For any singer, understanding the fundamentals of pronouncing the language being sung is crucial to a good performance of the music.

Without this attention to detail, every performance will not only be inaccurate to the intention/background of the composer, but it will also lend the music to a poor sonic quality.

For most of us who speak only one or two languages, there are often only a handful of phonetic sounds that we’re comfortable with, so approaching music in a brand new language can be extremely daunting.

This is the problem that the International Phonetic Association set out to solve in 1889, which led to the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet, or “IPA”. 

You may find IPA charts at the beginning of scores or workbooks to help guide your pronunciation in that given piece or exercise, so getting to become familiar with it is absolutely essential.

Before we jump into the core of the content, check out this preview for Bel Canto Bootcamp Co-Founder Derrick Goff’s course on IPA, available exclusively on tonebase Voice:

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Let’s jump into it!

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Understanding vowels in the IPA

The International Phonetic Alphabet considers vowels to be either open or close/closed.

These terms refer to the distance from the tongue to the hard palate, which is the hard section on the roof of your mouth. 

With open vowels, the tongue is far away from the hard palate, such as “a” in attack, or “o” in honest. Closed vowels are the opposite, where the tongue is close to the hard palate. This includes vowels such as “oo” as in loose, or “ee” as in keep.

Another classification for vowels is by differentiation between lip and tongue vowels, or vowels we make and change using either our lips, such as “ah”, “oh”, and “oo”, or using our tongues, such as “aa”, and “ee”.

The IPA relates these two tenants of vowels in this vowel chart:

In the middle of this chart, you’ll find “mixed” vowels, which are not found in English but exist in many other languages, such as “feu” in French, “höhle” in German or “sø” in Danish. These can be quite tricky for native English speakers to sing properly due to their unfamiliar constructions.

Understanding consonants in IPA

Below is a chart of all of the standard official vowel and consonant combinations in the IPA:

It’s important to understand that the IPA treats all consonants consistently, and no consonant can sound more than one way.

For example, in English the letter “c” can sound like a sharp attack, like with “cat”, or can be what’s called a fricative, such as the word “cinema”. 

In the IPA, this kind of double meaning doesn’t exist, and the IPA version of the word cinema in Standard American English would look like “sɪnemʌ”.’

Conclusion

The IPA is our tool for pronunciation of words in different languages. It can help us with specific vowel and consonant sounds, word stress, and it helps us envision what the word might feel or sound like in that language.

Now what the IPA doesn’t tell us is how the words work together in their language.

For example, we have the word procity, which refers to the innate rhythm of a language. Think of languages like Italian, Spanish or Hindi, which have a very distinct spoken rhythm. 

This is a tenant that while not covered by the IPA, is still crucial to understanding the text you are singing. 

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