Find Your Primal Voice and Keep Your Vocals Healthy

A little bit of primal screaming or grunting can really work in some songs, but what does it take to find your primal voice? How deep do you need to go to discover it? What can it sound like and, essentially, how can you pull it off without damaging your voice?

The History

We start with maybe the most important question: what is the primal voice? To find the answer, we need to take a little look at the history of vocal techniques and, actually, the history of music. Here, we’re guided by the experienced vocal coach, Alfons Verreijt.

Traditionally, music has been split into two main movements: folk music and art music. The origins of folk music go much further back than art music – probably all the way back to prehistory and, as such, we can only guess what the earliest folk music sounded like. There are no recordings and nothing has been written down, simply because, much like storytelling, this music was passed down through the generations by word-of-mouth. It might be that the folk music of today gives us some impression of the folk music from way back when, but we’ll never know. Today, pop music actually sits much closer to folk music than art music does. But we’ll talk about this more later.

Art Music

What’s known as art music first emerged during the middle ages, starting with church music. The Gregorian arrangements are the most well-known from the period, where prayers were set to melodies. Initially, these pieces were performed by a single voice and, later, more voices were added. This is also the same period when music started to be written down for the first time, laying the foundation for musical notation which became more and more sophisticated as the centuries passed before it became the musical notation we know today.

Art music emerged from religious music and, as it developed, more notation rules were added to help summarise pieces as they became more complex. These rules grew into a strict set of musical regulations, which had a stark contrast with folk music, which was and is so much more free simply because it was passed on rather than written down. You can already see similarities with pop music, which is very often learned and played by ear and isn’t regulated by the strict rules of classical music.

Now we’ll look at singing. While folk music was sung freely – just like in pop music now – classical singing was and still is regulated by strict rules. Around 400 years ago, an ideal vocal sound emerged within classical music, of which bel canto is most well known. Even today bel canto is applied to classical singing.

Getting Louder

The ideal vocal sound within classical music also had a practical aim. During the Renaissance period, orchestras as well as the venues where they performed were getting bigger and bigger, forcing vocalists to sing louder and louder. To reach the required volume, singers had to physically change the way they sang. They did this by creating as much space above their vocal cords as possible, so that as much sound as possible was allowed to escape without being hindered. During the process, the body becomes the resonance chamber of the voice. To achieve this way of singing, the larynx needs to be pushed down while the soft palate is raised, all to produce a bigger, more room-filling sound. Essentially, classical singing uses the same vocal tract position that’s used when shouting. This always works really well when sounding vowels, which is why training your voice with scales and vowel sounds is referred to as vocalising. The downside to the ideal classical vocal sound is that consonants are harder to annunciate, which makes it harder to understand the words that are being sung. This is something you generally want to avoid when singing folk or pop music, since you want people to understand what the song is about.

Also, the classical method sort of blurs the differences between voices. The character of someone’s singing voice is created within the channel that the vocal sound passes through after it’s generated by the vocal cords. This ‘channel’ is different for everyone. In classical singing, the channel is held so wide open that the influence it has over the vocal sound is minimal. This is why it’s much easier to recognise the voice of different pop singers than different classical singers, because pop singers actually sing with ‘their own voice’, which lies closer to their natural speaking voice.

What is Singing?

So, what exactly is singing? For centuries, classical singing was considered the only real singing method. Because folk and pop music is more commonly sung with the speaking voice, there are a few classical purists don’t consider this singing at all, and everyone seems to have their opinion of what singing is and what it isn’t. “In reality, you can’t really draw a line between what is actually singing and what isn’t,” vocal coach Alfons Verreijt explains. “If you state that adding a melody to the sound means that it’s singing, then you could say that speaking is singing, because even speech has a melody to it. But we don’t view speaking as singing. In my opinion, it’s a sliding scale with a highly subjective and undefined line between what is considered singing and what isn’t.”

