Focus of Attention in Voice Training

Summary:

Objective.

The vast majority of motor learning studies investigating focus of attention have found that an external focus of attention (focusing on the effect of a movement) results in enhanced performance and learning, compared to an internal focus of attention (focusing on the body movement itself). The present study attempts to determine if the high incidence of internal focus of attention instruction that has been reported in the realm of athletics is replicated in voice training.

Methods:

278 singers, who were at least 18 years old and taking voice lessons, were recruited to participate in an anonymous research survey entitled “Instructions given to singers in voice lessons.” The main six questions asked singers to report phrases or instructions that their studio voice teachers gave them in regard to posture, breathing/support, tone clarity/onset of tone, space/resonance, articulation, and reducing tension.

Results:

50.83% of the total responses were classified as inducing an external focus, 39.42% were classified as internal focus, 6.48% used a combination of both internal and external focus, and 3.27% were categorized as miscellaneous.

Conclusions:

The results of this study indicate that voice teachers use both external and internal attentional focus directives in the voice studio. Given the robust body of literature supporting the use of external focus, it is noteworthy that the current study found that external focus is used more often than internal focus in voice training.

INTRODUCTION:

Great singing teachers are always working to refine their pedagogical methods to best meet their students’ needs. Each student is a unique puzzle and outstanding teachers seek out the most efficient and effective means possible to train their students and help them to create habits that will serve them well in the absence of the teacher and also under pressure. The question of where performers should place their attention during learning and performance, known as focus of attention in the motor learning field, is a highly relevant, yet possibly overlooked aspect of voice training.

The past two decades have produced an enormous body of research in motor learning, mostly in the field of athletics, which seeks to determine the best focus of attention for optimal performance. In general, the vast majority of these studies (over 180 of them) have found that an external focus of attention (focusing on the effect of a movement) leads to more efficient skill development and superior performance, compared to an internal focus of attention (focusing on the body movement itself) [1][2]. Accuracy in golf performance improved when golfers were instructed to focus externally, on the movement of the golf club or on the trajectory of the ball (external) instead of their arms or wrists (internal) [3][4]. Likewise, accurate throwing of balls, darts, and Frisbees was enhanced with an external focus of attention [5][6][7]. In two separate studies with ballet dancers [8] and gymnasts [9], both disciplines which notably lack an implement (such as a club or ball) and are centered around body movements, an external focus of attention was shown to improve performance and movement form. Other studies have also shown benefits of an external focus in rehabilitation settings, when compared to an internal focus [10][11]. The attentional focus effect is often explained by the constrained action hypothesis, which posits that an internal focus of attention encourages a conscious type of control that inhibits the motor system, thereby hindering automaticity [12]. External focus, in contrast, has been shown to promote automatic control processes that lead to more fluent and regular movements, which are associated with high level performance [13]. External focus also may help performers to be more resistant to the detrimental effects of performing under pressure [7][14].

There are some studies that point to the superiority of an internal focus of attention, in certain circumstances. Beginning learners may benefit from internal focus instructions, as was shown in studies with baseball players and golfers [15][16]. It should be noted, however, that Gabriele Wulf does take issue with the methodology of these studies and cites many studies which do show a benefit of external focus for novices [2]. There also may be a case for individual learning style playing a role in determining which attentional focus is optimal. In one study, children who displayed a propensity for conscious control were shown to exhibit improved learning when they adopted an internal focus, as opposed to those without this propensity, who showed superior learning in the external focus of attention condition [17]. Relatedly, one study with basketball players and golfers found that performance improved when the instructed focus was a familiar one for them (regardless of whether it was internal or external), pointing to the notion that the optimal focus for an individual may be one that has been utilized and practiced the most [18]. Refinement of deeply automated skills also may benefit from internal focus of attention, as shown in case studies with elite experts [19][20]. However, more rigorous scientific inquiry that explicitly compares internal and external focus is needed to confirm the impact of attentional focus on skill refinement. Finally, several studies found no significant differences in regard to varying attentional focus conditions, suggesting that perhaps both types of focus can be beneficial and the optimal attentional focus may be task dependent [21][22][23][24].

