Singing Out of Tune and Shame

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.

-Brené Brown

I wish more people were celebrated when they sing out of tune.

What a perplexing thing to hear from a voice teacher right?

Let me explain.

Western popular culture has a real hang up about people who sing out of tune. It’s put forth as the ultimate source of shame for a singer. The proof that we are unworthy of singing. That we don’t belong in musical community with others.

I mean we have entire shows (think America’s Got Talent, X-Factor, The Voice, etc) dedicated to publicly humiliating any singer who dares to sing a note flat. And I mean humiliate.

Singing out of tune is not a neutral thing in most musical spaces in the western world. It’s moralized.

It’s something to be terrified of doing. It feels like a way that we signal to the world that we don’t really deserve to use our voice.

In response to all that, I say - when you do sing out of tune, keep singing!

Why?

Because every voice deserves the time it needs to find its center. Every person deserves the chance to let their voice wander and float around a pitch with a compassionate spaciousness until they find their way home to the melody.

Because challenges in tuning can be correlated with high levels of stress, with feeling rushed, with anticipating rejection.

Because struggles with tuning can be due to muscular tension and vocal coordination challenges.

Because being off-pitch can be the result of being told not to sing early in life, resulting in a suppressed voice that hasn’t had a chance to discover itself.

Because being out of tune can be a symptom of intense emotional expression, much like vocal cracks. It can be a natural outcome of a beautiful facet of our humanity - where our emotional experience is so intense, either in its delight or its pain- that the voice acts as a reflection of that experience through sound.

All of these reasons for being out of tune are worthy of patience, space, compassion, curiosity, presence, guidance and time.

Singing out of tune is not a flaw. It does not define you other than solidifying your place in the human experience.

So if you have ever felt shut out, rejected from the world of music because of singing out of tune - I hope that you can know that that rejection was no fault of your own.

And I hope that you keep singing.

I hope that you can bring a lighthearted playfulness to that super flat note.

I hope you can bring compassion to that anxious tension you feel in your throat when you’re off pitch.

I hope that you can find the capacity to bring curiosity and care towards your experience of your voice, both when you are smack dab on pitch and when you struggle to sing in tune.

Because all of that will keep you on this wonderful thing that is the vocal journey.

And we all deserve the chance to be on that journey.