I got into a discussion with our choir director the other evening regarding techniques for preventing singers going flat. He is adamant that smiling cures all such ills. What do you think? I have to admit, I have my doubts - rather a simplistic formula in my view.

Simplistic but it works

It depends what you mean by smiling. If you mean drawing the corners of your mouth back to 'smile', then I would have thought that would cause all sorts of problems the quality of tone production and vowels. If he means smiling with the eyes and raising the cheekbones, then yes, that would affect the placement, and thus alter the tuning. I'm sure there's a technical term for this, but it escapes me at the moment.

I'm awful at frowning and I know it makes me sing flat. One way I find works is to get students to screw their faces up and look really dull and bored then at a given signal, suddenly look wide awake and excited. Their whole faces open up.

David

Smiling will cause you to sing with dreadful tone - you'll sound overly bright and harsh.

Lifting the cheeks won't change your placement either - these are myths that don't hold any anatomical water. When vocal teachers tell you to smile when singing, what they're aiming for is false vocal cord and external muscle retraction to avoid compression around the vibrating folds.

Try this - imagine you have to laugh without making any noise and without releasing air (you can imagine that you have a friend the other side of a plate glass window and you want them to see that you're laughing, but you can't let the people in the room know) - you'll feel your throat open. Now place your fingers either side of your adam's apple and slide down to just below it (this is harder to describe for women ) - if you do the same exercise, you'll feel the throat muscles move aside.

That's what the smiling is for, at least anatomically speaking.

Oh, and - leave your eyebrows where they are - there's nothing worse than the smacked clown look on a singer.


EDIT - forgot to actually answer the question - if the smile / laugh technique is being used to remove constriction in the throat (which implies it has been correctly studied as a separate technique until singers can feel the retraction happening) then it will help people avoid singing flat because they will require less air to make their notes, less air means less cord resistance and less likelihood of bowed cords - therefore less likelihood of a note going slightly flat. I would say that he's right that smiling, if well done, can help - but that one has to know what one is doing and what one is supposed to feel when one does it - it's perfectly possible, for example, to do an insincere smile, which won't move anything in the throat.

That works well - it's always good to hear a variety of ways of achieving the same end.

My teacher descibes tone like a cable that's been cased in. The cable is the core sound you start with; it needs space on the bottom (i.e. the casing on the bottom of the cable) and colour on the top (i.e. the casing on the top of the cable). I find this is a good analogy. The thing about the cheekbones and the surprised look are kind of a means to where we want the placement to be - whatever they do with those always needs refining slightly.

It is always of course difficult to put these things into words!

It is surprising how many different ways there are to do the same thing, eh!

I like the cable analogy, too. Thanks!

Hmmm... In my experience there are a hundred different things you can do that will stop you from singing flat, and none of them actually work for very long. The best way to pull it off, I think, is probably to think about not singing flat. At the same time, smiling makes you look and sound nicer, so do that too!

Not quite 'on thread' but this reminds me of a performance of Carmina Burana I went to at The Bridgewater Hall with the Halifax Choral Society (One of the worst performances I've ever been to!) The baritone soloist (whos name escapes me) only seems to open one side of his mouth ! The right side opened wide up his cheek, but the left hardly opened at all, giving him a most unattractive lop-sided look. How a professional singer can sing like that, I havent a clue, it surely must have affected the kind of sound he made.

In choirs, I have sometimes written at the top of a piece 'Push sharp' as a reminder to try and keep the whole choir up.

nothing beats subconscious memory after scales at the piano -- "smiling", "thinking high" all depend on some idea of the notion being there in the first place somewhere. but smiling thru a requiem is very wrong.

Doesn't it depend on whether you liked the person or not?!

(There is a priest here who starts each one by saying that we are there for a celebration)

You are spot on David. My choir conductor always tells people to smile and I always think it is a dangerous instruction for the reasons you give above.

I always try to think of resistance in the cheekbones, actually placing my fingers along them at first if necessary, but keeping the jaw dropped back down and the mouth nice and oval with resistance at the sides - that way you get the resonance in the cheeks but keep the couperto which protects the voice and gives good clean vowels. The delighted suprise look is also a good one as you say.

Flat singing is most usually due to too much air being pushed at the vocal cords, thus learning better air control and relaxing the musculature around the larynx are likely to help. Thinking high won't help unless you're the kind of person who thinks high and then automatically does the things I've just described.

Keeping the soft palate up won't help prevent you singing flat either - it's a resonance thing, if when you move your soft palate, your tuning goes bad, then you have some fierce technique problems to address (and should probably avoid singing anything in French!)

Does smiling make you sound nicer? It very much depends on how you want to sound. Smiling when you want a dark sound would be disastrous (given that it effectively shortens the vocal tract). Smiling makes you sound brighter might be a more accurate thing to say.

Also, try not to depend too much on the piano - remember they aren't actually in tune !