Reflex voice: a tool to enhance my vocal expression in singing through embodied emotion and automatic vocalisation.

As a singer, I find the balance between expression and technique challenging. At the start of my singing studies, I was told my singing was not expressive enough - a comment which confused me for a long time. I did not know exactly what it meant, and, more importantly, I did not find the answers I needed in my training as a singer. Nevertheless, I did come across two lines of work which I found useful: acting and the notion of primal sound. Particularly, embodied emotion as used in acting and automatic vocalisation as used in primal sound. I decided to develop a tool combining them which can potentially enhance my vocal expression while singing. I called it: reflex voice.

The notion of expression in the field of music raises many doubts. In its main entry on “expression”, the Grove Dictionary of Music (2001) links it to the aspects of a music piece which are free to interpretation. Yet it also states that the discussion around this idea in music criticism “reflects the profound uncertainty in contemporary aesthetics over the most important concept bequeathed to it by the Romantic movement”: namely, romantic subjectivity. Expression is so central to music making that it even has been considered its role. In the 18th century, the main objective of music making became the expression of the passions - what we would nowadays call emotions. Following this 18th century idea, I decided to focus on the expression of emotions in particular.

I carried out a first experiment to test how embodying an emotion and vocalising automatically could influence the expressive aspect of my singing. I followed an introductory course to the Indian performance practice Navarasas and applied its particular ways to embody emotions to a 17th century music composition: “Hero´s lament” by Nicholas Lanier.

Below you can read more about:

FUNDING CONCEPTS

Primal sound and automatic voice

One of the most important singing pedagogues which works with the notion of primal sound is Janice Chapman. She devotes to it a complete chapter of her book “Singing and teaching singing: a holistic approach to classical voice”. Among other utterances, Chapman defines “crying, howling, wailing, laughing, groaning, calling, spontaneous joyful exclamations, grunts, the vocalized sigh and yawn, and the sound of agreement” as primal sound (Chapman 2017, 17). Speech pathologist Pamela Davis, who worked with Janice Chapman in writing several articles, summarises her singing method as follows:

(Chapman) uses natural primal muscle movements of the abdomen, chest and rib cage, proposing that the control of primal sounds also drives the air in singing. She teaches singers to gain voluntary control of these muscles, using a quick release of the belly muscular wall (“splat”) so that the ensuing inspiration is assisted by the recoil forces operating with a reduced volume of air in the lungs and associated with diaphragmatic contraction unopposed by abdominal co- contraction (Davis 1998, 5).

Therefore, according to Chapman, learning to sing would mean learning how to replicate an involuntary function which is healthier and more efficient when automatic. Speech therapist Oren Brown, who coined the term primal sound, explains that “a natural healthy phonation is an automatic function” and that learning to sing is “a process of discovering what your voice can do for you” and “a matter of learning how to let sounds happen” (Fotheringham 1998, 1).

My singing teacher at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, Xenia Meijer also mentions primal breath and primal impulses in her new book “Balanced Singing: a personal approach to singing, rhetorical performance and vocal coaching inspired by a life surrounded by animals”. While explaining her approach to breathing, she writes:

I learned a lot about breathing by looking at animals and their different breathing patterns. It may be argued that in non-human environments, animals relate to each other in a more primal way than we do, mainly because their communication does not function at the level of abstraction that our language does (Meijer 2022, 35).

Authors who use the notion of primal sound employ standardised vocalisations linked to emotion like, in the case of Chapman, crying, howling or yawning. These vocalisations can be learned through imitation. I found using these sounds efficient to a certain extent, but a doubt arose: while these sounds would indeed elicit in me a technically efficient bodily response, how could the emotion needed for the production of these utterances be readily available for me at any moment?

I imagined focusing on the sensation which produces the bodily response, rather than on a standardised vocalisation resulting from the mentioned response, would enhance the automatic quality of the vocalisations and, as a result, their variety. I found historical acting a useful tool to engage with this question.

