Is singing on pitch important?

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PITCH AS A VOCALIST

So. Singing on pitch. First of all, I want to say that singing on pitch is important to me. As a singer, as a composer, and as a teacher, pitch accuracy matters to me on a body and spirit level.

Pitch is orienting, life-giving, and an essential part of musical mastery. And mastery also matters to me.

So how does one work with pitch as a process-oriented teacher, especially when someone struggles with pitch?

Music teachers and parents and adults are often (rightly) quite obsessed with singing on pitch. In some ways, how good your pitch is as a child is THE factor in determining whether people will tell you you have a good voice or whether they'll instead tell you to stop singing and please find other hobbies. (Oy! How sad! Singing and giving voice and moving that vibratory aliveness of ourselves through our bodies is a birthright for all of us!)

Some children can naturally and easily match pitch and others cannot. Having a strong sense of pitch is, in general, something certain humans are born with more than other humans are.

In my personal experience, when people hear that I work with voice, many say some variation of “I am a bad singer” or “oh, I’m tone deaf." But as far as actual “tone-deaf-ness” - the inability to hear differences in pitch - goes, a quick google search says only 4% of the population is truly tone deaf.

If that isn't what's going on, pitch can improve! It might take a while, but it's possible.

If you're a teacher, you might consider: how accurate is the person’s inner ear? In other words, are they hearing the correct pitches in their mind???? If so, they are not tone deaf but more likely are struggling to externalize what they are hearing internally.

How will you know if that's what's happening? One simple way is to notice whether as your student or client softens and moves into a parasympathetic dominant nervous system state their pitch improves.

Another simple way is to ask them to imagine the note in their mind for a while until they are certain it's clear internally. Only then must they sing the pitch out loud. Usually people are so beautifully eager to sing the pitch the teacher plays on the piano immediately, but asking them to imagine it first, calmly and un-rushed, makes time for the person to actually focus.

What do you think of that?

Yatharth:

So… briefly loosen the grip on pitch, so instead of the micro-managing pitch with the habits of tension we already know, we allow a different bodily intelligence to figure it out.

Marisa:

Right. Simplistically speaking, usually at first when students worry less about pitch accuracy, the breath frees, and then as the breath frees, pitch becomes more accurate!

And then as the muscles and organs related to giving voice becomes more differentiated from each other, and more coordinated, the ability to accurately sing the pitch that’s in your mind strengthens.

Counter-intuitively, this often means not worrying about pitch for a while in lessons, since when people are hyper focused on “getting things right,” they tense up and squeeze and hold back the breath.​¹

SHALINI ASKS...

Someone on our Mighty Networks ​Vocal De-Armoring channel​ asked this exact question recently:

Is singing on pitch a priority for you?

This someone was Shalini, who is finishing up her vocal pedagogy degree, and whose live class some of you might have taken in November. More from her:

“I received a vulnerable…message from someone who I’ve been working with for a short time…and who received harsh feedback from her partner about not being completely in pitch. It sounded like that feedback confused her more because it hadn’t been brought concretely to her notice before. I’ve always (very genuinely) appreciated her voice, and my priority with her has been relaxation and playfulness. But I wondered if I’d been irresponsible in a way, to “send her out” with that feeling of freedom and confidence despite her lack of perfect pitch. Of course I can hold her now in the two parts of her experience…

But I was wondering where pitch fits into this work, and how each of you hold it, whether in your own singing, or when working with other people. Really mulling over this right now, and I felt like sharing the question with this community.”

This question resonated with you, Yatharth. As a newer singer yourself, how does the concept of pitch impact you? How are you thinking about it?

Yatharth:

Yeah, pitch is an easy focus point. It’s an easier focus point for what to do in a lesson than playfulness, for example. I started off super concerned about pitch.

But the whole approach is embedded in this frame of right and wrong.

To me, singing is about freedom. There’s different kinds of freedoms. There’s functional freedom, which is the freedom to make my pitches at higher and lower ranges. There’s playful freedom, which is being able to sing shamelessly at my song circle and not really care.

All practice is in service of expanding my zone of freedom, in whichever dimension.

A MATTER OF PRIORITY?

Marisa:

This is beautiful. What that tells me is that you’re in touch with what your deeper priorities are. At the center of everything is your yearning towards freedom.

There are times when, as a teacher, bringing someone’s attention to pitch accuracy in a more disciplined way will also bring more freedom to the singing! Because - in truth - freedom is not randomness, chaos, and a sense of “whatever.” Developing skills is part of expanding one’s freedom.

With this in mind, sometimes focusing directly on pitch would be the perfect next thing to invite someone into a deeper and freer relationship with themselves, and other times when focusing on pitch would get in the way of that freedom unfolding.

That’s why I like the way Shalini phrased this question - as a question of priority. What are our priorities in any given moment?

If I’m “perfectly on pitch” but disconnected from the truth force flowing through me and out as voice, who cares?

If on the other hand, I’m connecting to this truth force flow, to my own honesty, but I’m not exactly on pitch, well, at least then I know what I need to keep practicing.

If you’re committed, and you put in the time, the path towards free(r)-ness will eventually (maybe not in this lifetime) lead to musical mastery.

But a path geared towards external perfection will not lead to freedom.

