What Is the Vocal Muscle?

The natural vocal teaching method was founded by Yang Kunchun, president of the Beijing Academy of Classical Creative Music Art and the current principal of the Alto Art School, and has applied for a national patent for a new vocal training method.

Natural Vocal Teaching Method

The content is mainly based on adjusting personality and controlling emotions, and using natural and authentic methods to achieve sounds with purity, penetration, freedom, texture and resonance cavity. It aims to let people speak naturally in the correct state. , To quickly solve a series of problems in singing, such as treble, running tune, breath.

First, the basic theory of vocal music-balance theory

In modern times, China's vocal music teaching has basically followed the teaching method under the guidance of Russia and other western countries. Western teaching emphasizes more on people's control, but lacks a way of looking at the world with a natural balance of people. And because of the material-oriented characteristics in western philosophy, teaching focuses more on materialized technical training, and little on emotional state. The origin of vocal music is born of emotion and sentiment. The purpose of singing is to express personal feelings. The vocal technology produced from the material perspective emphasizes the movement of the muscles too much, thus forming a training method that uses generative technology as the main training method, which is very likely to cause a technical and emotional disconnect. Different from the Western contemplation, Chinese classical thought emphasizes the state of natural balance more. It holds that everything in the world has its reasonable side and its internal balance. Therefore, Chinese classical philosophy pays more attention to the adjustment of integrity and emotion. Invisible mental emotions to drive muscle movement, then which method is more reasonable?

For technical training, the advantages are clear training goals and clear steps. Vocal music teaching is more about the experience of some outstanding singers when describing their singing, and the process of communicating the singing experience to students has gradually formed the current vocal teaching method. An insurmountable obstacle in the process of communication is that the existing language for describing spiritual aspects such as feeling state is extremely pale. Human language cannot accurately express their feelings, emotions and states. For example: pain, no matter how to describe it, it can not accurately convey the feeling of pain to another person. It is even more difficult for a person who has never experienced pain to understand the pain through language.

In the process of communication, the main way is to use some similar examples to elicit the same or similar experience of the other party. Or by describing the state of movement of visible substances such as muscles and bodies to convey singing methods. Such a communication method is necessarily complicated and difficult to understand. Every simple movement of a person involves complex muscle movements, and every occurrence of movement involves many muscle movements. On the one hand, the specific description is complicated, and at the same time, due to everyone's attention, control and muscle movements Feelings are different, so there is always focus and negligence in describing the process. So different people have different description results. And the people who learn are also easily confused, so the process of learning vocal music is long and difficult.

Differences between Chinese and Western thought

Western culture is more focused on concrete results. When a person speaks a problem, Western philosophy is to adjust and solve it through technical means. Until the pronunciation problem is solved. And Chinese philosophical thoughts value people s own state more. There is a sentence called smell its voice like seeing its person. It is believed that the problem of sound more reflects the problems of people, such as: personality, habits, actions, status, etc . The emergence of the sound problem is caused by this personal character and other problems. Therefore, according to Chinese philosophical thinking, the solution of the sound problem should be solved by adjusting human character, state, and psychology. So how does personality affect people?

Psychological students are defined as: human thinking and emotional characteristics. Simply put, it is a person's emotional habits. Different characters have different emotional states, and there is a direct connection between personality and breathing (see Chapter 3 for a detailed discussion). Changes in mood will directly affect changes in breathing. Generally speaking, people will breathe faster and shorter when they are excited, and deeper and slower when they are depressed. And the Chinese and the western breathes have different understandings.

Western philosophy attaches more importance to materiality, so the theory of breathing is more established around the movements of the abdominal cavity and chest cavity. The Dantian breathing concept formed by Chinese Taoism is very different from western chest-belly breathing. Dantian is an acupuncture point in traditional Chinese medicine, which is divided into upper, middle and lower. At present, the acupuncture points cannot be confirmed by the scientific methods available today. Moreover, the position of Dantian from the perspective of modern medicine is very different from the position of normal breathing, so Dantianqi has not been scientifically proven.

Confucius has a saying: "The laborer governs people, and the laborer governs people." The understanding of the latter half of the sentence is that physical labor is controlled by others. So what does the heart in the first sentence mean? Many people interpret it as brain. This means that mental work is better. However, when studying classical culture, I found that Taoism and Buddhism in China have always opposed the use of the brain. That is, they do not agree with the role of the brain, thinking that the use of the brain makes people desire and separate their hearts, which makes life unhappy. Matter is visible and consciousness can only perceive. The ability of the brain is more reflected in the perception and judgment of the physical world, and the invisible conscious brain is powerless.

