Your Brain Sings Before You Do: What that means, and why it matters

There's something no singing teacher ever told you, and it's something that rules the day whenever you sing. Your singing coach wasn't withholding this information. They weren't taught this most fundamental reality of singing either.

Here it is: Your brain sings before you do.

Let me explain...

The currently accepted unifying theory of cognitive neuroscience is called predictive processing. This theory says that your brain is like a fortune teller that keeps making educated guesses about what you're about to experience - it creates models of your world. As it learns more about the world (which it does by the second, btw) it updates those guesses to minimize errors.

Biologically, it seems that this process of integrating past experiences with current sensory data - vision, hearing, etc. - is the most efficient way for a brain to interpret and respond to its environment. And it's not just human brains, it's all brains. The theory says that it's how all animals with a brain move through their world.

When you're doing something like singing, you're in a predictive-processing loop; you hear your voice filtered through your unique learned listening. Because, yes...you don't hear with your ears, you hear with your brain. Your brain has learned to hear based on your life experiences, personality, and interests. (That's a blog for another day.)

The learned listening you apply to your singing includes concepts, such as aesthetics about desirable sounds and musical values. All those things are wrapped up together with the brain’s internal model of how the sound is being generated, and the prediction machine is in motion. The chicken and the egg are prediction, intention, and experience.

Most of the time, that system is so smooth you don’t notice it. Sometimes, though, the sensory data being delivered to your fancy auditory processing system is unfamiliar, or there’s simply too much sensory data coming at you. This happens in performance situations all the time! Think about it. In a performance situation, your brain is trying to make sense of the space, the lights, the people, and the sounds while it's also dealing with those new shoes you should have broken in and the fact that your ex might be in the audience. That's on top of remembering all the things you have to remember, and then, oh yeah...singing.

The more things your brain has to juggle, the harder it is for your brain to rely on predictions. When this happens, you’re likely to compensate for that unconsciously. You may sing with an unnecessary degree of effort, for instance, or have an emotional response such as feeling unsure or frustrated. 

In a sense, there's no way around the challenges of performance situations. But it's also true that if you know how your brain works, and that your brain sings before you do, you can invest in the types of skills that will help your brain do that heavy lifting when the rubber meets the road.

• The easiest and most obvious brain training is to practice with amplification. Teach your brain how to hear your voice coming from someplace other than your face.

• Another easy and obvious technique is to know that you will not remember. If you cannot rattle off that checklist, those lyrics, or the new PA setup during a fire drill at 3:00 am, you should not imagine that you will remember it on the gig. Do what you must to prepare.

• The most important brain training, in my admittedly biased opinion, is to train your brain how to relate to your voice in a way that does not rely upon your hearing. NeuroVocal training was created for this exact thing!

  Train your brain, train your voice, be unshakable on stage.

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Meredith Colby coaches singers of all levels online from her indie studio in Chicago. She's the original developer of NeuroVocal Method, and the author of Money Notes: How to Sing High, Loud, Healthy, and Forever and Your Brain Sings Before You Do. Meredith's content can be found here, on her own blog, and on the NeuroVocal YouTube channel.