Recent research in music has pointed to positive effects of an external focus of attention. In a 2019 study with a variety of skilled musicians, Mornell and Wulf found that an external focus of attention generated improvements in musical expression and technical precision, compared to an internal focus of attention [25]. In four separate studies with singers, Atkins found that tone quality was enhanced in conditions where singers employed external foci [26][27][28][29]. In one of these studies [28], ratings for ring and overall tone quality were higher when singers directed their sound to targets farther away from themselves, which points to the increased benefits of more distal foci that have been reported in several studies [14][30][31].

The question of where singers are most often instructed to place their attention while singing has never been formally studied. Studies with elite track and field athletes [32], recreational distance runners [33], and elite baseball pitchers [34] support the speculation that the majority of instructions delivered by athletic coaches is directed toward body movements and therefore induces an internal focus of attention. In another study that analyzed real-time feedback given between rounds of the 2015 Australian Boxing Championships, boxing coaches were found to use more than twice as much internal focus feedback than external focus feedback [35]. A survey study with professional, classical ballet dancers, found that 72.2% of the time these dancers utilized internal focus, at least partially [36]. From these studies, it appears that internal focus is used much of the time in real world training and performance situations, despite the considerable body of literature supporting the benefits of external focus to performance and learning. There are no studies which examine and categorize instructions that singers receive in voice lessons. The present study attempts to determine if the high incidence of internal focus of attention instructions found in other disciplines is replicated in voice training.

METHOD:

Participants

Participants were 278 singers who were at least 18 years old and taking voice lessons, but not necessarily consistently. 78.78% of participants were between the ages of 18–44 and 21.22% were 45 or older. The majority of participants were singers that had received extensive vocal instruction. 93.88% reported studying voice for four years or more with an average length of vocal study of 15.6 years (SD=10.25). The vast majority, 94.60%, reported primarily taking lessons in classical/opera voice. For this question, respondents could mark more than one genre that they had studied. 39.93% reported taking lessons in musical theater, 7.55% reported taking lessons in pop and 6.47% reported lessons in other self-reported categories, such as jazz, rock, early music, and choral singing.

Singers were recruited via e-mail and social media posts to participate in an anonymous research survey (via SurveyMonkey) entitled “Instructions given to singers in voice lessons.” Teachers of singing were also contacted and encouraged to share the survey with their students. This study was reviewed and approved by the institutional review board of the University of Southern California, ID: UP-19–00553.

Procedure

Participants were blind to the express purpose of the survey, which was to analyze the use of focus of attention directives in the voice studio. Participants were told that the survey was concerned with understanding the nature of instructions singers receive in voice lessons. The main six questions asked singers to write phrases or instructions that their studio voice teachers gave them in regard to posture, breathing/support, tone clarity/onset of tone, space/resonance, articulation (consonants and vowels), and reducing tension. These short answer questions purposely did not contain any specific reference to the body or body parts and were designed to be vague, to prevent any unintentional bias on the part of the investigator. The final question of the survey asked singers to report whether what they focused on during lessons changed during performance and to provide an explanation.

3,242 separate short answer responses from the main six questions were rated by two singers (the author and a professional singer and voice teacher with a Master of Music degree) and separated into four categories: external focus, internal focus, combination, or miscellaneous. The author trained the second rater and provided guidelines and rules that should be used in placing responses into four categories, based on previous studies that have categorized focus of attention directives [32][34][35][36]. If the body or specific body parts were clearly referenced (e.g., “Feel expansion in the ribs, lower belly, and lower back on the inhale,” “Keep that tongue down,” “Low and open throat”), the raters coded the response as internal focus. If the body was not mentioned and the result of the body movement was the focus, often in the form of an image (e.g., “Sing through the keyhole,” “Consistent airstream,” “Repeat the vowel”), the response was categorized as external focus.

