Can Anyone Learn to Sing? Science May Have The Answer | Matt Ramsey at Nerd Nite Austin

Can Anyone Learn to Sing? Science May Have The Answer | Matt Ramsey at Nerd Nite Austin with tags nerdnite, english, life, achievement, motivation, positive thinking, speech, singing, vocal coach, voice teacher, matt ramsey

Presented at Nerd Nite Austin with Amy Cavender on Wednesday August 14th, 2019. Filmed by Jacob Weiss.

In this exciting and fascinating presentation on singing, Matt from ramseyvoice.com presents a lecture on the new science of singing. With a presentation tailored toward beginners and people with a general interest in singing, Matt breaks down the history of singing from the classical school of Italian music to singing today.

Starting off the presentation, Matt asks "how do you hit high notes"?

For a long time, the answer was always to breathe from the diaphragm, sing into the mask, and cover the sound. But what if those don't help?

Having taught over 500 students, Matt believes that good singing techniques can help anyone learn to sing better.

In this lecture, Matt demonstrates how new research shows us how to overcome the vocal break that has troubled singers for centuries.

Learning to sing from the bottom to the top of the voice without breaking or straining has always been a problem when teaching singing.

And ideas like breath support and covering the sound were pillars of learning the same for hundreds of years.

But starting in the seventh century, there was a small group of monks that possessed the information that made singing high notes possible for anyone.

And we can see their influence on singers like Stevie Wonder, Sara Bareilles, and Michael Jackson.

Throughout the history of voice teaching, teachers made a series of breakthroughs in teaching singing through a lot of trial-and-error.

The first breakthrough was classifying the boys according to what singers feel, in this case chest voice and head voice.

The second breakthrough came when singing teachers discovered the "middle voice" which was a middle ground in between the chest voice and head voice.

This middle voice also known as "pharyngeal voice" or "throat voice" created a sort of bridge between the different vocal registers. With enough training, this middle voice could be developed to the point where breaks in the singing voice became indistinguishable.

The third breakthrough came in 1854 when Manuel Garcia invented the laryngoscope which allowed singing teachers to see the vocal cords for the first time. This was the first time when singing teachers realized that proper breath support was not the only answer to improving singers. A few decades later, modern music including rock pop Jazz and R&B became very popular. Contemporary voice teachers at the time had no idea how to reconcile the differences between classical, breath-dominant teaching and the strong belting, emotional vocal sounds that they were hearing and artists of the day.

In the 1960s, Seth Riggs became the first singing teacher to rediscover the old ideas of middle voice and incorporated into modern music. He became tremendously successful teaching singers like Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Bette Midler mostly because he allowed them to sing from the bottom to the top of their voice without strain.

This led directly to the fourth breakthrough in singing which was that in 1994 Dr. Ingo Titze used EMG to show that different muscles activated in the throat as you sing from low to high. This gave credibility to the idea that learning to sing meant controlling the different muscles of the voice, rather than just the breath.

This is why most modern vocal techniques place an emphasis on coordinating the different singing muscles to work together to hit higher notes rather than just focusing on breath support or placement like singing into the mask.

Master Your Voice Complete Singing Course: ramseyvoice.com/special-offer