From another perspective, things in the world have two development directions: depth and breadth, material development often pursues breadth, while spiritual aspects only pursue depth. Breadth is quantity and depth is quality. Everyone in life is pursuing material accumulation and spiritual quality.

Perceptual and rational

From the perspective of classical cultural thought, Dan Tianqi emphasizes more on the depth of sensibility, that is, more on the control of emotion (description and example). That is to say, Western thought puts more emphasis on the control of power, and Chinese classical thought puts more emphasis on the control of spirit. Under the influence of modern western philosophical thought, material civilization has been greatly developed. However, China's material development lags behind in modern China due to the influence of the classical philosophy of harmony between man and nature. The reason is that Chinese philosophy takes spiritual civilization as its development goal, and its influence on material civilization is relatively small And Western philosophy does just the opposite.

Although modern material civilization was developed based on Western philosophy, although modern art education is also popularized and developed in the country based on Western education methods and methods, art education itself is a construction of spiritual civilization. Based on the above analysis, Chinese philosophical thinking should have an advantage over western philosophy in terms of art education. Chinese thought is that art is like its own, and it emphasizes human self-adjustment. The first thing to determine here is that the reason you don't master a subject is not how difficult the subject is, but because of your own ability.

As for the specific technical ability, the reason that others can master it but they do not master it is first of all due to personality and state factors. For example: For example, if you wave quickly, if the speed is slow, it seems that the problem is caused by motion control, but in fact it is caused by the lack of agility. The main reason for not being agile is that the personality or emotions are "sinking", and the solution is to lift the breath to make the emotions active, so as to increase the reaction speed. The other training method is to reflect on the technical movements, carefully check the problems in the movements, and then solve them one by one. In fact, these two training methods are like the two ends of a pole, with material and technique on the left and consciousness and feeling on the right.

Western training is more a habit that is gradually formed through specific technical training, and finally becomes a general feeling. And if training in the way of Chinese classical thought, it is more to stabilize and form accurate technology through emotional transfer, and finally to form specific technical actions. This is the process from part to whole; or from whole to part. Both methods have their own groups of adaptations, which are more suitable for rational people in the Western way, and more suitable for emotional people in the Chinese way. The West attaches importance to results, and China attaches more importance to the process. The Chinese method is more focused on changing the nature of people. ^[1]

First, natural bite words and spit words

Practice a natural bite state and make the mouth habit. Pay attention to practice in a calm manner, and avoid laziness or irritability. Because the character is bitten when in a lazy state, the position of the oral cavity is likely to be small, and it is in an abnormal state. In the case of impatience, the position of the oral cavity tends to be too large, and it is also in an abnormal state, and the character is very important in singing. For a vocal work, it is a poem with a tone, and singing is a recitation with a tone, which must be clear. The lyrics of a song, like the music, influence the style of the song. There is a saying: one side supports one person, one nation has the characteristics of one nation, one region has a regional style, and language has a very close relationship with the nation and the region. Including music is also a redevelopment on the basis of language, so bite words and pronunciation have a great impact on singing style. On the other hand, when encountering more difficult places during singing, it is inevitable that there will be tension, and the biggest effect of nervous singing is to change the normal and natural singing state, which includes oral bite and spit words, practice And stabilizing the oral state of the word can stabilize the mood and sing.

Control of emotions

In fact, vocal music expresses emotions through singing, and vocal music training is centered on two aspects: bite words, spit words and express emotions. When it comes to emotions, it also involves personality issues. The singing process is a process of expressing the songwriter's emotions. You cannot add too much personal color, especially some unconscious and paranoid colors. For example, an irritable person mostly sings works with impatience, and the music content of his works may have nothing to do with irritability, so there is no accurate expression of music content. In addition, paranoia of personality is also likely to cause technical problems in sound. Anxious personality and tight voice; lazy personality and cross voice. And the distinction between irritability and excitement must be distinguished, irritability is too excited, laziness is not excited enough.

Resonance, treble, technology, etc. pursued in singing are closely related to the state of excitement in singing, so it is necessary to pay great attention to the adjustment and control of emotions in learning. The technical training conducted by the natural vocal teaching method is mainly focused on vocalization techniques. How to obtain good sound is a standard for measuring the level of singing. The current vocal teaching focuses too much on muscle training and neglects emotional control training. We must know the control The muscle is the emotion. If the mood is unstable, even the muscle training is correct and stable. In fact, after years of muscle training, it can reach a certain degree of stability, and it can also achieve the effect of controlling emotions, but this requires considerable time and energy, and requires constant adjustment to achieve. In fact, in the current teaching methods, there is nothing wrong with the requirements for sound. The key is to look at it from some angles, such as: "Ventilation first and then sound": It means "be careful" emotional state. "State of smelling flowers": It means "excited" emotional state and so on. ^[2]

First, practice more word biting exercises

Practice normal, natural, peaceful, calm word-engraving. The purpose of practicing word-engraving with a more mechanical state is to solve the problem of tension in the vocal cords and cavities due to emotional changes. It should be noted that the emotion can neither be impatient nor lazy when biting. Peace of mind, as long as this exercise takes several weeks, it can form a resonance state.

