ELi5: What actually causes vibrato when singing?
In: Biology
Vibrato is just like it sounds, a vibration! By vibrating whatever mechanism is responsible for determining the pitch of a note, we can create a controlled oscillation around our desired note (think of a sin wave that goes around a line on a simple graph).
We can do this on many instruments! For guitars and violins we use our fretting/fingerboard fingers to control pitch, so by quickly bending the string in a vibration motion we can achieve vibrato. This same concept carries over to our bodies when singing—even whistling! The only difference is that instead of pitch being decided by string length/tension on where we place our fingers, it’s decided by tension of our vocal muscles!
It takes practice, but by relaxing the throat muscles and providing a steady airflow using the diaphragm, our vocal folds naturally vibrate and produce vibrato. Unlike with string instruments where we have to actively create vibrations, vibrato in our voice is actually the natural state that occurs when our muscles are relaxed. It’s not so much that we create vibrato with our voice, but that we stop suppressing it by our tightened muscles!
This is the correct and healthy way to achieve vibrato with your voice, but you can often hear people using improper techniques to achieve a “fake” vibrato. If you have the mindset like string instruments where you actively need to produce a vibration, you might try to stagnate airflow, or shaking their jaw. You can still create a similar oscillation vibrato effect, but most people would agree it sounds unnatural or amateurish. I just thought I’d mention this point to add further context that there are multiple ways to achieve the same effect, but they’re mostly considered improper techniques that have less ear-pleasing results.
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