Embodied emotion in acting technique

I followed a historical gesture course with flutist and historical acting scholar Jed Wentz from 2017-2020. During his lessons, we explored exercises which used enactment of the physicality of an emotion to create an emotional sensation in the actor. Furthermore, I came across another acting method which advocates embodied emotion as well: Navarasas. I chose the latter for my first experiment because of its use of breath.

Both acting techinques use embodied emotion which has been described as the “perceptual, somatovisceral, and motoric reexperiencing” of an emotion (Niedenthal 2007, 1). This strategy inspired the following hypothesis: the sensation achieved through the physicality of an emotion can be the trigger to vocalise automatically and possibly enhance the expression in my singing. This is the basis of the tool reflex voice.

THE EXPERIMENT

In order to test the application of reflex voice, I carried out a first experiment: embodying an emotion through Navarasas acting technique, exploring automatic vocalisation through this emotion and applying it to a solo piece filled with emotional changes: “Hero´s lament” by Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666).

Among other reasons, I chose this piece because it requires a very wide palette of emotions from the singer. It is a solo piece in which the character goes through a complex succession of emotionally challenging situations: a night of waiting for her lover -who does not appear to their date - and her subsequent troubled thoughts which include fear, jealousy, anger and, finally, such despair that she decides to take her own life. This variety of emotions is a characteristic of many early Baroque monody pieces. Musicologist Margaret Murata writes the following about these kind of compositions:

Emotion-charged, extended soliloquies in recitative, like the famous lament of Arianna by Monteverdi (1608), were published in collections of monodies up till 1630. They occurred regularly in operas until about 1650, thereafter more rarely until the total triumph of the aria around 1670 (Murata 1979, 1).

I took the following steps for this experiment:

  1. a recording of the whole piece prior any experimentation
  2. an introductory course to the acting technique Navarasas and its specific strategies to embody emotions
  3. five weeks of experimentation on how these emotions can trigger automatic vocalisation
  4. a recording of a performance after the experimentation

All the steps were recorded on video. At the end of this article you can read what are my findings concerning this experiment so far.

An introduction to Navarasas

I followed five one to one sessions with the actor and teacher Vivek Vijayakumaran in spring 2021. He introduced me to the nine emotions, Navarasas, described in the Sanskrit performance treatise Natyashastra. Navarasas practice is essential to the theatre form Koodiyatam. Vivek has a mixed background including the Indian performance practice Koodiyatam and mastercourses at the workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. He has developed a Navarasas workshop apt for actors who are not familiar with this form. He combines work on associations and imagination and physicality coming from the Indian tradition.

I chose Navarasas to explore embodied emotion and automatic voice production for two reasons: firstly, this technique works directly on emotions in a very structured way in which the physical characteristics are concrete and repeatable; secondly, Navarasas includes the use of breath to embody an emotion which provides an immediate link to exhalation and, therefore, phonation.

These coaching sessions were conducted in an unusual way, both for me as a student and for Vivek as a teacher as they took place online during the pandemic. Usually he teaches this introduction in groups so that the students can also learn from watching each other.

As I mentioned before, Vivek has developed an approach to Navarasas which uses the elements of the practice which are more relatable to actors who are not trained in Koodiyatam and leaves out other characteristic elements. For example, the Koodiyatam actor usually performers from an almost squatting posture which demands great strength in the legs. Another example is that Koodiyatam actors exercise their eyes for a couple of hours every morning - as actor Abhishek Thapar who trained in this form for some years explained during an informal conversation.

This discipline, like any other performing discipline, requires years of training, therefore I am not attempting to give a full overview of the depth and richness of this practice, but rather to grasp its potentiality in conjunction with reflex voice.