Pay more attention to your tone

When speaking normally, there is a certain tone and direction. To communicate with a certain person, even if they are talking to themselves, they have a direction, that is, themselves. So the tone is the "direction" of speaking, speaking emotionally in a dramatic way. This practice is for both the actual performance of the music and the "high position" of the sound. It should be noted that the state of singing is not to be found. The singing state generally considered is often very unnatural. When the singer thinks that the state is correct, it is just wrong, so you must always practice more language and mood. Singing should be as natural as speaking, so as to ensure the correct breathing and resonance.

Third, don't make vocal learning methodological

You can understand the state of singing of all outstanding singers. It must be the overall coordination, not the adjustment of a certain part of the muscles. Although they have also undergone a long technical training, the final singing method is a hazy state, that is, it seems There is a certain amount of muscle movement, and it seems to be an emotional state. As long as you find that feeling, the sound is fine. In fact, the overall state of vocal music is an overall emotional adjustment, and there is an emotional correspondence behind all methods. Finding emotions is tantamount to learning methods. The actual training effect is also the same. For emotions, it takes a certain amount of steady practice, but one thing is that when you find the emotions, you can find a way to sing. For those who are rich in emotion and active, they can Good results can be achieved in a very short time, which cannot be achieved by the practice method.

Fourth, the best sound

Many girls have such experiences. When she is frightened, she can unconsciously make a very high and penetrating sound. In vocal singing, it is very difficult to practice to that level. The normal way of generating behavior is to go through: the process of thinking and judgment to produce emotions and then dominate the physical behavior, thinking runs through the entire process. And the behavior process when being frightened is: because of the fright, emotions dominate the body behavior and thinking occurs, and thinking comes after the process. The advantage of this method is to avoid psychological problems caused by thinking, so when it comes to emergencies, you can exert your ability beyond normal. The same is true for singing. The process of learning methods is the process of thinking and judgment, and the process of finding sounds through emotions is the process of emotional domination. These two are very different ways. ^[3]

In fact, the requirements of vocal music are the following three points: 1. Natural, normal bite and spit words. 2. Careful, excited emotional state. 3 Grasp of different styles of songs. Problems that occur during singing can be solved by the above methods.

The cause of poor breathing is due to the abnormal state of the bite, which usually occurs after a request to "open the throat". Because the normal state of the bite is ignored, the vocal cords are too wide during the bite, resulting in excessive gas consumption. Many are caused by breathing problems. This can be confirmed by the state of spitting words. If the breathing is not good, the bite words are mostly unclear, like something in the mouth. In fact, there is no need to practice breathing. Usually there is a problem of shallow breathing. The main reason is due to the influence of emotions. To solve this problem, we must start with stable emotions. According to the personality of the students, those who are irritable should use soft, Slow vocalization exercises to calm the emotions. For those with a loose personality, raise the emotions through loud and excited vocalization exercises. When the mood is at peace, breathing naturally deepens. Generally speaking, irritable breathing is shallow, and the sound is easy to float. Lazy in character, breathing too deep, and his voice tends to be heavy. The result of the adjustment is based on the sound, which is the kind of balanced sound.

The problem of changing sound points is actually a problem of psychological endurance. People who are unfamiliar with themselves will have a certain amount of psychological tension, as is the problem of treble. The change of the vocalization method after changing the sound point is like a person who can't swim down into the water. The deeper the water, the more urgent the more nervous, and the harder it is to grasp the people around, but as long as it is not Let go and never learn to swim. Therefore, do not consider the problem of changing the voice point in the singing. The best singing state is the unification of the low to high tone. It cannot be one tone in the middle sound zone, and change to another tone in the high tone zone.

The problem of resonance is also very simple, that is, the problem of vibration. Physically speaking, any object has its own frequency, of course, including the body's bones and cavities. Resonance refers to the resonance that occurs when the frequency of the sound is the same as that of the cavity. This requires two conditions: one is the same frequency and the other is relaxation. You can usually try it. Knock the bowl with chopsticks. If you hold the bowl with your hand and then knock, the resonance of the sound is very weak. If you hold the chopsticks tightly, you won't relax the sound of holding the chopsticks. The above experiments can prove that the cavity has tight resonance and poor vocal cord tightness. Therefore, in vocal practice, the state of "carefulness" is to obtain a beautiful tone, and the state of "excitement" is to obtain a good resonance.