The Science of Vocal Pedagogy: Theory and Application [Paperback]

D. Ralph Appleman, a fixture in the (excellent) vocal department of Indiana University for some three decades, published this work in 1967 in an attempt to bring the science of acoustics, physics, and physiology to bear on the challenge of teaching people how to sing. The result is this book, which is essentially the "grandaddy" of scholarly texts on singing. (This review is based on the original hardcover.)

Take care: this is not an easy read. It is a cogent, well-researched textbook on how the vocal apparatus works. After covering respiration (proper breathing technique) and phonation (how the vocal folds vibrate, and how they relate to all the surrounding muscles, bones, and cartilage), he delves into the physics of the sung tone. To make his text clear and consistent, he uses IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) throughout the book.

The real meat of the book (at least for this singer and teacher) is his discussion of the various vowels and their proper production up and down the range of singers. He spends much of the book explaining "vowel migration", which is a technique of singing that requires each vowel to be adjusted as the singer ascends from chest voice into upper-middle and then head voice. (To reduce the chance of confusion, he refers to these different registers of the human voice simply as "stable vowel", "first migration", and "second migration".) The copious details regarding how the various parts of the singer's instrument (principally the positioning of the larynx - neutral, high or low, and the shape of the mouth) include such things as the frequency of the overtone that the throat and the mouth are "tuning" to (in his vocabulary, the "formants"). This research is helpfully illustrated via radiograms (an X-ray-like technology), which show the positions of the tongue, lips, velum, etc. of a singer in real-time (not just some theoretical drawing of where things should be).

Appelman set a high standard in explaining how the voice works. This is not a book for someone who just wants to learn how to sing. His primary audience is teachers of singing, many of whom (in my experience, anyway) have no clue about what is really going on physically when people sing. If a teacher tells a student, for example, to "sing in the mask", that is all well and good if the student already grasps that abstract concept. If the singer doesn't understand what "the mask" is, or how to "place the tone" there, the teacher can give such "imagery" instructions until they're blue in the face, and the singer will not improve.

Teachers: Know What Your Students Are Doing. This book will help, if you take the time to absorb its concepts. Once you know what your students are doing with their body, their "instrument", you can use any number of techniques to adjust their production technique.