Preface: Where a Singer’s Attention Goes

Note

Voice health notice. This book is a review of voice science, acoustics and the psychology of attention, with mathematical models. It is not medical advice and does not diagnose or treat any voice disorder. Hoarseness that lasts more than a few weeks, pain when using the voice, a sudden change in the voice, difficulty swallowing or breathing, or coughing up blood need a doctor, ideally an ear, nose and throat specialist or laryngologist, not a singing lesson. The exercises in Chapter 8 are gentle and short; stop if anything hurts.

Every singing teacher has heard it: a student who sings a phrase easily while thinking about the song, then loses it the moment they start thinking about their throat. Pitch wobbles, the tone thins, the high note cracks. Teachers have many names for what goes wrong, from “pushing” to “over-thinking”, and many remedies, from images to touch. This book asks what voice science, acoustics and the study of attention can say about it.

The answers come from several fields that rarely meet. Biomechanics explains how air from the lungs keeps the vocal folds vibrating, and why a stiffer, drier or more pressed larynx needs more pressure to start. Acoustics explains how the vocal tract filters the sound, and how classically trained singers produce the concentration of energy near 3 kHz that lets a voice carry over an orchestra. Control theory explains why a feedback loop with a delay can wobble when its gain is too high. And the psychology of motor learning has spent a quarter of a century testing whether attention directed to the effect of a movement works better than attention directed to the body, with results that are more contested than popular summaries suggest.

What this book is and is not

This is a book of models and reviews. Each chapter states an established piece of physics, physiology or psychology and runs it in a short Python program so that the reader can change the numbers and see what happens. Unless a source is given, the numbers in the programs are illustrative; they show how an argument works, not measurements of any singer. Where the book proposes how a model applies to singing, it says so in a hypothesis box, with the result that would show it to be wrong.

How to read the boxes

As in the other books of the 5D Library, different kinds of statement are kept apart.

Evidence

Evidence boxes report published findings, with their sources.

Calculation

Calculation boxes give formulas and short Python programs. Every program runs as printed with a standard Python 3 installation and nothing else, and its output is shown underneath it.

Hypothesis · not established

Hypothesis boxes hold the author’s ideas. They are labelled “not established”, and they say what result would show them to be wrong.

Source text

Source text boxes quote the classical texts, with the author’s translation.

Note

Note boxes give cautions and explain choices.

The plan of the book

The myoelastic–aerodynamic theory. How airflow sustains vocal-fold vibration, what the Bernoulli effect does and does not explain, and Titze’s formula for the phonation threshold pressure.
Source, filter and the singer’s formant. The vocal tract as a tube, its formants, and how a narrow epilarynx inside a wide pharynx gathers the third to fifth formants near 3 kHz.
The auditory–motor feedback loop. The Lombard effect, the pitch-shift reflex, and a delayed feedback model that shows how too much correction makes pitch wobble.
External focus of attention. Wulf’s experiments, the constrained-action hypothesis, the evidence from muscle activity and from singers, and the recent reanalysis that questions how large the effect is.
Rhythm and timing. The Wing–Kristofferson model of tapping, phase correction to a beat, and the brain networks of timing.
Measuring the voice. Jitter, shimmer and the harmonics-to-noise ratio, computed from synthetic voices, with their limits.
The classics of song. The Record of Music, Shen Kuo’s “no words within the sound”, and the sayings of Chinese opera teachers.
Practice and a pre-registered trial. A four-step acoustic assessment with free software, and a randomised trial comparing an internal-focus instruction with a tactile anchor and an external-focus instruction.

This edition

This is version 1.0.0, the first complete edition: a preface and eight chapters, in Chinese and English. Corrections, and references the author has missed, are welcome through the 5D Library website.

Disclosure

The author teaches singing at vocal.guru and singingasia.com, including the listening-based method 耳根圆通法 and the touch-and-external-focus cue tested in Chapter 8, and so has a direct commercial interest in the subject of this book and in the result of that trial. The book does not promote any course, and the trial is designed to be run and analysed by people independent of the author’s businesses. All the code and the study protocol are published openly for anyone to check.

Fan, Y. (2026). The Biomechanics of Phonation and Attentional Shift: Myoelastic-Aerodynamic Theory, the Singer's Formant, Auditory-Motor Feedback and External Focus of Attention [发声的生物力学与注意力转移] (Version 1.0.0). 5D Library. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23719625 · Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).