Crazy making. I actually spent a few minutes thinking maybe she was right. Then I woke up. You would know this woman’s name if I printed it here.

There’s nothing to do about these situations except sit there and be polite but it is galling to think that the young people are not being given real information based on how they sound and how they look or even how they are communicating in such displays. The teachers do mean well, but good intentions are not good teaching.

I have seen some pretty amazing master classes in my day. Scotto, Arroyo, von Stade, Hakegard, Horne, but you could make a long list of the ones I have witnessed that were either useless (Wustman, Curtin) or actually frightening (Schwartzkopf, Kraus). We don’t have too many master classes in other styles, so I can’t comment about them, but it’s likely that they are no better, because it reflects the state of the art of the profession as it is.

As for me, I intend to “act” on the low notes, the high notes, the middle notes and the breaths and the silences. Save me, please, from all things “master” that are not.

It used to be that singing was easy to recognize. Not so much anymore. It used to be that we knew when someone was singing because there were recognizable cues. Not so much anymore. The lines continue to blur.

Why?

I don’t have an answer. All I can say is that it many factors have converged to make the various components in CCM singing looser, freer and less “formalized”.

High rock belters are definitely shrieking, but that’s because rock is often an extreme form now and the capacity to sing this way has evolved along with the style to become, finally, expected. Whether it’s Christina Aquilera or Steven Tyler screaming out some off-the-Richter Scale high note or some other power belter plowing through a gospel song, the sounds no longer shock as they did when we first heard them. Our ears have become used to such shrieking, for better or worse.

This is no different than any of the other extremes our society has come to accept as we drift further away from convention of all kinds and more towards chaos. The backlash from this drift is to become fearful, try to hold on to what is known, go back to what was before, and decide that the old way was better. You can see that in the ideas of the “right wing” conservatives and you can see it in governments. It is stagnant thinking and it is bound to fail.

On the other hand, order isn’t a bad thing and some kinds of structure are necessary in order for us to function in a healthy manner, both in our own lives and in the world at large. Singing only gorgeous, beautiful tones that are always just pleasant and appealing might be nice but it can also be boring and completely inappropriate to some CCM styles.

I tend to think we need all of it, but a measurement has to be there as well and that measurement is vocal health. You can shriek away as long as it doesn’t injure your vocal folds. You can make noise, sound scruffy or breathy, as long as it doesn’t cost you in terms of your ability to continue to sing well. You can avoid sustained tones, vibrato, clear undistorted vowels and have next to no special ideas about breathing and as long as you can still get the job done on a regular basis, you certainly can continue. On the other hand, if you want to invest in your own vocal well being and you have decided to sing for a living (or try to anyway), then you must, whether you like it or not, find a way to make sounds that suit your artistic vision that do not also hurt your voice while you sing. If you can shriek for hours and days on end and have an OK voice after you do, then the choice is yours for the having. If, however, you are like most people and can’t quite get away with such vocal behavior, you must discover what your vocal folds will do and what they won’t and work within that structure.

There are those who think that certain people have voices that are only good in a specific style….sort of a genetic disposition to gospel or rock or country. I don’t believe that at all. There are those who think that any kind of shriek, scream, yell, shout or exclamation is automatically harmful. I don’t believe that either. BUT, I do think that if you constantly shriek you run a high risk of vocal damage, and if you continue to ignore the toll of singing full out, you make that risk even greater.

I never had any desire to sing rock music nor to be a shrieker. I never had any interest in being a gospel belter, but I know many people who did have those desires and some of them were able to see those desires come to pass. I am more personally inclined to like “pretty” singing more than shrieking, but all of these things are just my individual preferences, not “the way it should be”.

If you are going to sing something “shrieky” and you intend to do so repeatedly and for a long period of time, you have to condition your vocal folds to maintain those sounds without injury. If you might also sing something that is warmer and more intimate, you might find that getting that to happen requires you to let go of the shrieking, at least temporarily, and lighten into head. The only way to know is through trial and error. Where does the speaking end and the singing begin? Where does the normal singing end and the exaggerated singing begin? When are you singing and when are you shrieking. Only you can decide.