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Yatharth:

It’s funny. When I started out, I really did want external perfection. And I heard other singers say, that free singing is better singing, and so I thought, ah, I will pursue “freedom” as a way to be more perfect….

But somehow in the process of pursuing this (kind of unspecific and nebulous) “freedom,” I stopped caring so much about perfection, even when it came to pitch.

My little side-detour from perfection kind of changed my whole trajectory.

SO DOES PITCH IMPROVE?

Marisa:

So I'm curious, Yatharth, then what happened? Did your pitch improve? Or did it not improve but you just stopped caring? :-)

Yatharth:

Oh… my pitch did get worse. That kept me from allowing it to happen for so long.

I felt obsessive about pitch. In lessons, my singing teacher would say, don’t worry about it, it’ll sound funny for a while, but we’ll find more control later. But I just couldn’t listen. And I felt horrible I couldn’t let go. My mouth wouldn’t open and let me make shapes that felt less in control.

I ended up doing lessons with a different teacher. These were different. We did them on the beach. We started with a lot of bubble-making and safety-fun-playing. We made sounds with our lips closed, and played with pitch, making our mouth make the pitches our hands were tracing.

Somewhere in that process, I think I kind of forgot to care? It just became so fun. It didn’t happen immediately, but over many weeks, it became inscribed in my head: hey, these lessons are for fun, and freedom.

One day, as I was relaxing in the sun, alongside her, I noticed: my pitch accuracy was off my charts. I had so much control, and I didn’t know how, but, it seemed to be here, meanwhile I felt so relaxed.

I wasn’t used to feeling that relaxed. That’s not normal for me. Normal is tensing up my body in a shape I think is more likely to make an outcome happen, and make other people see I’m trying, goddamit. This is… I don’t know what it is, but it feels like drawing from an alternate timeline of fun, play, relaxation. The timeline where my body learned—the world can be dealt with from a place of default-relaxation, occasional stress sometimes.

Now my pitch accuracy is higher, and I’m freer too, and I had fun along the way.

PROCESS-ORIENTED VOCAL EDUCATION

Marisa:

It seems lessons with the new singing teacher was a big part of the shift. What was different about them?

Yatharth:

Safety. Play. Setting. Purpose. Like the whole thing was just different. The first few lessons, we barely sang; we spent time looking at paintings, and having me describe my inner creative world I see in response to them. We read Thich Nhat Hanh poems and breathed to them. We wiggled bodies like trees, and listened to the sounds of the birds.

Eventually, we began singing. Using our mouths anyway, making all sorts of strange noises. None of the stuff I’d been obsessing over, there was no room for me to obsess over. Because we sang with our mouths closed, so I couldn’t obsess over mouth placement. Because we slided up and down notes, I couldn’t obsess over hitting notes right. Because we sang “Ah” five different ways, I no longer felt so concerned about getting it right any single way.

All these activities we did, they told me: hey, your inner creative expression is safe. It’s wanted. It’s desired. It’s deeply part of the thing we’re doing.

My attention, very slowly, began dropping its grip on external perception, and began returning to the interiority of my soul, how the sounds felt to make, and what I wanted to do next. Somewhere in that process, my body must have learned how to sing on pitch.

Marisa:

I love hearing this!

Yatharth:

From a thread I wrote earlier:

a mother’s love rewrites the architecture of attention we may have learnt, where we put attention on another instead of having it naturally, without overwhelm or need to maintain it, stay on us

a mother’s love is rehabilitation of the exploratory system

It occurs to me that exploratory system is the very thing that’s alive, that lets our body learn to sing on pitch naturally.

SHALINI, AFTERMATH

Marisa:

Back to Shalini, she wrote in the channel after her student came to their next lesson:

[With my student,] I noticed I immediately became focused on this element of pitch as I assumed she would be as well, but to my surprise she couldn’t have cared less and was much more in an exploration of tension relief and like you said, playfulness! I did not feel an obligation to name this aspect of her singing as it didn’t seem as relevant to her journey, and found with more release and a smaller range she was able to match pitch more and more often.

This is, to me, a success story in a way. It can be a challenging balance to strike for someone learning - because we do want to improve in external ways, and I totally understand this!

And yet, at the same time, part of what is so magical about the intimacy of a singing process, is that you have the opportunity to come into deep and bodily contact with your inner world and your desires such as your desire to express, your desire to be seen and heard, your desire to impress. As I wrote earlier, singing is all of this - it is the practice of becoming more and more skilful at expressing your life force through your voice.

So keeping that in mind, a process oriented vocal practice can be the most wonderful playing field to know yourself more deeply as you engage the the ongoing process of staying in touch with your present moment truth (where you are with pitch, for example) while also honouring your desire to get better.

Mmm hmmm,
Marisa and Yatharth

1. Okay a caveat that pitch may actually become less accurate for a time, because you may have been able to squeeze out the right pitches and then as you let go of the squeezing, your body needs to discover a new way to sing accurately and this takes some time. But it's worth it!

I've written about this much more thoroughly in the chapters in my (still upcoming!) book about freedom and form. Broadly speaking - I want my freeing process to begin with freedom from - the letting go, the releasing, the shedding - before moving with more directionality towards the “freedom to” - the freedom to do what? to sing more authentically? to feel more alive? to give with less fear?