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... a few words about music.
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Your Essential Voice, Part 2 – Sounding “Just Like Yourself”
September 23, 2020
Last week, I wrote about our Essential Voice: the voice each of us was born with, to express our unique selves. It’s such a vital topic, I want to add another piece: about uniqueness, not sounding like anyone else.
When I was in high school, I sang a lot of folk music. People used to compliment me by saying things like, “Ooh, you sound just like Judy Collins,” or sometimes “…just like Joni Mitchell.” Yes, I was a young woman with long blonde hair too, who sang a lot of the songs they had recorded. I loved those songs, and their singing. But I wasn’t trying to sound like them! Though the comparison was kind of flattering to my teenaged self, I never aspired to sound like anyone else, so I always found it uncomfortable too.
One of the reasons I might have unconsciously taken on something of their sound, is the physical phenomenon known as entrainment. It’s when, without our consciously intending or trying to, our bodies come into alignment with other bodies around them. (A typical example is when young women go off to college, and after a while most of them in the same dorm find their monthly periods have synchronized.) Choral singers notice they tend to sing better if a really good singer is standing next to them—or worse if someone with a lot of tension or constriction is next to them instead. They may not realize why, but their muscles, and their ears, are unconsciously mirroring the sensations and sound production around them. By learning some of my folk repertoire from recordings by singers I liked, I probably did start to sound a bit like them.
Meanwhile, there are many singers and aspiring singers who feel genuinely uncomfortable with their own sound. So they might be pleased to be told they sound “just like…” –but there’s always a level of awkwardness with that. Remember what I said last week about the Not-Me sound produced by tension or old habits, the sound that’s less beautiful than it can be when those habits begin to dissolve? Not-Me can also apply to a beautiful sound, if it’s Not-Your own beautiful sound. It’s still not your essential voice.
Lately I’ve been back in contact with a woman who studied with me 7-8 years ago—we’ll call her Dee. Dee shared with me about the long-lasting impact of an exchange we had during an early lesson. Around that time, someone had told her her voice sounded “just like” a certain well-known opera singer. She wondered if that was true, and then probably had been trying to encourage her voice to emulate that sound. (A famous opera singer has to sound better than little ol’ me, right?) During one lesson, she asked me, “Do I sound like _____?” Apparently I said emphatically, “No, Dee, you sound like YOU!” And what she tells me now is that that response was profound for her, for the way she felt immediately and still feels about her voice. She wants to sound like herself. And she does.
This week, I was teaching a young woman who’s been working beautifully with the self-confidence issues that affect her singing. The singing and the confidence are improving all the time, and she enjoys starting to sing now with others (in safe spaces, of course). Her concern though, like many people who are shy to share their singing, is still that the voice isn’t “good enough.” She’s getting over it, and was helped when a new singing-friend said to her the other day when she was feeling shy: “You sound great! But anyway, look at people like Bob Dylan. He doesn’t sing well at all, but people love his music. You have your own voice, that nobody else in the world has.”
Exactly. Just as there’s no one else in the world who is just like you, there’s no one else in the world who sounds just like you: your unique voice, carrying your own vibration and soul out into the world.
So sing out!
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A workshop, "Finding Your Voice," is one I've given often, and have now moved online.
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©Danielle Woerner 2020