Sometimes both an internal and external focus were referenced in a single response (e.g., “Like you fell asleep in the recliner, relax the jaw,” “Keep facial posture up at cheeks - surprise look”) and in those cases the raters classified the response as combination. Images and analogies (which generally are considered external focus) that contained specific body reference were also coded as combination (i.e. “My head is a concert hall--I have to fill all spaces,” “Doughy face”). Responses that did not contain a directive that implied an action or were not relevant to the subject of attentional focus (e.g., “Support doesn’t mean anything,” “Lay off the caffeine,” “Depends on the character I guess”), were coded as miscellaneous.

The two raters independently categorized the responses after the initial training session. The percent agreement between the raters averaged 95.23% for the six question items with an average Kappa statistic of .91.

RESULTS:

See Table 1 for representative responses in the three main categories (internal focus, combination, and external focus). The “miscellaneous” category was not included in the table.

Table 1.

Representative Responses in Each Category--Internal Focus, Combination, and External Focus

	Internal Focus	Combination	External Focus
Posture	• Sternum high  • Shoulders back  • Tuck hips  • Ribs out  • Knees not locked  • Elongate the spine  • Don’t drop the chest  • Pecs up	• Imagine having a string at the crown of the head pulling you up  • Chest should be open and expanded---think Wonderbra  • Plant your feet like the roots of a tree	• Noble posture  • Tall and vertical  • Feel buoyant like you could move at any moment  • You are a tree. Grounded, tall, and poised  • Root into the ground  • You’re a marionette
Breath/Support	• Breathe from your diaphragm  • Breathe from the bottom of your lungs  • Keep your belly out (but don’t push) as you exhale  • Breathe into your back  • Epigastrium!!  • Push the ribs out for support  • Don’t raise your shoulders  • Free the ribs  • Engage the lower abs	• Breathe low, fill the bottom of lungs first  • Expand your ribs/abdomen/back in all directions, as if to fill a barrel  • Expand your lungs like two balloons  • Open throat/silent breath  • Breath fills all the way around the stomach and waist like an innertube of air  • Breathe low, relax the belly and air will flow in	• Fill the pitcher  • Sip air, don’t gulp  • Innertube expansion  • Float on the breath  • Take the “smell the flower breath”  • Sob/primal noises for connection/support  • Inhale in the shape of the vowel  • Feeling of fogging a mirror  • She will have me sit on the edge of a chair and sing through the chair  • Appoggio
Tone Clarity/Onset	• Keep the pharyngeal space the same from the initial onset of tone to the end of the phrase, coordinating the onset and release with abdominal muscles  • Keep zygomatic muscles activated  • Keep it on the hard palate  • Open aperture in the throat  • Let’s make sure your cords are achieving full closure  • Bring it all up into your nose  • Keep the tongue forward  • Place it forward in the mask  • Open mouth more  • Loose jaw  • Low voice box	• Onset requires open throat--imagine that your starting a phrase with an H in front of it  • Feeling wideness in the neck upon inhalation and acting as if I were going to fog up a mirror improves onset  • Use fast air and clean cords  • We sing lines not notes, don’t move pitch with your tongue!  • Practice gentle staccato onsets to reinforce singing on “thin edges” of cords  • Funnel with small end at nose  • Trumpet lips  • Start with a few gentle glottals to feel cord closure	• Grow high notes from the “kernel” of the tone  • Sigh into it  • Drink in the tone/sound/breath  • Bell-like  • Singing is like a light switch, 100% on at the beginning of the note not a dimmer switch  • Vibrato everywhere  • Think of a whine, or the most piercing part of the sound  • Chiaroscuro  • Repeat the vowel (subdivide, don’t hold)  • Hear the sound before inhalation, shape the vowel then simply add the breath  • “Thread the needle” in middle voice  • Ghosty wiggle
