Opening the Throat

Opening the throat is perhaps the second most important technical issue in singing.

Opening the throat while you sing achieves two results:

It relaxes the voice and allows the vocal folds to vibrate freely and comfortably, even on high notes, where there is a natural tendency to force the voice to operate. (Forcing the voice is almost never a good idea, as you will sound fairly awful and eventually destroy your voice. A lot of singers have had early ends to their careers once they were performing regularly, because they didn't have enough training to protect the instrument, especially in Rock music. This also used to be a common problem in Opera, where attractive young singers would accept roles they weren't ready for vocally, but nowadays there is much more awareness of the need to gradually build up to certain levels of singing, even once one is already a professional singer).

The extra space created by opening the throat while singing adds resonance to the voice, which makes it richer and more beautiful. Especially in the high voice, where notes tend to be thin naturally, many harmonics can be added to the sound, in the same way recording studios add reverb and echo effects to Pop voices. Of course the richer the singer sounds by themself, the more that can be added to the sound in the recording studio. How to open the throat and sing at the same time? There are several approaches, most of them requiring patience and persistence. It isn't a question of open versus closed, but a question of degree of amplification. The simplest way for most students is to yawn and sing at the same time. A similar approach is to gasp as though surprised, and keep the muscles of the neck flexed in an outward direction while you sing. The higher you sing, the more important throat opening techniques are.