What is a Vowel? 

A vowel is a blend of frequencies determined by the shape of the resonating cavities in your throat and mouth. Our ears can identify the different vowels based on the frequencies of which they are made.

In voice training, we tend to use the five “Italian” vowels of “ah”, “eh”, “ee”, “oh” and “oo”. If you observe the workings of your own mouth and tongue, you can see that:

• “Ah” has the tongue lying fairly flat in the mouth, whereas in “ee” it forms a hump, quite far forward in the mouth. The “eh” vowel is intermediate between “ah” and “ee”.
• “Oo” is largely formed by pursing the lips, with some minor mounding of the tongue further back than the “ee”. The “oh” vowel is intermediate between “ah” and “oo”.

We already know how to pronounce vowels without even thinking about them and in singing we don’t want the conscious mind to interfere with natural processes, but it is pedagogically important that you learn to hear your own vowels accurately and pronounce them precisely. 

Why are vowels so useful? 

The vowel controls the shape of the resonating spaces in your throat and mouth, not directly by manipulating things as in “shaping the tongue” or “singing through a yawn” but by simply thinking of the vowel and singing it. The vowel can be detected and controlled by using your ears. The instrument - your body - will adjust accordingly without you telling it exactly how. This is the best possible situation, where you have artistic control without needing to know all the ins and outs of how it happens! The mind decides and the body fulfils.

If your register balance doesn’t easily shift from chest dominance toward head dominance as you raise the pitch, your voice will need to raise the pitch by stretching the vocal cords tighter. The most accessible way to do this is for the larynx to be pulled up, which changes the resonance adjustment and the vowel. By working to keep the vowel consistent, we begin to counteract this tendency. 

The cost of this will be that the tone suffers or falls apart altogether at first. By allowing the voice to make some awkward, ungainly sounds because we are insisting on a good vowel, you are giving it the freedom to solve its own registration issues. The vowel becomes a stable platform for the voice to learn how to “rotate the registers”.

In vocal pedagogy, different vowels can be used to help the voice in specific ways. For instance, the “oo” vowel encourages the falsetto function. “Ah” will tend to encourage chest voice and an open throat, and “ee” can sometimes help with blending the registers. Sometimes a little experimentation with various vowels and musical figures (such as arpeggios, 5-note scales, octave leaps, etc) will create surprising and pleasing results.