Vocal Breaks, Cracks In The Voice
It’s called a glottal stroke, but it isn’t something to send you to the emergency room. If you’re a serious singer, you might feel like you wish it could be handled – immediately. There are more names for the most unwanted or distasteful or vulgar things in life, it seems. How many ways are there, to say crap? Point made.
Crack, break in the voice, register transition issue, or whatever else we wish to call it, most people don’t want it. Some yodel through it. Some try to make it part of their signature style, but it is a very slim minority of professionals who get away with that.
Listeners often perceive a crack in your voice as a weakness and some think you are lazy and should just power your way through it. Is it a weakness?
Strength Or Coordination Problem?
It’s not a muscle weakness. In fact, many singers have their voices so strong that they can sing thorugh the break, or crack, by forcing the vocal folds together. It is called hyperadduction and is dangerous.
Why is it dangerous? It can cause irritation than can lead to blisters, blood blisters, hemorrhage, and eventually to nodules.
The problem with nodules is that they reduce your range and destroy certain qualities in your voice. Nodules are not nodes. Nodes are glands, such as are in the lymphatic system. Nodules are calluses and they do not vibrate the same as healthy vocal folds do, thus the sound is altered, usually for the worse. Most singers don’t want to have reduced range.
Despite all this, if the vocal folds remain in close proximity to one another, there is no crack in the voice. The crack happens when the vocal folds suddenly fly apart and readjust and produce a lighter tone production, sometimes a breathy one. The skill and coordination needed are keeping the vocal folds together and the pressure uniform, regardless of the range or passaggio.
Many people have the issue of the larynx jumping up or rising as they ascend in pitch. At a point, muscles used typically for swallowing get involved and hyper-adduct the vocal folds. This can also cause the disconnection (or the crack).
The Solution?
If the vocal folds stay together and the larynx doesn’t rise, cracks never, or almost never, happen. A split-second of a rising larynx or lapse of healthy adduction and the crack will happen as pitch ascends, however.
How can you get your voice to do this, to behave?
If you sing with your larynx imposed, or down, all the time, you may sound like Yogi Bear. Very few singers sing with the larynx down. It may prevent a crack, but it also makes the words muddy or fuzzy or unintelligible and you may not want the dark, throaty, or hollow sound in your voice.
There was a school of thought that I heard from an announcer, who said to keep the larynx down for as long as possible regardless of the pitch as it ascends. Most people don’t want to hear the affectation of the Yogi Bear impression. One singer has made a career of it, but there is only one of him.
What can we do to stop the crack?
Vocal Exercises
They don’t involve weights.
Vocal exercises can help you to tame the beast in your throat. The wild animal called your larynx has muscles, ligaments and cartilages in it. The muscles can be trained to work for singing, even though there is another primary purpose for the larynx.
Your vocal folds are the swallowing “safety net”. If the epiglottis doesn’t successfully close off the tube to your lungs, the vestibule of the larynx, which leads to the trachea, You choke. In normal swallowing, the vocal folds tightly close, as the larynx rises, every time you swallow something.
This might account for the larynx rising as you sing higher, unless you have it trained to not jump up like an excited Pomeranian.
There are vocal exercises for laryngeal stability, for safe and adequate adduction, for control of pitch, and for having excellent endurance. There are also vocal exercises which are useless or even harmful. It’s vital to know the ones to use and in what progressive order, so that your voice develops without injury or unnecessary delays.
You can learn to use your voice to your best advantage, when you do exercises for strength and control.