If you’ve done some digging into learning to sing, you’ve probably come across the word ‘resonance’.
The actual definition of the word resonance by Oxford Diction is “the quality in a sound of being deep, full and reverberating.”
This is actually quite a close definition to what resonance means in regard to singing!
In the simplest terms, resonance in singing is just where you feel your voice in your body.
Resonance is felt by a sort of vibration feeling.
If you hum any note, you’ll notice that your voice causes a sort of buzz or vibration in specific places in your body. If you hum a pretty low note, you’ll feel that resonance, or that buzz or vibration feeling, in your chest and in your mouth, either down by your lower jaw, throat or close to your teeth. If you hum a higher note, you’ll feel the vibration in your head, perhaps in the back of your head, or locating by your forehead.
These are all places that your voice resonates when you use your voice to do anything. If you simply speak with your talking voice, you can even feel the resonance (vibration) travel down your neck a bit if you’re in a low enough pitch.
Okay—great. Now we know that resonance just means it’s where you feel your voice in your body.
What’s the importance of that?
It’s actually very important!
Where you feel your voice helps you to more accurately place your voice in the right vocal placement.
Vocal placement is how to sing throughout your range without strain or tension. Instead of pushing or forcing your voice to hit certain notes, singing is about how to put your voice in the right places in your mouth so that it can access those notes. When you are learning vocal placement (I have a post on vocal placement over here!), for example, if you are learning Chest Voice (your lowest notes), in order to find that placement, it is very helpful to know that your voice should be close to the front of your face, right behind your front teeth. You will be able to easier find this placement by focusing on where you feel your voice resonating – when you feel it vibrate or buzz right behind your front teeth.
If you are singing in Mixed Voice or Head Voice, those vocal placements are located under your soft palate (the upper back of your mouth, which raises when you yawn). You will feel your voice resonate there, under your soft palate, when you sing higher notes. Therefore, it’s very helpful to know what that resonance feels like there, so that you can more easily find that vocal placement, therefore be able to access your high notes (which are only accessible when your voice is under your soft palate).
Here is a diagram I drew of where you will feel your voice in these three placements, or vocal registers:
Try not to overthink resonance in singing - truthfully, it just means where you feel your voice.
I hope this blog post resonated with you (sorry, I had to xD), and you are able to feel where your voice goes in order to help you with your vocal placement, so that you can unlock freedom in your voice.
As always, leave any questions below, and I offer online voice lessons here if you need any other help!
Happy Singing!