Research - singing mechanism

First of all, there are just so many different schools of thoughts on this issue and I guess I'm learning from what I find on the website, so this consists of mixture of theories. When I was thinking about this project, I desperately needed to know how to sing. I just didn’t have basic understandings of how singing works out in our body and how the good sounds are produced. In order to get clues, I surfed through lots of forums and blogs that deal with these topics. Many of them were in Korean websites, just because I think theories that are written in Korean is much better to understand and read. With researching for many hours, I learned that the most basic thing when singing is breathing. Before I knew about this, I thought all the people were singing with just their voice, and from my experience, my throat always used to hurt after hours of singing in a karaoke place. It seemed like that all the professional singers had innately better throats that theirs never hurt even though they sing all day, every day.

But after I learned about breathing, my throat never hurt like before, even I sang for a good few hours, with this type of breathing, which is called abdominal breathing.

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The mechanism goes like this. Right before you sing a verse, or pretty much anything, you breathe in with your mouth. Some forums say you should also breathe with your nose simultaneously just to get as much air as possible. Upon breathing, the lower part of your stomach should pop out and should hold on to it. When you sing, you gently release your breath but not all the way, because that way, you are going to end up making some weird noise. And when all the breath has gone out, you breathe again during the ‘gaps’ of the songs. For example, in a song called Viva La Vida, you would breath during a $ mark.

$ I used to rule the world $ Seas would rise when I gave the word $ Now in the morning I sleep alone $ Sweep the streets I used to own.

This is how you should breathe when you are singing. But there are sometimes that you just don’t have enough time to breathe enough air for the verse, and end up making a mistake. I encounter this type of situation and I am still looking for a solution. My guess is that I should increase my lung capacity so that I could breathe more air in a shorter time.

There are some exercises to help breathing process. I wouldn’t mention about swimming and running or all the other aerobic exercises because I think even Chimpanzees would know that will help for sure. The teacher who teaches me vocal lessons told me a simple exercise that everybody could do easily. Lie comfortably on a floor and put about 3pounds of weight on your stomach (Dictionary is really good if you don’t have any alternatives). Breathe as much air as possible and hold on to it about ten seconds. Once you count up to then, try to breathe out as long as possible with your mouth open slightly. During this process, you only open a tiny gap between up and bottom teeth. If you feel like you are dying, you stop and repeat the same process about ten times. I am doing this with different exercises and this really helps because this gives you more stability when singing and of course, larger lung capacity. Next time, I am going to write about different types of mechanisms of singing.