Freedom is the opposite of control. Any effort to directly control the voice’s natural functioning will create stiffness and interfere with free, expressive and enjoyable singing. 

Freedom, on the other hand, brings with it a better kind of control that amounts to an intimate and trusting relationship with your voice.

Using the body’s intelligence: 

Our bodies grow and maintain themselves through processes that are complex and happen without our conscious effort or intervention. The voice, likewise, develops and functions best through its own agency and living intelligence. The voice’s neuromuscular resources are mostly reflexive and proprioceptive, which means they happen well below our conscious control.

Conscious access to unconscious processes:

Just like breathing, the voice is partly conscious and also unconsciously controlled. We cannot directly control the tiny muscles in the larynx and the throat, but we can set them in motion by giving them a job to do. They respond quite predictably to vocal exercises and our 3 main levers of influence are:

• Pitch: The note you are singing, say middle C
• Intensity: How loud you are singing
• Vowel: In vocal pedagogy, learning to sing pure and consistent vowels is very important. We generally use 5 basic vowels of ee, eh, ah, oh and oo. Once these are mastered, the other vowels found in various languages can also be developed.

Intuition:

As mentioned, the body has the ability to find its own preferred balance and coordination of muscles, but the conscious mind can also participate and speed up the process by paying attention to what works, repeating it and applying conscious effort where it is most effective. Thus, we learn to cooperate with natural processes.

Your voice is fickle: There will always be days when the voice doesn’t respond as well as it did in the past, influenced by one’s overall health, hydration, tiredness and whether you’ve warmed up sufficiently (without overdoing it!). Good vocal technique can help us to get through these rough spots.