A WINTRY MIX- What We Can Learn from "Frozen"

So I finally saw "Frozen"... I inexplicably cried like a total loser during the song about the little snowman wanting to experience summer, but the singing was phenomenal in the rest of the movie and I want to show you how Frozen can totally serve as a mixing masterclass.  

Sisters from another Mixer.
You have to agree that Idina Menzel (Elsa) and Kristen Bell (Anna) sound very different, however, they're both mixing.

If they're both mixing, why do they sound so different?!
If you took away the hair and eye colors on these characters they actually would look exactly alike, but with those added details you can absolutely tell who's who, right? In regards to their voices, you could say the exact same thing for these characters, as well.  If you take away the little decorations here and there, they're both doing the same things and they only sound very different to us because each of them has her own spin on it.

Here are the similarities: 

Both sisters utilize oral twang (speakyness) in the lower parts of their range and nasality in the middle of their ranges achieving equalized twang throughout, making it sound like the characters have big, consistent voices up and down.  This is the part that's usually easier said than done.  We've talked about this technique in regards to my favorite people like Sherie René Scott in previous entries. (Yes, I did just bring Sherie into this post about Frozen.)   

Another mutual strategy used by both singers is tilting their thyroids during some or all of their music… Here's what that means:



You can tilt your thyroid by crying on "boo hoo" sounds; saying, "Hello, little birdie!" as if you're Snow White opening your window in the morning; or saying "I don't wanna!" like a brat.  Various additional anatomical ingredients make each of those sounds completely different from one another, but they all have the common denominator of a tilted thyroid.  So from now on, think of tilting your thyroid as being sad, whiny or sweet.   This is where the differences are, though because it depends on where and when the characters are choosing to tilt their thyroids. It's all about what's going on at the top.

Here are the differences:
Anna (Kristen Bell) tilts her thyroid the WHOLE time during every song whether it's low or high, twangy or not. This is what makes her sound really sweet (as she should because she's the ingenue).   She takes out the nasality and/or oral twang on her top notes so they tend to go a little more soprano-land like this.  Listen for the "ay" of today… and the "er" of "forever. They're not as speaky as the rest of the phrases.

So Anna is a Head-Mixer with some twang.  (If you haven't seen my post about the different kinds of mixes, check this one out.)  Contrastingly, when Elsa (Idina Menzel) is in her lower-mid range, she's not tilting her thyroid at all which makes for a more bored, dull sound that is, again, more appropriate for her character because she's jaded by having to hide her embarrassing secret curse for 10 years. She's not as sweet as Anna. (Men, you can actually hear this strategy in the Reindeer are better than People song, too.)   But when Idina DOES have a pity party on her high notes and gives into some thyroid tilt, she brings what she's doing on the bottom with her to the top and LEAVES THE BORING SPEAKY-NESS IN, as well, which makes her do this:

So it's not sweet at all; it's actually like an aggressive rock belt when it has those little added features of the twang (whiny as opposed to sweet) and the boring (cricoid tilt which we'll get into at a later date). 

You can hear the difference from the first part of the slide to the last note way up high.  It's like a boring speaky note for the word "I" and she glides into a witchy, whiny thing on the word "can't." So there's only a slight ingredient difference between the girls' high notes, but doesn't it make them sound completely different?   Elsa is what we'd call a Chest-mixer because her mix sounds closer to belting.

BUT GUESS WHAT.  THE SYLLABLE "DAY" FROM ANNA'S SAMPLE AND THE "CAN'T" IN ELSA'S SAMPLE ARE THE SAME… EXACT…NOTE.  THEY'RE BOTH AN E!  But they sound VERY different just because of a couple of minor adjustments! And neither are belting or singing in a legit soprano sound.  So they're both mixing!

Another major difference is that Anna SINGS AND SPEAKS with a very high larynx (Anna sounds childish) compared to Elsa who has a mid larynx, meaning she pretty much sounds her own age in both her songs and her dialogue. This is another reason why these performances are so fantastic.  The dialogue leads right into the songs and the voices don't change very drastically in the transitions which is an important lesson for us Break-Out-Into-Song-At-Any-Given-Moment-Folk to learn.  If you go into your song from your scene and your singing voice isn't connected to the speaking voice you were just using, you're going to get a lot of eye-rolls from the husbands in the audience whose wives just dragged them to the theater.  You need to fool those people into wondering WHEN you started singing, exactly.   Kristen Bell does that pretty flawlessly throughout the whole movie in all of her songs.  Take a look at the first few seconds of this one here:

Perfection! So if you didn't get a chance to see this one you should go if not just to get a little voice lesson from animated royalty and to see what's coming to Broadway! Long live Disney princesses!