Your brain sings before you do.
That’s essentially what my work, NeuroVocal for Popular Styles, is based on. Any motor action has to happen in your brain before it happens in your body, including singing. The singing voice is also affected by other elements involved in predictive processing, like beliefs, perspective, emotions, and language. Your brain does a whole lot of singing before you do.
Here I’ll share two studies (there are many) to illustrate how your brain predicts, and how those predictions show up in real measurable, physiological ways.
The first study is about wine tasting. In this study, the participants were offered three samples of wine. The samples were indicated by their price, and participants were asked to rate the quality of each sample. The majority of participants rated the more expensive wine as being better tasting. However, all three samples were from the same bottle of wine.
The people in the study were neither lying nor pretentious. Their brains were predicting a sensory experience based on the available information, which included the price of the wine. Their brains had learned through inference over time to associate higher-priced things with better-quality things. And so their brain inferred that wine with a higher price tag was a better-tasting wine.
The other study, called Mind Over Milkshakes, showed how our bodies respond physiologically to our beliefs. When you’re hungry, your stomach releases a hormone called ghrelin. Grehlin tells your brain you’re hungry and slows your metabolism. When your stomach is full the release of ghrelin is suppressed and your metabolism speeds up.
Here the participants were offered two milkshakes, one of which was called Sensishake, and carried a label that it was 140 calories. The other was called Indulgence and the label indicated a 620 calorie shake. The people who drank the milkshake labeled 140 calories experienced hunger sooner. The ghrelin levels of participants who drank the Indulgence shake dropped about three times more and staved off their hunger longer. The thing was, though, that the shakes were exactly the same at about 300 calories. People’s physiology responded differently based on their beliefs.
Why do we care about wine and milkshakes and how our subjective assessment affects our physiology if we’re talking about singing? These are examples of predictive processing; your beliefs about your environment affect your body. The singer’s experience of singing — the sound, feel, and aesthetics — is predicted by their brain and influenced by their physiology.
This matters to us as singers because of how we experience our practicing and our coaching sessions in relation to our performances. Physiological markers change in response to perceptions and environment.
Singers typically practice and have coaching sessions in an acoustic environment; their home, car, or shower. Even if they practice with a microphone, that is not the same as rehearsal with the band. Most of their singing is done in an acoustic environment where there’s little to no impedance to their ability to hear and feel their singing. Practice is generally done with an intention to increase both skill and expression and is generally done in an acoustic environment. Their familiarity with the embodied experience of singing, with the perceptions that accompany that experience, are molded in familiar, acoustic environments wherein the singer can hear herself well.
Once the singer hits the stage all that changes. The experience of singing changes radically in the presence of amplified instruments and voice, and an unfamiliar environment. The brain’s sensory experience is on overdrive, and the ability to contextualize so much sensory information is limited. The brain’s prediction pathway is tilting hard toward sensory input, and it has to choose what sensory input is most important.
If the singer has taught herself to relate to her singing based on how she hears herself in familiar, acoustic environments, then performing in an amplified situation where she may not be able to hear herself well or at all, along with being bombarded with other sensory stimuli, becomes disregulating. Her perceptions will influence her physiology, and she may experience stress, vocal limitations during performance, or extreme fatigue afterward.
My work, NeuroVocal Method, is based primarily on the brain’s predictive processing, and the stability of your internal sense of your singing. When you make sound, you create movement. You physically move and the air that is moving creates vibration, which is also movement. It’s possible to “train the brain” to focus attention on the specific interoceptive sensory experience that singing creates. The experience of movement and vibration is reliable (colds and congestion notwithstanding).
If your brain sings before you do, but it’s not being filtered through aesthetic and sonic expectations, or perceptions and beliefs, but is instead initiated with an expectation for an interoceptive experience of movement, then the experience of singing is easier and more reliable.
Meredith Colby is the author of Money Notes: How to Sing High, Loud, Healthy and Forever, and the creator of NeuroVocal Method, an approach to coaching for popular styles based on brain science.
Meredith teaches privately online to professional & adult singers, and voice teachers & coaches from all over the world.
You can get information and book individual sessions or classes from this site.
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#meredithcolby blog post about #brainscience and the power of #predictiveprocessing. This is a foundation theory behind #neurovocal , created for #singers, voice teachers, and vocal coaches by Colby. This post contains #freedownload of an original #ebook about #bandsingers, #singersongwriters, and how voice professionals can help them. Meredith is a #voicecoach, a #vocalcoach, and a #voiceteacher from #chicago. She helps #voiceteachers and #vocalcoaches teach for #popularstyles and #microphonestyles by teaching privately, supplying helpful content, and offering a #certificationclass in #neurovocalmethod.
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