Why do people who stutter, don’t stutter when singing?
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I’m a stutterer, no fucking idea.
Sometimes I do stutter when I sing, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I can talk for hours with no problems, sometimes I can’t say my name.
I would say that saying that stutterers can sing without stuttering is a lie. It’s more of a confidence thing. If I’m singing bad pressured, then I’m gonna stutter when I sing.
For me anyway, it’s a lot with confidence and pressure, but how exactly things work and why, nobody really knows.
In general, when you have a conversation, you don’t think about the words before hand. Your thoughts roll into words as they come. When you’re singing, you likely know all the lyrics before hand, so you don’t have to think about them.
Source*is me, I’ve had a stutter for 35 years.
Scientists aren’t exactly certain why this phenomenon Exists. But there are theories related to the fact that anthropologists believe as a species we were able to communicate via singing chanting et cetera long before we developed a written and spoken language. So perhaps singing is more embedded in our deeper evolutionary past which allows it to come more naturally than speaking they’re therefore by passing issues with stuttering that occur based on spoken and spoken language. Just an idea I’ve come across in research.
We do. Singing helps but stuttering doesn’t necessarily stop all together. For example a lot of the time I can’t even get the first word of the song out if it’s a certain sound type.
Childhood stutterer who mostly overcame it here. Speech therapy exercises involve starting your breath before you begin to speak. Words can be hard to start with “hard vowels” for instance. Say I had trouble saying “eggs”, they would have me breathe out and start to say the word mid breath, kind of low key sing-songing it. Singing is kind of the same, where when stuttering, you kind of seize up, singing involves a lot of breathing. This was always my theory.
I’m not sure the speech and music part of the brains are that disconnected, I’m a musician (guitar player) and we make involuntary mouth movements when playing.
As a stuttererererer (sometimes), this is a question I’ve often pondered about. I’ve found that either singing, talking in accent, or talking with a rhythm will relieve my stuttering.
My struggles come from very specific sounds (hard vowel sounds). Situational factors also come into play as well. Doing things like reading out loud or having to say defined words usually make it worse for me, but other stutterers have a different experience.
Unfortunately it’s not a terribly well studied or understood condition.
Let me refer you to an expert: Scatman John
🎶 Everybody stutters one way or the other so check out my message to you. As a matter of fact, a-don’t let nothin’ hold you back. If the Scatman can do it, so can you. 🎶
🎶 Everybody’s sayin’ that the Scatman stutters but doesn’t ever stutter when he sings. But what you don’t know, I’m gonna tell you right now: that the stutter and the scat is the same thing.
Yo, I’m the Scatman. Where’s the Scatman? I’m the Scatman. 🎶
It’s complicated and this is one of those areas where there are theories, but nothing is categorically proven yet. But here are the main theories (and the answer is probably a combination of all three:
1) Language is handled by the left hemisphere of your brain and music is handled by the right.
Basically, when you’re singing, you’re using a different region of your brain…and while singing is technically language, your brain deals with it in a different way. One way to think about it is your brain deals with singing like it’s ‘advanced whistling’, you’re not holding a two way conversation, you’re just making sounds in time to music…and this is also reinforced by:
2) Singing is different to holding a conversation.
A conversation is two way communication that is unpredictable, you’re using language to respond and express yourself. You don’t know what you’re going to say from moment to moment. Singing is different. It’s one way and you’ve memorized the lyrics, so you always know exactly what you’re going to sing next. Again, it goes back to the ‘advanced whistling’ thing. You’re not having to think about what to sing in the moment, you’re just making sounds in time to music.
Think of it like this: If I learn a song in a language I don’t understand, because I’m just memorizing how the words sound instead of the actual meaning, I’m not actually using the part of my brain that deals with language. So, even if I do understand the language, learning a song relies more heavily on my right brain than my left brain.
3) We use our mouths and vocal chords differently when we’re singing.
Singing is a learned talent. As a musician, I often hear people say they ‘can’t sing’, when that’s the equivalent of picking up a guitar for the first time and deciding that because you can’t play it right now, you never will be able to. For most people, in order to sing well requires practice and training. Learning to sing teaches you how to project your voice, how to shape your mouth and tongue to get the tone you want…so learning to sing is very different to learning to speak. Because the way we engage our vocal chords and enunciate differently could also be a factor in why people don’t stutter when they sing.
In fact, when you think of it, asking why people stutter when they speak, but don’t when they sing, isn’t all that different between asking why there are people who can talk, but can’t sing a note… it’s because singing and talking are not the same thing.
Mel Tillis stuttered. But sang like a songbird.
Samuel L. Jackson stuttered as a child.
There’s techniques that people who stutter, can do to get thru a block (a word that you can’t get out)
It usually happens with hard sounding letters
(K, D, T ect)
You can slide into a word you know you likely will have a problem with by putting a subtle
“Mmm” sound. To help you ease into the problem word.
Now back to SLJ. Like singing, mostly when you swear, you won’t get blocked on the word.
Jackson used foul language to ease into problem words.
“Mother-Fucker” or a version of this was used.
This is not a joke. There is articles on this a a story of this on the internet.
I’m not about to find it.
But, found it highly relatable.
A lil google searching will lead you there.
I had a bad stutter as a child.
I went through 11 years of speech therapy as a kid. When reciting something from memory you’re only recalling it instead of trying to formulate words to express an original thought coming out of you. It’s much less likely that I’ll stutter or mix words up when I’m reciting something I know.
Others here have detailed out exactly why that happens. All I know is from what I’ve experienced personally.
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