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Singing advice causes mondegreens

Last week I attended a workshop on improving my voice quality presented by Amy Carol Webb and learned a lot about how I can improve my speaking and singing voice. It is a matter of opening up the mouth and breathing below the diaphragm. But I heard a tip there that may not work out. I had heard it before. There are certain vowels that one should not sing long on, because they don't sound well. One of these is long e (in English), as in Bees. My instructor said to sing "biii…" with i as in "bin". This reminded me of advice I had received much earlier in a vocal group. Don't sound the vowel "ir" or "r" as in "bird". In other words, sing "gloooooory", not "gloerrrrrrry", which does not sound as well. This improves the vocal quality of a song.

Unfortunately it can also cause trouble. For example, in "I Come From Woman", one of Amy's songs, she sings "women of tears". Following the advice, she does not sing the "er" vowel at the end. But this leads to a mondegreen; that is, a misheard song lyric. She came out singing "women of tease", which is not what she meant at all. When I heard it, it sounded like "women of cheese", which is also not what was intended. In other words, if you alter vowel sounds to make songs sound better, you will be misunderstood. Sometimes, you need to make consonants clear; for example, pronouncing "t" forcefully with the tongue against the teeth. For example, I also heard "Women who pass this course for me." Sounds like cheating, but she really intended "Women who passed the torch for me."

As one can tell from the link on "mondegreen", which by the way is a web site whose name is a mondegreen (www.kissthisguy.com), many, many singers make mondegreens. How can they avoid it? Here's what I say:

1. Make your voice clear - voice from the abdomen, clear pronunciation, and clearly understood vowels.
2. Don't alter a vowel if it will change the meaning. Sometimes you have to sing "teaerrrrrs".
3. Make your voice substantially louder than the instruments or singers who accompany you.
4. Avoid phrases that sound like other phrases. For example, don't sing "the sky", for it sounds like "disguise" and "this guy".
5. Some lyrics don't make sense grammatically or in meaning. Sometimes this is part of being poetic. Imagine Lucy being up in the sky with diamonds. But the meaning of this is so off-beat that the mind wants to find a more usual meaning for it; for instance, "Lucy met this guy; he's dying". If you must sing unusual lyrics, you need to be especially clear, with faint accompaniment.

Hopefully these pointers will prevent future singers from finding their lyrics on www.kissthisguy.com.