How are humans able to nail it the first time without rehearsing the sounds we make? By the way, I’m talking about daily life, but of course the question is valid for professional singing as well.
How are humans able to nail it the first time without rehearsing the sounds we make? By the way, I’m talking about daily life, but of course the question is valid for professional singing as well.
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We hear the note in our heads a fraction of a second before we sing it. At least, I do.
I’ll get to singing in a moment, but we are in fact “practicing” it, because most people talk every single day, in some cases for a combined hour or possibly even several hours! The components that make up how you talk – everything from your diaphragm to your mouth and tongue and everything in between, and even including your ears for instant feedback – have “muscle memory” to be able to create different sounds that you want at different times. It’s not a 100% perfect system, but it’s effective a vast majority of the time.
Singing is much the same way – our brain many times “hears” the pitch you want to sing and then the muscles coordinate to produce that tone, timbre, and if there are words involved, the right vowel or consonant sounds to produce that word (known as “diction” in the singing world).
In the same way that we’ve learned how to reach out to turn on a light switch – we know by experience what muscle activity will be required to generate a particular response (e.g. pressing the switch or producing a certain tone). But we do still need feedback to ensure that the ‘output’ is correct and make any adjustments necessary, in the same way that we’d struggle a bit more if we looked at the light switch across the room but then closed our eyes whilst trying to walk to it and turn it on, or tried to sing a certain note with a set of ear defenders on.
I would like to add that some people do not, in fact, nail it the first time. Personally, I often have to apologize for incorrect tone when speaking and some people just are not good singers.
As other folks mention, speaking and hearing yourself is constant practice in knowing what muscles and air pressure connect to what sounds.
Think of the voice box as a woodwind instrument. When you start playing (as a baby) you have no idea what things make what noises. But as you learn, you can ‘play’ your voice. And voice training is just that ramped.up – it increases muscle control so you don’t drift into a specific note and have better range.
This is also why make voices sound odd as their larynx and voice box lengthen during puberty – the muscle and breath control that used to make a sound is now being pushed through a different sized instrument, and you get squeaks, just like if you swapped a clarinet out with a base clarinet.
Practice.
Do anything multiple times a day, sometimes for hours at a time, for your whole life and you’ll get good at it.
‘Audiation’ (hearing music in your mind) is the term from music education I remember. It’s especially important for musicians who are going to write / conduct music. it’s developed by four kinds of practice, ending with leading musicians in performance.
Reading music – translating visual information into a mental model before you play (visual-audiation-performance)
Transcription – translating audio information into a visual model, to write down what you hear (listening- audiation – visual)
Improvisation – performing music directly from your mental model (audiation – performance)
Composition – writing music directly from your mental model (audiation-visual)
Conducting – holding a mental model of the music, and communicating it with words/gestures. also listening, comparing the band’s sound to your mental model, and changing words/gesture to get them to perform how you want. (Audiation/listening – communication)
… experience seems like the likely answer. how do you not need to ‘rehearse’ walking first thing in the morning?
Your premise is false to start with. You have absolutely rehearsed all the sounds you make. It’s just that you started rehearsing since you were a teeny tiny baby or toddler. so you don’t remember the early days when you sucked at it. Try learning a new unfamiliar language with sounds that are not in your native language, for example an English speaker learning Mandarin.. You will find out quickly that you absolutely suck at making the correct Chinese tones as a beginner!
To add to other good answers here, in a few thousandths of a second your ears can pick up that you’re off key and send signals to vocal cords to correct. So you don’t have to nail it, you just have to get close.
Listen to, say, an 18-month-old talk. They are beginners, and it sounds like it. So by as young as 4 or 5, you’ve literally had years of practice in making all the sounds of your native language.
But we do rehearse. Every time we speak we’re becoming more experienced with using our voices. We have an entire backlog of experience of using our voice that imitating a tone comes easy for most of us.
It’s like driving a car (something most people are shockingly bad at). When someone cuts you off and you brake in time it’s not because you had to figure out braking right then and there, it’s because every day that you drive you become familiarized with your car and how it brakes which makes it predictable.
It’s kind of the same with any other skill, like talking or singing, it becomes predictable.
People mimicking accents show that we do not in fact nail it on the first try
For the most part, experience.
How do you know you’re going to be able to hit the ball into the right place using your tennis racket or your baseball bat or whatever? Experience.
And you’ll often hear musicians tuning up before playing, and most singers sing to music or immediately after having heard music.
There is also something called perfect relative pitch. Where a person will be able to go up and down the vocal scales based on whatever note they start singing with. But if they start singing with the wrong note, say like if they’re just a little bit flat, they’ll sing the entire piece exactly that flat.
There was a guy who performed at a local theater that I worked in for several summers. He was a great guy. He had perfect relative pitch but he could not start on a note to save his life but he could start matching any note he’d heard recently. Like within the last 30 seconds. Or there was actively playing.
So there was one song and I think it’s 32nd Street that is basically acapella come at least at the beginning, so there was a gag added to the show where the lead pianist would hit the particular starting node repeatedly and then the guy on stage would break the fourth wall to explicitly thank The pianist when he puts on his head and then begins singing correctly given that he had the starting note.
But basically we just know what different sounds feel like. We know how strong we have to tense our throat. And people who use fretless strained instruments like the violin and the cello basically either quickly cheat in a note or they start, hear the wrongness in the note before it’s established and fix it and then play there on relatively.
So just like anything else, the more you do it the better you are at it but it’s almost always a feedback loop of hearing and or feeling and or seeing what you need to hear feel or see in order to synchronize what you’re going to produce
Your brain is really good at guessing things based on past similar experiences.
A pro basketball player has shot a basketball thousands of times. Over time their brain remembers how they moved their muscles to shoot a free throw. If you tell them to make a shot with a volleyball, maybe they haven’t done that exact thing before but they can probably shoot a free throw almost as easily, especially if they practice with the volleyball a bit.
Your voice is the same way. Your brain remembers how it moves your muscles to speak at all manner of different pitches and volumes and whatnot just from talking every day so it can adjust accordingly when asked to imitate a sound.