“Breathe into your belly”
“Sing from your diaphragm”
“Engage your core. It should feel like you’re doing an ab workout”
“Use breath support”
These are just a few of the often used phrases teachers, choir directors, and music directors use to get their singers to use their breath properly. But they’re honestly really confusing statements, and in some ways, these widely used phrases sometimes conflict with each other! We all know that breathing is important for singing, but why do we spend so much time working on something that our body naturally does all day long anyway?
Basic Anatomy
When we sing, we exhale the air from our lungs through the trachea, and then through the larynx where the vocal folds vibrate to create sound (phonation). It’s important to understand that the lungs are not capable of moving on their own for inhalation and exhalation, so it is the movement of the surrounding muscles that facilitate the opening and closing of the lungs– primarily the intercostals (the muscles between the ribs), abdominal muscles, and the diaphragm.
Diaphragm
When working with a new student with previous training, I typically ask how breathing has been explained to them in the past. The most typical response is “to breathe from the diaphragm.” My follow up question is typically, “Ok, how do you do that?”
The reality is that the diaphragm, while essential for breathing, is not a muscle that we can control directly. This is because the diaphragm does not have proprioception, meaning, we cannot feel its position in the body. So how do you control something that you can’t feel? Lucky for us, the brain communicates with the diaphragm without us being conscious of it. In summary: yes, the diaphragm is an important part of the breathing mechanism, but since we do not consciously control its movements, I believe that we should change our focus and descriptive language as teachers to the parts of our body we can control.
For a visual representation of this anatomy, see the video below!
Belly Breathing
Another confusing direction often given to singers is “breathe into your belly.” Most of us understand that this means relaxing the abdomen and allowing the stomach to move with our inhalation and exhalation. However, our lungs are much higher up in our torso, so what does the stomach have to do with breathing?
When the diaphragm descends in the body it moves the internal organs below out of the way. Instead of moving down into our pelvis, these organs move forward (posteriorly) in the body to make space for the diaphragm. That is why “belly breathing” can be a helpful indicator of the diaphragm’s function in our breathing. Unfortunately, many of us hold tension in our abdomen for a variety of reasons, so finding this abdominal release is not immediately accessible to all singers, but is absolutely a goal worth working towards! Not only do these deep breaths give us greater control while we sing, they also send signals to our central nervous system that we can relax, which can be an essential component of managing performance anxiety, but that’s for a future blog post!
Rib Cage Movement
In order for the lungs to fully expand with our inhalations, the rib cage must also expand outward. In order for this movement to be possible, the intercostal muscles expand to create space between the ribs. This movement is particularly important, not just for singing, but because over time if the intercostal muscles are not used for deep inhalations, they can calcify and the rib cage becomes fixed and unable to move, permanently impacting our breathing. This movement is especially important if a singer finds themselves in a performance or costume where a full “belly breath” may not be possible.
Breath Support
“Breath Support” is a phrase that voice teachers use to describe the way that we control the flow of our exhalation. After all, singing really is just a controlled exhale, so we gain control of our singing by controlling the way that the air moves while we sing, but there seems to be great discrepancy between teachers in how we describe this function. I believe that the difficulty with explaining breath support comes from the fact that we all experience these sensations differently. A significant portion of this control comes from our abdominal muscles, but since we all have different bodies and different levels of strength in our abdominal muscles, the control we have can vary greatly. Therefore, the engagement of these muscles can be felt differently in different bodies. The best way to understand what your version of support feels like is to work with a teacher you trust.
Now, let’s all take a deep breath together!
If you’d like to continue nerding out about this topic and how it relates to voice production, I highly recommend this article by Johan Sundberg (bonus: it’s free!!!) https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6028/74453b2b69ccefa0e951e84725286e4a4aaa.pdf
~Lauren
Sources for breathing anatomy:
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/how-lungs-work
http://umich.edu/~elements/web_mod/cobra/humresp.htm