If you remember the classic musical The Music Man, you will remember Professor Harold Hill’s claim that River City kids who joined his band would learn to play their instruments almost magically by using the “think method.” He said playing a clarinet or trumpet is just like whistling, you think high, and the notes go high; think low and the pitch lowers. Of course, that whole idea was a scam created by a skilled con artist. Musical instruments do not work the same way whistling or singing does. But when you really think about it…how do we change the pitch of our voices? What gives us the ability to sing higher or lower tones and why can some people consistently sing a song on the correct pitch while others sound more like a droning bee? The answers lie in understanding the way we produce notes, and our ability to hear and match the pitch of a song.

Your vocal cords are located inside your larynx, a structure made of cartilage, which can be found at the front of your throat. The cords are made up of folds of membranes that vibrate when air pushed up from the lungs passes them. Since all sound is made up of vibrations, that is easy enough to picture. Each tone in a musical scale actually vibrates at a precise rate of speed, so if you are singing an A above Middle C, for example, your cords are vibrating at 440 times per second.  So, how do you change the pitch of the sound you produce from high to low and back again? It might help if you think about Prof. Hill’s band instruments again. Which ones make the lowest sounds? The big ones, right? It is the tuba, sousaphone, and baritone sax that produce the bass notes in a band. Conversely, the smallest instruments, like flutes and piccolos create the highest sounds. That’s why men, who are usually bigger than women and have longer vocal cords, also have lower voices.

If you watch a guitar player or violinist play, you will notice that their fingers depress the strings further away from the neck of their instruments when they are playing higher notes. They actually shorten the amount of the string that can vibrate when the pitch is higher. We do the same thing to our vocal cords without even knowing we are doing it. When you sing “The Star Spangled Banner” and reach for the highest notes on the “rocket’s red glare,” you are actually thinning and shortening your vocal cords. Only the front end of your vocal cord is used to produce a high note. This shorter useable length of the cord allows it to vibrate faster and therefore make a high-pitched sound.

Most people have trouble hitting higher notes when trying to sing for the simple reason that their bodies tend to tense and tighten as the notes go higher. If the muscles around your throat, neck and jaw are tense, there is not enough room for the vocal cords to vibrate fully. If you are having trouble singing in the higher registers, you should concentrate on relaxing your upper body as much as possible. If your head is held high, your throat is relaxed, and your muscles are loose, the tones you produce should not only sound pleasing to the ear, but they should soar to the sky as well.

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