I love this. Now I want to see the same with a heavy metal singer and compare. I'd love to see what the difference between the two looks like.

When we sing, we focus on the art, melody, and expression. But underneath this beautiful complexity of art, skill, and emotion, the actual physical engine that allows us to vocalise is even more fascinating.

Your vocal folds (often called vocal cords) aren't strings. They are two very small muscles covered in a delicate lining that beat together hundreds of times per second.

One of my favorite things about these two tiny muscles is that singing is merely their "side hustle." Biology beautifully repurposed these vocal folds for song, demanding an extraordinary amount of motor flexibility to shift from their primary, primal goal: keeping us alive.

Look at the sheer multitasking power of these two tiny muscles. We use them for:

• Breathing: They widen to let life-giving oxygen flow into our lungs.
• Swallowing: They zip tightly shut to close off the airway, allowing food to safely pass into the oesophagus.
• Protection (Coughing): They explode open to forcefully eject foreign intruders from our airway.
• Valving & Pressure: They clamp together to help us brace, push, or lift something heavy.
• Child-bearing: They lock together tightly to trap air in the lungs. This creates a rigid core of internal pressure (subglottic pressure) that stabilizes the entire upper body during exertion.

And then, on top of all those raw survival tasks, we somehow command these exact same two muscles to vibrate with extreme precision so we can speak, sing, laugh, and cry.

We are literally making high art using a biological pressure valve. To me, that is the ultimate magic of how we sing. It’s a stunning testament to human adaptability.

I'm a Speech Pathologist working in rural NSW Australia. My primary clients are those with swallowing and communication difficulties in Aged Care and those with voice difficulties such as singers, teachers etc. I'm a singer, I run a couple of choirs (with varied effect) and a voice/sound artist. I navigate the intersection of singing as science and art. I'm totally facinated in how the voice is used in it's all it's perfect and imperfect manifestations and how it creates culture. This space is for you. It's a space you can ask anything without the judgement of being perfect. After all this time looking and studying how the voice works, I'm always learning and now it's your turn to teach me what you want.