Teaching Without Words

by Ellie Seligmann

When you think about it, teaching singing is a pretty crazy superpower.

If it were not enough that we are teaching singers to use muscles they’ve never heard of and whose activity we cannot see, here we are living in the world of conscious awareness trying to communicate with the subsconscious motor learning center in someone else’s brain, to convince it to execute a series of precisely coordinated movements (with the aforementioned invisible and unknown muscles) in order to produce and filter an efficient and expressive vocal sound on every possible combination of pitch and vowel – and we need this precise and multifaceted coordination to be infinitely reproducible!

No sweat, right? You’ve got this, Superhero.

The obstacle is, we are conditioned to communicate primarily with words, and words communicate with our student’s conscious mind, a part of the brain distinctly under-qualified for complex motor activity.

The subconscious mind responds to smells, tastes, images, feelings, and sounds, and those aren’t “languages” we readily speak. Words can be communicated through sound, but let’s face it, you’re reading my words right now, without sound.

But all is not lost! There are ways to communicate without words, and there are ways of using words to prompt the student to communicate with their own subconscious mind.

Here are just a few!

1. Replace words with gestures whenever possible. Of course, we use words to establish the expectation and justification of target behaviors, but for reminders, words are the wrong medium. If my student’s subconscious mind is actively processing vocal activity, the last thing I want to do is draw the student back into the conscious mind by activating the speech center. If she needs to lower her larynx, I stroke my neck; if he needs to correct his alignment, I shake out and “correct” my own, allowing the student to process the correction with the same part of the brain that will implement it.

2. Encourage the student to gesture or demonstrate instead of using words. “Point to where you felt tension,” or “move your hand up and down to show me how much pressure you feel in your throat while you sing this passage.” This keeps their attention on their tactile & kinesthetic awareness, which is processed in the subconscious mind, right where we want it.

3. Model the technique you are teaching. Humans possess powerful “mirror neurons” that copy human behaviors that we see and hear. It’s one of the reasons we sometimes catch ourselves mouthing the words along with our students. Mirror neurons are also responsible for the “spidey sense” that allows us to “feel” in our own instruments what our students are doing in those invisible internal places in their instruments. Our students possess those same mirror neurons, so when you demonstrate the coordination of mix technique, the student’s subconscious motor brain experiences a reliable model of the behavior it is aiming to learn. This works best when your voice and the student’s are similar in size and timbre, but it is effective even among disparate voices.

4. Take time in the moment for them memorize what “right” feels like. It’s tempting to ask a student “what did you feel?” with the idea that assigning words to the experience will make it easier to recall later. Unfortunately, when later comes, it is likely that the words are all they recall. If asked to describe what it feels like to ride a bicycle, you would likely struggle to give it any words at all, and you would be aware that any verbal description falls drastically short of the detail in your motor memory. To help students remember what they did right, encourage them to mentallyreplay it right away and feel it in their minds (activating those mirror neurons) to reinforce that rich, complex motor memory. Then ask them to do it again!

5. Encourage audiation & mental rehearsal. Audiation is hearing something in your mind that you are not hearing with your ears. In learning vocal technique, it is most useful to hear one’s own voice in one’s mind singing a particular passage absolutely perfectly. During this process, using the mirror neurons we discussed earlier, the motor brain runs through all of the steps it would take in order to produce the sound you hear in your mind. It actually learns how to produce that sound!

Mental rehearsal is using audiation for entire practice sessions. If you’ve found the perfect sound in your mind and you rehearse your repertoire over and over with only those perfect iterations for your motor brain to execute, you’ve had a perfect practice, without reinforcing any bad habits. As crazy as it sounds, I’ve experienced it myself on several occasions!

6. Reserve verbal correction for when the student repeats the same error or moves away from the target behavior. When the motor brain is learning, it takes an educated trial-and-error approach to discover what happens when it tries X, Y, Z and beyond, and all of that data provides useful context for skill acquisition. Thus, we should expect that when the motor brain is actively learning, the student will perform a variety of different errors in succession on the same exercise, as the motor brain tries X, Y, and Z, and it is wise to remain quiet and let the student learn from that experience. However, we should intervene when the student is getting progressively farther from the target behavior or when they make the same mistake a few times in a row, indicating that the motor brain thinks it has found what it was looking for and is, erroneously, reinforcing it.

Of course, even with all of these tools in your toolbox, you will still speak to the student a fair amount in any lesson; but with intention, you will recognize more and more opportunities to tap directly into your students’ motor learning centers and bypass the interference of the conscious mind. It takes faith and discipline to relinquish the words on which we so heavily rely, and trust the student to learn more from what we don’t say. Sometimes we see results faster when we use words, but the motor successes of the conscious mind are fleeting and depend on constant conscious attention – attention that singers need for so many other things during a performance. Like riding a bicycle or tying one’s shoes, singing in mix is neither reliable nor practical until it is habitual…subconscious. We do our students a great service when we start there.

Ellie Seligmann joined IVTOM in 2019. A 2005 graduate of the National Center for Voice & Speech’s Summer Vocology Institute, she has been teaching voice and piano independently since 2001. She is a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS), presently serving at the chapter, regional, and national levels, and is a certified CoreSinging teacher and LMRVT trainer.  She lives in Aurora, Colorado with her husband, two young children, and four cats.