How to sustain your voice in any environment. (Copy)

Sustaining your voice over a night out can be challenging… learn this new voice exercise to help maintain the pitch and resonance you desire.

So you’ve done all this work on gender voice presentation. You’ve modified your pitch and altered your resonance to have the darkness or brightness you prefer… only for it to drop out or completely disappear when you raise your voice to be heard.

Whether socializing in a bar, talking in a loud restaurant, or yelling at your loved ones, sustaining your voice is challenging when raising your volume. Enter…

Messa Di Voce!

Messa di voce, "placing the voice," comes from the Italian mettere (to place) and is traditionally a technique used by singers. Messa di voce is not for the faint of heart, as it’s been called one of the most difficult exercises for singers to master.

Lucky for you, I use a modified version of the exercise with my clients to help train their voices when both loud and quiet.

To master messa di voce it’s important to know where your power comes from when increasing your volume, and that’s breath. Remember all that work we did on diaphragmatic (belly) breathing? NO? ok… here’s a refresher.

Ok, now that we’re on the same page it’s time to talk about breath and loudness. Basically the more air you expel the louder you’ll speak. To sustain a louder volume over an extended period of time, you’ll need to be able to control your airflow. That’s where messa di voce comes in.

Messa di voce exercise trains breath control by sustaining a single tone while moving up and down in loudness.

So how do you do it?

Use a comfortable pitch for easy relaxed voicing.

Start with the quietest pinpoint sound and smoothly increase in loudness, really opening up at the top (crescendo), before sliding back down the to the quietest sound (decrescendo) sustaining a single pitch all the way through.

Because we’re focusing on loudness and resonance, it’s helpful to change up the sound you’re using to practice.

Try starting with a closed mouth “MMMM” sound to really feel the vibration in the face, then opening up to a nice “EEEE” on your way down. You can then move on to the words “MMMM-AAAA” and “MMMM-OOOO”.

Tips when practicing messa di voce:

• No whispering. To ensure you’re maintaining voicing through the whole scale, it’s important to start out with a quiet but clear sound, no breathiness!

• Make sure you’re using a belly breath

• No breath holding before starting, think “breath in - voice out”, with no pause in between.

• Make sure you’re starting and stopping quiet. Don’t spend all your breath getting louder and have none left to get quiet.

• If you’re someone who benefits from visualizing: Think out and in (loudness) as opposed to up and down (pitch)

• DON’T STRAIN! If you feel any tension, stop, take a few relaxing breaths, and start over. It can be helpful to do the exercise in the mirror to make sure you’re not tensing your throat muscles.

Let me know how it works for you! if you have ANY questions or need some feedback on how you’re doing, reach out via email or shoot us a a message!

For more guidance and exercises to achieve the gender voice presentation that most represents YOU, check out our comprehensive gender voice program, Undead Voice Lab.