The word rasa loosely translates as taste, flavour, sensation or sentiment, and nava stands for the number nine. In the “Natyashastra”, a rasa is described as “the cumulative result of stimulus, involuntary reaction and voluntary reaction” (Rangacharya 2014, 55).The author compares what the spectator feels when watching a performance, with a person tasting a meal prepared by a cook, in this case the actor. They write that the bhavas or emotions are ingredients or spices and the actor mixes them to create a rasa (Rangacharya 2014, 55).

It is important to clarify that the technique Navarasas includes the term rasa in it instead of bhava, even though the latter would translate better as emotion and the first would translate better as the audience perception of this emotion (Rangacharya 2014, 53). This complicated relationship seems to concern the author of the treatise as well, since they write: “Some are of the opinion that (the relationship between bhava and rasa) is symbiotic. That however is not correct. It can be clearly seen that rasa is produced from bhavas and not viceversa” (Rangacharya 2014, 55). They further explain the relationship between rasas as well as their colours, deities and other characteristics.

The relationship between an emotion and its perception is relevant to this article since it brings light to an interesting debate in the performing world, namely, whether an emotion is meant to be felt or simply represented for the spectator to perceive or empathise with it. The author of this Sanskrit treatise seems to sustain that the felt emotion needs to happen first and engender its representation.

My doubt as to how to apply this notion to performance remains: where does the emotion or bhava come from then? This research functions on the assumption that the theatrical techniques I have selected can generate an emotion within the performer, even more, that this emotion can be strong enough to allow an automatic engagement to voice production, like other emotions do in life outside performance.

In my own experience, the specific exercises to embody an emotion, present in the Navarasas, can generate a strong sensation which in turn has an influence in the body and in the voice. With the experiment presented after I attempt to observe how this emotional embodiment influences my voice in more detail.

The idea that it is possible to generate an emotion from its physical expression is not new. Besides recent research in the field of neuroscience is often based on this notion. For example, social psychologist Paula Niedenthal induces certain emotions on participants through “manipulations of facial expression and posture in the laboratory” in order to observe if those emotions affect “how emotional information is processed” (Niedenthal 2007, 1).

Renowned actor and teacher Konstantin Stanislavski suggests alterations in posture, movement and facial expression to create a successful physical characterisation. The fictional director of his book “Building a Character” calls these alterations “remarkable external tricks” (Stanislavski 2021, 3). After a long demonstration of how squinting an eye, paralysing the arms or pulling the tongue in all possible directions influence the teacher´s acting, the witnesses conclude:

Even in his own psychology in spite of himself there had been an imperceptible impulse which he found difficult immediately to analyse. It was, however, an undoubted fact that his inner faculties responded to the external image he had created, and adjusted to it, since the words he pronounced were not his words, although the thoughts he expressed were his very own. (…) he vividly demonstrated that external characterization can be achieved intuitively and also by means of purely technical, mechanical, simple external tricks (Stanislavski 2021, 4).

During the five sessions with Vivek Vijayakumaran, I learned to identify and embody the nine emotions and augment them. Vivek suggested to find the physical characteristics of each rasa by engaging with the five senses. He explained that, although traditionally actors would be told these characteristics beforehand, he preferred to ask the student to find them themselves through self-exploration. Each rasa was explored through sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. For example, when we worked on Shingara (excitement) for the first time, I was asked to list memories relating to this emotion through each of the five senses.

Once the rasa had been identified as a sensation in the body, Vivek and I focused on making this sensation grow. By the last session, I could access the sensations connected to each of the nine rasas, augment them (for some emotions more successfully than for others) and make them dissolve in order to perform the nine rasas in a sequence.

These are the nine rasas and their translations:

Shingara: excitement Hasya: laughter Adbhuta: wonder Veerya: pride Raudhra: anger Bhayanaka: fear Karuna: grief Beebatsa: disgust Shanta: the bliss of emptiness or death

There are several ways to translate the rasas above to English. The ones I have included above are in line with what I learned from Vivek and, above all, the translations which I found more relatable and practical. The translation of the “Natyasastra” differs from the one above on some points. For example, shingara is translated as love instead of excitement and veerya is translated as the heroic as opposed to pride.