Space/Resonance	• Space in throat  • Lift the soft palate  • Low laryngeal position/laryngeal tilt  • Feel lift in cheekbones and nostrils  • Get the tongue up, and narrowed at the sides to allow more pharyngeal space  • Jaw releases down and back  • Lift upper back molars  • Make sure you have a mouth full of tongue, not a throat full of tongue  • Vertical mouth	• Drop your jaw, and think of a yawning sound  • Imagine a balloon in your mouth and throat  • Tall narrow vowels with low released larynx  • Try to make the ugliest, brightest sound you can, up and back on top of your soft palate  • Think of a reverse ice cream cone so that your space at the front is focused and gets bigger as you go back into the lofted palate space  • Egg in back of the throat	• The whole room is yours--fill it up with warmth  • Bite the apple  • More sneeze up top  • Ich-laut feeling  • Sing through a yawn-like space/snorish space  • Preacher man!  • Breathe in surprised breath  • Look of dumb  • Pear-shaped tone  • Find the dome  • Remember the emotion of the song. Does your tone match the emotion?  • Smell the roses
Articulation	• Use lips and tongue, not jaw to articulate  • Feel the mid-back of the tongue make contact with the back molars for the closed vowels such as [i], [e]  • Maintain stable pharyngeal stretch behind articulation  • Slightly show front teeth  • Open your mouth more  • Round the corners of your mouth as you move past passaggio  • Don’t move your jaw for different vowels  • Release tongue from the root  • Front of tongue articulates	• My best vowel is [i]. We aim to have other vowels placed in the same resonance/tongue position as my [i]  • Use rounder lips between B4-E5. Above that gets sneezy  • Consonants are tiny, creaky, and done with small articulations of the top of the tongue against lips and teeth  • Don’t chew your words... less jaw more lips  • Relaxed tongue - imagine the bottom of your tongue is covered in purple paint - let it paint the entire lower inside of mouth	• Sing as if the vowels are your clothes line and the consonants are clothes pins  • Picture consonants as pearls on the string of the voice, rather than separate entities  • It feels like a tap dance, no pressing the point of articulation  • Use consonants to propel the sound forward  • Sing like you are projecting to the back of the room  • Sing vowel to vowel with quick consonants (imagine a wave form - the peak is the consonant, valley is the vowel)
Reducing Tension	• Relax neck  • Relax jaw  • Don’t open mouth so much  • Loosen up your shoulders  • Use more of the pelvic floor to support  • Support in abs instead of throat  • Don’t “help” with the muscles of the back of the tongue  • I need you to support with ribs, not shoulder  • Forehead relaxed	• Feel grounded, think about your back muscles  • Sing it to “Blah blah blah” with a slack jaw  • The jaw should be ‘novocaine jaw”-completely relaxed and slightly back in its neutral position.  • Finding a lower position of the larynx, release of the jaw with an expression guttural like “huh” or “duh”  • Dead face	• Let yourself feel like jello  • Always be able/ready to take a step forward  • Practice in cat position  • Catch! (As they throw a ball a me while singing)  • Pant like a doggy  • Two martini tone  • Feel like you are laughing or sobbing as you ascend  • go “ba ba ba” while sort of bouncing and squatting at the same time  • Relax  • Focus on the character  • Walk around while singing

The results are displayed in Figure 1 and show the relative frequency (in percent) of each type of response. 50.83% of the total responses induced an external focus, 39.42% induced an internal focus, 6.48% used a combination of both internal and external focus, and 3.27% were categorized as miscellaneous.

Figure 1: Percent of Responses that Induced Various Attentional Foci.

The results also revealed that certain topics in voice training may be predisposed to different types of attentional focus. Directives concerning posture, space/resonance and reduction of tension contained the highest percentage of internal focus instructions. Other types of technical directions, such as those concerned with breathing/support, tone clarity/onset of tone, and articulation, used more external focus of attention instructions. Figure 2 shows the breakdown of attentional focus by instructional category.

