When the Voice You Hear Isn’t Quite Yours: A Voice Teacher on Imitation, Authenticity, and the Sound That’s Already Inside You

Most singers, especially in their first few years of study, sound a little bit like someone else. They don’t mean to. They aren’t aware of it. They just listen, often obsessively, to a handful of artists who shaped the way they think singing should sound, and that listening leaves traces. The vibrato of one favorite. The breathy intimacy of another. The riff at the end of a phrase that the singer they admire always uses. None of it is calculated. It’s the sound of a developing artist absorbing influence the way every developing artist always has. If you’re in those early years yourself, these singing tips for beginners cover the fundamentals that come before style.

For Norwood, a voice teacher at Tunelark, the question of whose voice a student is singing in is one of the most interesting puzzles a teacher gets to work on. Not because imitation is something to be ashamed of, but because it’s so often invisible to the person doing it. A student can spend months working on a song, hear themselves through a phone recording, and never notice the way their accent or phrasing has migrated halfway toward the artist they love. They think they’re singing as themselves. They almost are.

The work Norwood does with those students isn’t to strip out everything they’ve absorbed. Influences are part of how style develops, and a singer with no influences would be a strange thing to encounter. The work is to help the student see the influences clearly enough to make actual choices about them, and underneath that, to discover the parts of their own voice they didn’t even know were available yet. The first part is awareness. The second part is range. Together they are what “finding your voice” turns out to mean in practice.

The first tell: when your speaking voice doesn’t quite show up in your singing

Ask Norwood how he can tell when a student is singing in their own voice versus borrowing someone else’s, and his answer is small and concrete enough to test on yourself.

“When someone is singing in their own voice, elements of their speaking voice often come through as well,” he says: their natural tone, timbre, accent, and manner of expression.

It’s a useful diagnostic. The voice you use when you ask a friend how their week was, when you tell a story at dinner, when you read aloud from a book, carries a signature: a particular warmth or brightness in the tone, a recognizable timbre, the soft trace of wherever you grew up, a cadence that’s yours. When you sing in your own voice, those qualities follow you into the song. The instrument is consistent across speaking and singing because it’s the same instrument.

When the qualities don’t follow, something else is happening. “When someone is imitating another singer, those qualities often shift in a way that can sound less natural or authentic.”

The shifts can be subtle. A singer’s natural mid-Atlantic speaking accent disappears into a southern lilt when they sing country. A singer with a warm, conversational speaking voice suddenly produces a thin, breathy sound on the verses of a song. A clipped, articulated speaker rounds out every consonant into a smoother shape when they sing pop. None of these shifts are problems on their own (every singer makes some stylistic choices that depart from how they speak), but when the shifts are wholesale and unconscious, they’re a sign that the student is reaching for someone else’s instrument instead of playing their own.

Norwood is careful to take the moral charge out of this observation, because the most important thing he wants students to know about imitation is that it isn’t a flaw. “Most of the time, this isn’t a conscious choice. It’s completely normal for singers to pick up traits from the artists they listen to most, especially when they’re first developing their voice.”

That’s the field a young singer is always working in. The artists they love supply not just their love of singing but their working model of what a singer sounds like. Of course some of that seeps in. The question isn’t whether to be influenced. The question is whether the student can become aware enough of the influence to start making the choice on purpose. “Part of my job as a teacher is helping students become aware of those influences and, over time, discover and develop a sound that feels uniquely their own.”

Finding your voice, in Norwood’s framing, isn’t an act of subtraction, peeling away the imitations to reveal an authentic core that was always there. It’s an act of construction: a sound the singer develops rather than uncovers. The singer’s authentic voice is real, and it’s also something that has to be built out, explored, expanded, and trusted. Often the parts of that voice a singer is going to claim as most their own are parts they haven’t even met yet.

When the missing range was right there all along

To see what that looks like in practice, Norwood tells a story about an adult student whose voice changed in a single afternoon, not because she gained new ability, but because she gained access to ability that was already inside her.

“One student who comes to mind is an adult woman who had spent several months studying with another teacher before coming to me. She had been encouraged to sing primarily in her head voice, which gave her beautiful high notes, but left her feeling frustrated with songs that sat lower in her range.”

The student didn’t lack technique. She’d been studying for months. She had beautiful high notes. What she lacked was one of her own registers. Her head voice, the lighter, higher resonance, had been the entire instrument. Her chest voice, the heavier, lower resonance that most people use when they speak, had been left out of her singing altogether. Songs that asked her to live in the lower middle of her range felt like fighting the instrument, because half the instrument wasn’t being asked to show up.

What Norwood did from there was specific and physical. “As we worked together, I introduced her to her chest voice and helped her incorporate it into her singing.”

He doesn’t dramatize what happened next. He just lets the student’s own response describe it. “The moment she connected with that part of her voice, she had a genuine ‘aha!’ experience. Suddenly, her sound had a depth, warmth, and power she had never been able to access before.”

Her breakthrough wasn’t the arrival of a new ability. The chest voice had always been there; it had simply never been brought into her singing. The moment her instruction caught up with the full physiology of her instrument, the sound that had been latent in her body became available, and the difference was immediate.

But the change Norwood says actually mattered wasn’t the new tonal richness. It was a shift in her relationship to her own voice. “What changed most wasn’t just her voice – it was her confidence. She stopped feeling like she was fighting against her instrument and started trusting it.”

For months, every lower-range song had been an argument she was losing. She’d been told her voice could do something it couldn’t, and so the friction had felt like her own deficiency. The moment she had the full instrument under her, the friction disappeared, because there was nothing to fight. Her instrument was working as it actually wanted to work. She trusted it because it had earned trust.