You can also listen to short audios of myself practicing some of these emotions:

Shingara-excitement:

Veerya-pride:
Raudhra-anger:
Bhayanaka-fear:
Karuna-sadness:

Five weeks of experimentation

After the introduction to Navarasas, I started exploring how the exercises I had learned from Vivek could be the starting point to vocalise automatically and how could this be applied to the chosen composition.

First, I worked on the text of “Hero´s lament”. I identified some emotions which I intuitively connected with my experience of the rasas. The story goes as follows: Hero is waiting for her lover, Leander. They had a date at night for which he had to swim from his island to hers. He did not appear causing a variety of intense responses from jealousy to anger and ending in the resolution to take her own life. Below you can listen to how the emotional sensation, achieved through the Navarasas practice, affects how I speak the text of the composition by Lanier.

Shingara (excitement): Hero imagines her lover undressing and swimming towards her.

Raudhra (anger): Hero realises Leander might have forgotten her and be with someone else. She asks, outraged, how can he break his promises.
Veerya (pride): Hero demands the wind and sea to change according to her wishes to allow Leander to swim safely towards her.
Bhayanaka (fear): Hero sees a heavy storm approaching and is scared that her lover may drown.
Karuna (grief): Hero finds Leander death, drowned in the storm. Shanta (the bliss of emptiness or death): Hero decides to suicide.

For five weeks I practiced Navarasas everyday. The first week I only worked on the exercises Vivek had advised: accessing each of the rasas for around a minute and changing between them. The second week I started exploring vocalisation. I would enter a rasa through the physical cues described by Vivek and let the voice happen automatically when the emotional state was strong enough. I tried to focus on the physical sensation as I had done during the coaching sessions and add the voice gradually as a consequence of increased intensity in the breath. I would try not to focus on creating a sound, but rather maintain the sensation and see if the exhalation can push the voice out of me.

At this point, I would define the main difference between using conscious voice or automatic voice lies in my focus. In the case of what I call here conscious voice, I focus on the sound I want to produce and the knowledge of my voice I have developed as a singer. In the case of what I call here automatic voice, I focus on the sensation that inspires the sound and try to let go of technical voice habits. This change of focus is central to the reflex voice tool.

Afterwards, I started applying the rasas to the text of the piece. I would follow the same procedure as before and add the text when I achieved the heightened sensation. These are the steps I practiced for each rasa:

  1. exploring the sound of a rasa independently of the piece
  2. applying discovered sounds to singing
  3. applying rasa sequence to selected text
  4. applying the breath of the rasa to text
  5. applying the breath of the rasa to singing

ANALYSES

I have so far analysed the data collected for my experiment in the following way: I decided to focus first on the audio only, since I thought watching and listening to myself could compromise the depth of my perception.

I compared specific phrases of two performances of the piece - one recorded right before the start of my Navarasas practice (performance A) and the other one recorded after the five weeks of practice (performance B). Performance A was recorded in an informal setting with lutenist Ramiro Morales. It was a livingroom concert with a very small audience. Performance B was recorded in the Conservatorium van Amsterdam as part of a singing exam within my master study. Alessandro Pianu played the harpsichord, there was a small audience and a jury.

