[a freshman in the vocal department] 02. Is singing really based on talent

*This content was translated by AI.

"Sir, may I not have talent?"

This is what I hear most often in the lesson room. Students raise this question when the pitch is not high, when the pitch is shaky, or when they feel that they are growing slower than others. It sounds like a question, but in fact, this sentence is already close to a conclusion. This is because it is a judgment to oneself whether or not to continue singing.

We often think of the talent of singing as a natural range, a special tone, and a sense of being at once. And the moment such an element is not seen, the situation is quickly sorted out by saying, "I have no talent." Since when have we come to call this sense 'talent'. The result-oriented tournament-type audition program and the domestic entrance examination practical system, which filters out hundreds or thousands of people with just one song, have also strengthened this perception. But how fair was that judgment.

In the past, I saw a scene where a reporter asked master singer Ahn Sook-sun, "Can you make me sing well, too?" The teacher replied with a smile. "I can take out what I have, but I can't make what I don't." As expected! A word of reward. I read this word not as a 'limit of talent' but as a 'matter of how to pull it out'. However, this word is often misunderstood as evidence that "you must have talent."

The word 'talent' needs to be read differently in the field. While working as a trainer, I have also judged countless people as 'talented' and 'none'. Then one day, I saw a student who thought I was not talented meet another teacher and make a completely different sound. I realized it at that moment. It's not that the student wasn't talented, it was that I didn't know how to bring up the possibility.

The phrase 'a matter of talent' may be the easiest explanation. This is because you don't have to explain where it's blocked and why it's not possible to the end. But as soon as it is called, the problem becomes a judgment, not an object of analysis, and the possibility is closed before it is explained.

In the field, talent is by no means the result itself. Rather, it is more of a combination of conditions. There are physical conditions such as vocal range, vocal cord thickness, and resonance structure, and sensory conditions such as how accurately one can hear and distinguish one's own sound. What language and method has been explained is a condition for learning, and psychological states such as anxiety, comparison, and atrophy also directly affect sound. It adds to the environmental conditions of when they have been exposed to music. We combine all these results into one word and call them 'talent'.

So talent is by no means a single price. In some worlds, accuracy is a talent, in some genres, personality is a talent, and in some traditions, indelible traces of time are a talent rather than cleanliness. I've heard this from an otolaryngology vocalization study. A pansori singer underwent surgery for severe vocal cord nodules, which was a very successful operation medically, but the person's own sound texture has since disappeared. Technically, it is close to the answer, but the long-established "sound like him" has disappeared together. This scene makes me bury. Is talent perfect or is it an indelible mark.

From the perspective of a vocal trainer, there is no absolute answer to a song. But there is a clear wrong answer. It's a way of destroying the body, an unsustainable vocalization, and a practice of breaking down a person. We do the job of erasing the wrong answers one by one rather than injecting the correct answers.

So I want to redefine talent like this. Talent is not a natural threshold, but an ability to understand one's body, a structure that can be repeated without collapsing, and a system that can last a long time. And this system is not born, it is made by erasing the wrong attempts one by one.

I once attended a practical audition for a music college in the United States in Korea, and I asked one applicant to sing the same song in various ways for about 30 minutes. The tempo was changed, the accompaniment was changed, and with the band, it was repeated without accompaniment. What they wanted to see was not a single degree of completion, but how far it was transformed and where it was blocked. Rather than discriminating talent, it was a way to see the structure in which possibilities work.

Singing is not an instant skill. It is the sum of management, repetition, recovery, and adaptation. So, talent should be gradually changed to a question of "how high does it float," not "how long does it last?" For those who say "I don't think I have talent" even before they start singing, the first thing they need is not the amount of practice, but an attitude that prevents the possibility. I just haven't tried this method yet, I just didn't know this route yet.

There is always a way. I just haven't found it yet.

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*This content was translated by AI.