This ‘sliding scale’ can actually be easily illustrated (see the table below). At one end of the scale, we have ‘parlando’, which means speech, and at the other end we have classical singing, with rap, pop/folk singing and jazz singing falling in between. The further you move to the right and towards classical singing, the more important it is to listen with a more critical ear in terms of purity. Over on the parlando end, when you speak, your voice has a certain pitch but when speaking with music, your voice never sounds out of tune with the music. This is pretty weird, all things considered. Alfons thinks he can explain this: “The further you shift to the right on the scale, with classical singing at the top, the more open the the voice gets. So less and less colour is added by the vocal channel above the vocal cords. This makes the note much clearer and more audible, without any of the added ‘noise’ of the voice’s natural character. Normal speech has the most noise, or character. The more open the note, the more important the purity of the voice.

The Primal Voice

After this (necessary) diversion, we finally come to our initial question: what is the primal voice? “That’s a hard question to answer,” Alfons admits. “Especially when you think about what we just described as singing and not singing. Technically speaking, you could describe classical singing as tapping into the primal voice, because in it, you hear the vocal cords in their purest form. But of course, that’s not what we’re talking about when we say ‘primal’. When talking about the primal voice, we’re talking about yelling, screaming or grunting.”

We start with yelling and screaming, which are great vocal techniques, but need to be performed carefully. “Yelling and screaming is, by definition, performed at a high volume,” Alfons explains. “To do it carefully, so without damaging your vocal cords, you always need to do it without compression. So, if you normally sing with compression, like in most pop and rock music, and want to add a yell or scream, then you need to learn to switch the compression on and off.” In an earlier article, Alfons explains how to sing with and without compression and pointed out the crucial difference between the two. Here’s a short summary of the technique.

Singing With and Without Compression

By actively pressing your vocal cords together, compression is applied to your voice. Pop music singers use a lot of compression, but singing with compression comes with some limitations because, when using it, you’re unable to sing really softly or really loudly. When you do try to sing any louder or softer, you’ll risk damaging your vocal cords.

When the vocal cords tighten when singing, along with the surrounding muscles that push the vocal cords against each other (the adductors), this is referred to as the active mode of singing, or more commonly: compression. Here the vocal cords are actively involved in creating the note and the pitch. As well as an active mode, there is also a passive mode, where the vocal cords are still pressed together by the adductors, but remain relaxed. This passive mode of singing is commonly referred to as singing without compression. But how do you switch compression on and off? When singing without compression, your throat feels more open, as if the vocal cords aren’t pressed together, but they actually are, it’s just that they are completely relaxed. How is this achieved? It’s all about the in-breath. When breathing in, you keep your throat open, so if you want to sing without compression, you need to maintain that open feeling. Have a look at the table below to get a clearer idea of the differences between singing with and without compression.

Grunting

Grunting can definitely be seen as a form of the primal voice. In some styles of music, like death metal, whole songs are performed using the grunting technique but there are also a lot of pop songs that include a little grunting. While it can sound really bad for your vocal cords, if you do it properly, grunting won’t cause any damage. When you grunt, you don’t even really use your actual vocal cords, but your ‘false’ vocal cords. This is why you can’t sing a melody when grunting, because the false vocal cords aren’t capable of intonating. Grunting is also performed without compression. The false vocal cords are violently vibrated while the physical vocal cords remain dormant, so it’s also impossible to grunt in a high pitch. While it’s largely male singers who grunt, like Karl Willets from the death metal band Bolt Thrower, there’s virtually no difference in the size of male and female false vocal cords, so female grunters can sound almost as low pitched as male grunters. A great example of a female grunter is Angela Gossow from Arch Enemy.

What’s your primal voice? Is it a yell, a scream, a grunt or even a Tarzan-style yodel? Whatever it is, we wish you the best in finding it.

See also…

» Microphones & Accessories
» Vocal Books
» Vocal Effects

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