So chest and head voice are terms get used a lot and I don’t use them because I find that they are misleading.
What they’re referring to is a feeling of vibration either in the chest or the head.
The problem I have with these terms is that you really only experience these in the extremes and if you’re trying to “push your voice” to those places then you could be doing more harm than good and I have seen this with a lot of people.
The terms have been around for years and they can be useful if you know what you’re talking about and what it means but what I have found is these terms have been taken and kind of just given as they are, and not fully explained and what has happened is people have started trying to take them literally and trying to “push their voice” either to their head or their chest and that can cause problems.
So basically any vibrations that you’re feeling in your chest in your head, they’re an outcome of what you’re doing with your voice not what you’re actually doing with your voice.
Your vocal folds are here in your throat. They vibrate together to create sound – that’s how they work, and I think this concept of head voice particularly can cause frustration for people if they’re trying to feel a vibration here (in the head) and they’re feeling a vibration here (in the throat), they feel like they’re doing it wrong, but they’re not.
What Terms Have I Found More Helpful?
So I think one of the things with chest and head voice as terminology is that they’re just – it’s very broad and it’s kind of covering, or trying to cover multiple elements of the voice kind of coming together, and everybody’s interpreted that differently. So what I tend to do is break it out into the different elements.
I think also I find that chest and head voice get used as terminology in different ways when somebody’s talking about singing compared to when somebody’s talking about speaking.
So one of those vocal elements that is the one that I tend to kind of go to when I am sort of unpacking chest and head voice is the setup of the vocal, the vibration pattern of the vocal folds.
The terms I use for this and modal and falsetto and that is a big topic and I am running out of time on this video so I’m gonna do another one.
Modal and falsetto are the terms that I start with when I am unpacking this concept of chest and head voice.
So, our vocal folds are muscles, and they vibrate together to create sound.
Model is basically referring to the vocal fold muscles being engaged and falsetto is when the vocal fold muscles are not engaged.
So the vocal fold muscles being engaged or disengaged changes the thickness of the vocal folds.
And now the way that we produce pitch is the vocal folds vibrate together at a different speed. So higher pitch is faster, lower pitch is slower.
So where this comes in with modal and falsetto is that falsetto does tend to be sort of the higher notes and modal is sort of lower notes but there is this cross over and I call that the gear change.
And this is where chest and head become really really confusing for a lot of people. Because when we’re talking about speech, we don’t want to be speaking in falsetto, we speak in modal. But neither modal or falsetto is just on or off. You can have thick or thin modal and anywhere in between.
So to kind of bring this back round to that concept of chest and head voice and unpacking that.
As I said in my first video about this, you kind of only experience the feelings of vibration in the chest and in the head in the extremes. (Because you’re not creating the vibration in your head or chest, it’s just a “knock-on” effect, which not everyone experiences in the same way)
And that means that if you’re trying to aim for a head voice you’re more likely to potentially end up in falsetto which is not what we want for speech. (This is just one example of something I have seen coming from the concept of head voice. There are more, and there are problematic things that aiming for “chest voice” could get you doing as well.)
And I will talk about chest and head and modal falsetto and everything in terms of singing in some other videos.
So in terms of speech, the reason that I don’t feel chest and head is really helpful is because if you’re trying to push or aim to feel something in your head or in your chest, then you don’t actually know what you’re doing with your vocal folds.
And therefore, for example, if you’re aiming for head voice, you may end up going into falsetto, which we don’t want.
What you do want to be doing is exploring all the different elements that come together within the voice. This is things like pitch, resonance, volume, inflections, onsets and offsets, language use, breath use and a whole bunch more.