Performance B shows relevant differences in timing. The passages of the composition which include exclamations, especially when several exclamations follow each other, seem to have more variations in tempo, which I perceive as an increased urgency in the singing. Below you can listen to two examples. In each example you can listen to the same phrase twice; first perfomance A and then performance B:

Besides, two new qualities appear in my voice during performance B:

Firstly, there were moments in which the text became more important that the pitch resuting in the register becoming more spoken. In my opinion, this has an negative influence on intonation, but highlights the expression of the specific emotion. The following example includes sections from performance B only highlighting this aspect:

Secondly, a new quality which could be described as growling appeared. The false vocal cords responded automatically, mostly when performing with anger or despair. The example below includes several sections from performance B:

Lastly, in the same exclamation passages I mentioned above, something new started happening during performance B: as a result of automatic and powerful inhalations, which would occur in climatic moments, some sounds which are not written in the score appeared. They could be considered as a type of expressive ornaments which are not bound to a specific pitch. I would call them breath-based ornaments, as shown below:

It is very interesting to me to realise that on performance A I was using pitch-based ornaments to highlight important moments. This was a conscious process, since I was thinking of specific notes to embellish a melody. Whereas on performance B, those pitch-based ornaments were gone replaced by the afore mentioned breath-based ornaments.

I proceeded by analysing the audios taken during my daily practice. Bellow you can read how I analysed the vocalisations stemming from each of the emotions. Some aspects which seem relevant are:

CONCLUSION

So far I have focused only on the affordances concerning voice expression. The next step for my research is to analyse the visual expression as well - changes in gesture, posture, movement, relationship to the space and facial expression.

Afterwards I will asses the experiment as a whole and follow up with a second improved experiment with the same goal and a new 17th century piece. I will present my research at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in March 2023.

In the future I hope to develop reflex point to a point in which it can be applied to other people´s practice as well as mine. I have experimented with several of its strategies in individual singing lessons and in improvisation workshops. I found the results could potentially add to the way expression is taught in singing.

To end this article, I would like to include here two links, found below, which might illustrate how I use reflex voice in my practice as singer and creator. The first one is a full live recording of the afore mentioned performance B which took place right after the experimentation process. The second is a trailer of a work I developed with the collective Moving Strings using my research as an inspiration. It is called “Pars pro toto” and was premiered in Perdu (Amsterdam, 2021).

I am currently working on a new performance with the collective for the festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2023. It will use this research as a base to create a performative music work for voice, chorus of performers and electronics. With it I will further explore what I consider the most relevant affordances of reflex voice in my own work: giving visibility to the emotional voice and challenging the sexual connotation projected into female vocalisation.

“Hero´s lament” by Nicholas Lanier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx1H-Wv19VU

“Pars pro toto” by Irene Sorozábal in collaboration with Moving Strings https://youtu.be/dUtzRfLEtRs

Note: This article was written in autumn 2022. In the meantime Irene Sorozábal has graduated from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. She has written a master thesis titled “Reflex voice: an approach to expression in singing which employs embodied emotion and automatic voice”. She would be glad to share more information about this thesis when approached on this email: irenesorozabal@gmail.com

Bibliography

Burgh, J. (1727). The art of speaking in publick: An essay on the action of an orator as to his pronunciation and gesture. Printed for N. Cox in Story Passage Westminster.

Chapman, J. L. (2017) Singing and teaching singing : a holistic approach to classical voice. San Diego, CA : Plural Publishing, third edition.

Davis, P. J. (1998). Emotional influences on singing. Australian voice.

Fotheringham, Sharon (1998). Review: Discover Your Voice: How to Develop Healthy Voice Habits by Oren Brown (1996). Revue d´orthophonie et d´audiologie, vol. 22, no.2

Meijer, X. (2022). Balanced Singing: a personal approach to singing, rhetorical performance and vocal coaching inspired by a life surrounded by animals. (Self-published, available in bol.com)

Murata, M. (1979). The recitative soliloquy. Journal of the American Musicological Society.

Niedenthal, P. M. et al. (2007). Embodying emotion. www.sciencemag.org accessed (10/09/2021).

Rangacharya, Adya. (2014). The Natyasastra, English translation with critical notes. Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd.

Stanislavski, Constantin (2021). Building a character. Bloodsbury revelations.

Video:

Brown, Oren (2015). Therapy for singers, part I. The voice foundation archives. https://youtu.be/8VpgvqN-53o (accessed 29/08/2022)