Figure 2: Percent of Responses that Induced Various Attentional Foci in Six Instructional Categories.

The final short answer question asked singers if what they focused on changed between voice lessons and performance. Data were analyzed and categorized into three responses: yes, no, and somewhat. 77.39% of singers reported that their focus did change in performance and that they were less focused on their vocal technique and more focused on the drama or expression of the music. 13.03% of participants said their focus did not change in performance and 9.58% reported that their focus changed somewhat. Implications of these results will be discussed in the next section.

DISCUSSION:

According to the survey responses, instructions singers receive in voice lessons contain a wide variety of instructional techniques and reveal the immense amount of creativity utilized in the teaching and learning of singing. Singing is both a body-oriented endeavor in which the body is the instrument, as well as a skill in which much of what is happening to create the sound is invisible to the performer and the listener. Therefore, it is understandable that the results showed that voice teachers use a mix of external and internal focus directives, displaying somewhat of a preference for external focus directives (50.83% external versus 39.42% internal).

One interesting finding of this study is that there are certain topics that may lend themselves to a higher amount of external focus instruction, especially tone clarity/onset and articulation (See Figure 2). It may be that teachers have intuitively discovered that external focus is the best way to evoke optimal results in regard to tone clarity, which requires precise coordination of the vocal folds and cannot be directly manipulated by the singer. For the topic of articulation, it appears that singers are typically instructed to improve articulation in ways that do not require an emphasis on the body. Vivid images, such as “vowels are a never-ending stream of water” and cue words, like “crisp consonants,” were frequently employed by voice teachers.

Unsurprisingly, there are other topics which lend themselves more naturally to teachers making direct reference to the body, given their nature. The topics of posture and reducing tension had the most internal focus responses. For these categories of instruction, it likely seems most expedient and simple to make direct reference to the body. However, the survey also provided examples of an avoidance of direct body reference in regards to posture and reduction of tension (see Table 1).

Teachers sometimes utilize combinations of internal and external focus directives. One singer wrote, “drop your jaw, and think of a yawning sound.” This response was classified as combination because the first part of the response is clearly internal focus, since it references the jaw, and the second part is external, since it focuses on yawning and the resulting characteristics of the sound that the teacher desires. Responses that combined a direct body reference with an image or analogy were also coded as combination. One survey respondent wrote, “Think of a reverse ice cream cone so that your space at the front is focused and gets bigger as you go back into the lofted palate space.” The first half of this sentence contains an image and no reference to a specific body part, which makes it external. The second part of the sentence references the soft palate, which makes it internal. To make this instruction a purely external instruction, the teacher could say, “reverse ice cream cone” as a cue to the student. It may very well be that the teacher would use this variation in real-life teaching situations or use the combination instruction during early stages of training and then switch to the external version later in the student’s development. These nuances may not have been reflected in this study and the limitations of the survey format will be discussed more below.

Focus during performance versus learning

While in some cases, explicit instructions and declarative knowledge may be necessary in the learning phase, most performers hope that by the time of the performance, these rules and directions can be, for the most part, forgotten. With regard to the final short answer question of the survey, the overwhelming majority of singers (77.39%) reported that their focus changes in a performance. Most singers reported less focus or no focus on vocal technique during performance. While this may be the goal for most singers, it may be difficult for many singers to completely forget about the technical directions they received while learning and thus, the nature of instruction during learning is important. The theory of reinvestment states that performers experiencing anxiety often revert to an earlier learning stage that included conscious processing and explicit, rule-based directives as a way to control movement [37]. It is, therefore, arguably important for teachers to be mindful about what instructions they give singers during voice lessons because those instructions might be called up by the singer as a way to deal with performance stress, even long after the skill has been well-learned. Teachers may want to assess their own teaching from the perspective of attentional focus as a potential factor in equipping students to be more or less resistant to the often deleterious effects of pressure.

