Effective Tools and Strategies for Musical Theater Registration Cultivation in Cis-Female Voices through Neutral, Binary, and Flexible Voice Models

To successfully navigate the five sub-genres of musical theatre: legit, contemporary legit,
standard belt, contemporary belt, and pop/rock, the cisgender female must possess highly
flexible registration strategies. Singers must cultivate technical ability to negotiate between these styles with both aesthetic and artistic integrity while maintaining mechanical functional efficiency. Singers must explore and condition their voices with a variety of variable adjustments to the breathing, phonation, articulation, and resonance systems.

This workshop will demonstrate a toolbox of practical exercises to help singers with registration exploration and coordination, involving breath flow and resistance, articulator shaping, vowel adjustments for efficiency and variable aesthetic resonance qualities. Participants will witness habilitative tools for cultivating three distinct voice tools; the Neutral Voice, the Binary Voice, and the Flexible Voice to help with registration development. Emotional stimulation and play will be present to help students discover a wide variety of sounds and the effect of emotion on the subsystems of the singing voice. A brief discussion of registration concepts will occur.

Kevin Wilson, BM, MM Vocal Pedagogy, PAVA-Recognized Vocologist, Professor of Voice and Head of Vocal Pedagogy at The Boston Conservatory at Berklee