Music and Self-Deception

I’m not a real musician. I just happen to be able to sing some, and can almost read music — I can pick out the correct notes on a keyboard, but can’t actually play. People tend to like my singing, but my baritone voice is highly unreliable due to capricious and persistent allergies. It’ s not often I can actually use the full range, which is nearly three octaves. I’ve led singing in church worship a few times, once or twice in a regular position. My primary weakness is remembering the intervals between notes well enough to reproduce them, all on pitch. The best way to work on that is sing the intended song a capella until it sounds right.
I’ve worked with youth choirs since the last time I was young enough to be in one. A primary and growing problem with kids singing is most of them learn what little they know by singing along with their favorite artists. Typically, they wear headphones, or worst of all, earbuds. The effect is to become absorbed in a sounding atmosphere which masks their own voice from their ears.
I suppose if you watched the premier episodes of X Factor on TV the past few nights, you were confronted with people whose singing shows that sort of bad self-training. They can’t carry a tune on their own because they’ve never heard themselves without that poor quality of music blasting in their ears. Most modern recordings are almost completely lacking in dynamic range. Granted, a few contestants appeared utterly tone deaf, but several sounded like most kids trying to sing without any formal training.
It’s bad enough folks never really hear themselves the way others hear them. Our voices echo partly inside our own heads, and what we hear in our ears is never quite what comes out into the air. If someone records us singing and we hear the recording, the first few times we are shocked. I’ve had just enough formal training to get away with singing in public. I know I don’t hear the tones you hear, and I have to make sure my mouth and neck are in proper physical position for sound to come out as clean and pure as it can. Then I have to consciously relax my throat in certain places and breathe carefully. A lot of folks auditioning have never learned any of that.
One particular choir instructor I worked with made much of getting the kids to hear themselves as they actually sounded, then correcting all their stupid habits, habits which arose from trying to sound in their own ears like those they mimicked. I learned an awful lot from that guy, and I’ve never forgotten much of it. I can be as lazy as anyone else, but if I intend to be heard by others, I always go through the mental exercise of doing it right. It’s hard work when you do more than two or three songs in succession. Almost no one instinctively breathes correctly, so keeping your stomach muscles working that much is tiring. A depressing number of kids give up before they have a chance to learn much. Some simply refuse to learn, and insist it’s alright because it sounds okay in their ears.
So the next time you observe and hear someone making an utter fool of themselves in public, auditioning with gusto and making sounds which violate your sanity, it’s usually one of three things. It takes a lot of moxie, but you can go too far. (1) Some may simply suffer from blind narcism. (2) A few are tone deaf; they simply can’t tell the difference. (3) Most have simply never heard themselves a capella, never had anyone play their recorded singing back to them.