Why Singing Is Hard

Welcome to Why Singing Is Hard (and How to Make It Easier)! This blog is about the challenges singers of all levels face, with the goal of not just identifying and addressing those challenges but also understanding why we find them hard in the first place. Singing is a skill and an art, a technical feat and an extremely personal way of expressing oneself, a physical exercise and a mental challenge. Becoming a better singer is not just about developing good technique but about understanding who you are, how you learn, and how you want to be in the world. In other words, learning to sing is learning to live.

Some of the topics will be extremely specific to singers, focusing on vocal pedagogy or acoustics. Others will speak more broadly about how we think and how we learn. In all of them, I hope to shed light on some element of the holistic experience of singing that often frustrates people, in hopes that validating those frustrations will help us all feel a little less alone and a little more empowered to continue our vocal journeys with confidence and joy.

Learning to sing is learning to live.

Today, we’ll start by defining our terms. I’ve named my blog “Why Singing Is Hard.” What is “singing,” and what is “hard”?

Singing is a physical act: it happens within our bodies and involves strength, coordination, flexibility, and agility, just like a sport. It’s also an emotional experience: the way we use our voices is inextricably tied to our senses of self. We engage intellectually with singing as well, both with the science of vocal production and the theoretical concepts of music. On top of all this, we each have our own sense of artistry — what we like or dislike, what we think sounds good or bad — and guides us toward sounds we want to make or feelings we want to evoke.

What does it feel like to encounter all those elements at once? When we think of physical training, we imagine rigorous athletic work, drills and repetition, and refining our technique by trying and failing over and over again, all of which are core elements of vocal training. We don’t usually think of doing hard emotional labor while, say, learning to shoot hoops on the basketball court, but sometimes using our voices will force us to confront difficult feelings in the middle of training. Thinking intellectually can help us understand what’s happening, but it can also frustrate learners who either struggle with a concept or understand it so well that they expect to shortcut the physical work because they “get the idea.” Learning to serve our artistic voice as singers means separating the act of creating sound from the feeling of receiving it, and sometimes we are so afraid to be “bad” that we don’t let ourselves discover new things.

Singing is a physical, emotional, intellectual, and artistic experience.

All told, there are a lot of layers of personal and emotional acceptance mixed up in the pure physical practice of singing. It’s a lot for anyone to handle!

Which brings me to the word “hard.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with something being hard: it just means whatever we’re doing requires some effort or skill to do. Unfortunately, our cultures often teach us that certain kinds of hardness are more acceptable than others.

American culture tends to put “hard” next to the word “work” in a very specific context that involves raw physical or mental exertion and the resulting ache of satisfaction when the job is done. We glorify that kind of hard work, but we don’t give the same glory to the equally challenging work of gaining emotional intelligence, developing internal awareness, and coming to terms with our full selves. When we try to apply ourselves to something new like singing, we may feel stuck trying to “work hard” in a way that doesn’t actually serve the goal we’re trying to achieve.

Many of us also struggle with newness, unfamiliarity, and discovery. Children are amazing learners because everything is new to them, so they expect and embrace the unfamiliar. As we get older, we start judging ourselves and others for not knowing or mastering everything already, and if we don’t continually celebrate exploring the unfamiliar, then we end up afraid to leave the familiar. When we call something “hard” in this context, it usually comes with a healthy dose of judgment of ourselves for not being “better” at it sooner. In other words, many adults lose touch with learning. Relearning how to learn may be yet another layer of why singing is hard to you.

Work is the stuff that takes time to do, and hard is the way we feel about it as we do it.

So while we acknowledge that singing is, indeed, hard, let’s give ourselves permission to redefine our relationship to the word “hard.” Let’s acknowledge that work is the stuff that takes time to do, and hard is the way we feel about it as we do it. We don’t have much control, if any, over the kind of work required to get from Point A to Point B, but we do have control over how we feel about it. I believe that understanding the core nature of what we’re doing is the best way to regain our sense of curiosity and discovery, and I hope that this blog will free you to move toward your goals with a little more joy, and a little less hardness, than you had before.