Limitations and Implications for Future Research

There are several limitations of this study. First, singers were relying on memory to report instructions they were given in the voice studio. In future studies, it would be useful for researchers to observe voice lessons in real time or obtain video recordings of lessons, in which directives given by the teacher can be recorded and categorized at a later time. This would provide a more accurate view of actual instructions teachers utilize in their teaching.

The other limitation of this study is that, because of the survey format, participants were required to write their responses and could not be asked to clarify their responses. In some cases, singers may have omitted parts of the instruction they assumed were obvious. In an interview setting, by contrast, the investigator would have had the advantage of documenting attentional focus reports in real-time, which would have allowed for the clarification of vague responses. In this study, all such vague responses, such as “relax,” “make more space in back,” and “support low” were categorically considered external focus because they did not make direct mention of the body. If the participants had participated in interviews, they may have given more specific answers, which would have potentially led to a higher percentage of internal focus. For instance, in an interview, some singers likely would have clarified “make more space in back” to “make more space in the back of the throat,” which would have changed the classification to internal focus. Still, these “cue” words or phrases constitute external focus and it is noteworthy to appreciate the value of these simple yet powerful instructions, which have the ability to trigger more complicated responses [38]. Future studies could investigate if teachers give more detailed, internal focus instructions earlier in voice training and subsequently are able to switch to external focus cues as students become more experienced. Additionally, because external focus of attention has been shown to improve performance and learning in rehabilitation settings [10][11][39], analysis of focus of attention directives given by speech language pathologists during voice therapy could be a fruitful area of future research.

Another limitation of the survey format is that respondents may have indicated body references as a means of explanation for the researcher. For example, “Breathe in on a “k” to lift your soft palate and for a clear onset” was coded as a combination instruction due to the mention of both internal and external directives. In the actual lesson, the teacher might only say “Breathe in on a k,” without the clarification of the body part this directive seeks to activate. Still, it seems probable that many teachers do give these kinds of combined directives. From a focus of attention perspective, it may be advantageous to use externally focused cues to replace anatomical explanations that teachers may think are obligatory or advantageous in the learning process. Research in implicit learning points to some evidence that learning a skill implicitly, in which the learner is not consciously aware of what exactly is being learned and direct instructions to the learner are minimized, leads to the skill being more resistant to the negative effects of pressure [40][41].

Due to the nature of singing as a body-centric activity, it is likely not practical nor appropriate to exclusively use external focus directives in the voice studio. In future studies, an investigation into whether or not certain aspects of vocal technique are better suited to different attentional foci is merited, given that, in this study, the prevalence of certain foci seemed to be a function of the type of skill (e.g., articulation versus posture). Within instructions that do center around the body specifically, this study made clear that there is a spectrum ranging from highly externally focused to highly internally focused and these degrees of attentional focus could not be completely captured in the analysis of the data. For example, “open your throat” is highly internally focused. “Egg in the throat” was categorized as combination and finds a middle ground by utilizing an image, while still drawing some direct attention to the throat. Encouraging the student to make a hooty, owl-like or ghost-like sound would be a purely external focus directive. This kind of external focus instruction may promote automaticity because the body parts are allowed to self-organize in pursuit of the target sound and all mention of the throat, which according to the constrained action hypothesis [12] may inhibit the motor system, has been removed.

CONCLUSIONS:

Results of this survey study, the first of its kind conducted with singers, suggest that singers are instructed to use a mix of attentional focus instruction in voice lessons. 50.83% of the total responses induced an external focus, 39.42% induced an internal focus, 6.48% used a combination of both internal and external focus, and 3.27% were categorized as miscellaneous. Given the preponderance of evidence supporting the use of external focus instruction in the attentional focus literature, it is noteworthy that voice teachers, who may or may not be aware of the literature, have gravitated towards using more external focus directives than several other athletic disciplines, in which a higher proportion of internal focus instruction has been reported [32][33][34][35][36]. Until more studies comparing the efficacy of varying attentional foci can be performed with singers, it is advisable for voice teachers to continue using a mix of attentional focus directives in voice training.