Babies can create amazingly strong sounds for the size of their bodies and cry for hours without getting hoarse. Their psychophysical mechanism works perfectly. As babies become toddlers they unfortunately change in the way they use their voices and their breathing mechanism, and with it they often lose the ability to use the voice freely. Talking about breathing always heats up conversations because of many different and often controversial ideas about it. All agree, however, that the breathing mechanism works at its best if the singer uses it in a healthy way.

Many terms exist for breathing: abdominal breathing, accessory breathing, at-rest breathing, autonomous breathing, belly breathing, chest breathing, clavicular breathing, deep breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, lower abdominal breathing, natural breathing, rib breathing, shallow breathing, silent breathing, thoracic breathing, etc. The problem arises that many teachers understand the same terms to mean something totally different. Basically there exist three different types of teaching breathing. Some teachers focus on inhaling, some on exhaling and the third group stresses the concert of both.

The Alexander Technique works mainly on exhaling, because it assumes that if singers coordinate themselves in the most efficient way and let the air out of their lungs, inhaling will be a simple reflex, and not controlled by conscious will. F. M. Alexander considered the whispered 'ah' as one of the most important applications of the Technique. F. M. Alexander found out that by having singers practice the whispered 'ah'- which singers rarely connect with bad psycho-physical habits in vocalization-, he could teach them the complex interaction between the specific parts of the body used for the singing process and the whole.

Singers working on the whispered 'ah' exercise do not only practice breathing. They work on psycho-physical co-ordination. The stimulus to say the whispered 'ah' teaches the student to become aware of his habits regarding breathing and vocalization. With this acquired knowledge of the basic principles, the singers can find out what they actually do with their psycho-physical mechanism while vocalizing. This approach leads to change in quality, volume, range and beauty of the voice.

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