Sound begins in the mind

The Record of Music opens with a theory of where sound comes from: not from the throat, but from a mind moved by something outside it. Read beside Chapter 4, the passage puts the cause of the voice in what the singer is responding to, not in the mechanics of producing it. It is not a theory of motor control, and it would be a mistake to read modern psychology into it; but it describes a direction of attention, outward and then back into sound, that the external-focus instruction also uses.

No words within the sound

Shen Kuo goes on to explain the saying. A melody, he says, is a single thread of sound rising and falling, while the syllables of the text are made with different parts of the throat, lips, teeth and tongue. A good singer makes each syllable light and round and dissolves it into the melody, so that the changes from one to the next have no lumps; when a syllable’s own tone does not fit the note, the singer turns it so that it can be sung on that note. Poor singers either merely recite the tune without rise and fall, or shout it without reserve.

In modern terms this is a description of coarticulation in singing: consonants and vowel changes are made without breaking the continuity of the voice source and the pitch line. The singer’s attention is on the line, and the articulators serve it.

Sayings of the opera teachers

Chinese opera teachers pass on a set of short sayings, usually oral and attributed to no single text. Three are often quoted together:

• 声断气不断, “the sound breaks, the breath does not”: between phrases, and even within a held silence, the breath and the support continue, so the next phrase begins from a prepared state rather than from rest.
• 以字行腔, “the words carry the melody”: the tones and sounds of the words shape the melodic ornaments, rather than the melody distorting the words.
• 意在声先, “intention comes before sound”, an adaptation of the calligrapher’s maxim 意在笔前, “intention before the brush”, traditionally attributed to Wang Xizhi.

The last of these is the closest to the subject of this book. It places the singer’s attention on the sound that is about to be made, its pitch, shape and destination, before and during its production; that is an external, goal-directed focus in the language of Chapter 4.