Norwood draws the lesson into a definition. “To me, that’s what finding your voice is all about: discovering the full range of what your own voice is capable of and learning to use it authentically.”

It’s a definition that cuts against much of the conventional advice singers receive. “Find your voice” is often presented as a process of stylistic self-discovery: working out what kind of singer you are, which genres suit you, how you want to sound. Norwood’s emphasis is on something more primary. Before any of that, find the physiological range of what your voice can do. Meet the registers you haven’t met. Discover the depth or brightness or volume that’s been waiting in tissue you didn’t know how to engage. Then choose what to do with it.

Influence in the wild: the Billie Eilish question

When students bring imitation into the lesson, it’s often without naming it as imitation. They’ve fallen in love with a particular artist’s sound and the artist’s sound has quietly become their template. Norwood has a working example he comes back to often, and it’s a useful one for any singer who has ever wondered whether a stylistic choice is helping or hurting.

“One common example of a voice that students often imitate is that of Billie Eilish.”

He’s clear about his own position first. “Before I say anything else, I should mention that I’m a fan of hers and genuinely enjoy her singing.”

That disclaimer is doing work. It signals to students that the conversation about to happen isn’t a verdict on the artist or on the student’s affection for her music. It’s about understanding what a particular vocal choice actually does, technically, so the student can use it on purpose.

“That said, one of the defining characteristics of her vocal style is a very breathy tone.”

What follows is exactly the kind of clear, accessible explanation a serious voice student benefits from. “Breathiness can be a beautiful stylistic choice, but it comes with trade-offs. A breathier sound typically sacrifices some vocal clarity, resonance, and volume, and it can contribute to vocal fatigue if relied on too heavily.”

Each of those trade-offs is worth understanding on its own terms. A breathy tone happens when more air passes through the vocal folds than is being efficiently converted to sound. That’s the source of the intimate, whispered quality that makes Eilish’s vocals so distinctive. It’s also why the same quality, defaulted to, can leave a singer’s voice tired, lacking the carrying power they’d need for a larger room, and less able to produce the bell-clear notes that some songs ask for. Guarding against that kind of wear is its own discipline, the heart of a good daily vocal health routine.

Here Norwood’s teaching philosophy reveals itself. He isn’t trying to talk the student out of liking breathy singing. He’s trying to give them the technical understanding that turns breathiness from an unconscious default into a real artistic option.

“For singers who want a versatile, healthy instrument, it’s important to understand when and how to use that quality effectively.”

And then he shows what that teaching actually looks like. “I enjoy teaching students how breath interacts with the vocal folds and how different levels of vocal fold closure affect the sound they produce.”

The science is real and the explanation is accessible. The vocal folds, two small bands of tissue in the larynx, come together and apart as air passes through them, and the degree to which they fully close determines how much of the air escapes as breath versus how much vibrates into sound. Light closure produces the breathy sound. Fuller closure produces a clearer, more resonant tone. A singer who understands the mechanism can choose, in real time, where on that spectrum they want to be for any given phrase, the same deliberate control that lets a singer work on singing in tune rather than leaving it to luck.

“My goal isn’t to eliminate breathiness, but to help students develop control over it so they can use it intentionally as an artistic choice rather than as their default way of singing.”

There’s a deeper principle underneath. Style on purpose is good. Style by accident, especially when it limits the rest of the instrument, deserves a second look. A Billie Eilish-inspired breathy tone, chosen for a verse and released for a chorus, is a real artistic choice the singer is making with their full instrument. A breathy tone applied to every phrase because it’s the only setting the singer knows how to produce has narrowed the instrument and called it style.

What Norwood is offering is not the removal of the influence. It’s the enlargement of the instrument until the influence becomes one of many things the singer can do, instead of the only thing they know how to do.

What “finding your voice” actually involves

Pulling Norwood’s pieces together, finding your own voice as a singer isn’t a single moment of self-discovery. It’s a process with two visible tracks that develop together.

The first track is physiological. Discover the full mechanism of your voice: every register, the breath dynamics that feed it, the way your vocal folds close at different volumes and emotional intensities. Meet the parts of the instrument that have been quiet so far. Learn what it feels like when your voice is working in places you didn’t know it could go. It’s gradual work that unfolds across a vocal technique timeline, and it’s the work that gave Norwood’s adult student her chest voice back, and with it, the confidence that her instrument was on her side.

The second track is awareness. Begin to hear, in your own singing, the influences that have shaped you. Notice when your speaking voice qualities come along for the ride and when they go missing. Notice when a breathy verse is a choice and when it’s the only setting you’ve got. Notice when your accent or phrasing has drifted to match an artist you love. None of these noticings is a verdict. They’re invitations to choose.

What emerges from working both tracks together is a voice that is fully and recognizably the singer’s own, capable of more than they expected, and stylistically rich because the singer is now able to choose, rather than being limited to the single approximation of someone else’s sound they used to default to.

Frequently Asked Questions

About Norwood

Norwood’s love of singing began in early childhood, when he’d sing songs from his favorite Disney movies to anyone in the room willing to listen, and was sealed at a musical theatre summer camp at age 10, where, as he puts it, he was “hooked for life.” After many years of teaching, the moment he says still makes the work worth it is precisely the one this article has been about: “When a student discovers a part of their voice that they never even knew existed before.”

The larger thing teaching has taught him reaches beyond music: how, in his words, “the skills and confidence gained through singing lessons often cross over into other areas of students’ lives.” A student who has learned to trust their full instrument, to make choices about it with awareness, and to release the need to sound like someone else, tends to carry that newly-claimed sense of agency into the rest of their life as well. That carryover is one of the quieter rewards of voice study, and one of the most lasting.

Ready to meet your full voice?

If you’ve been singing for a while and have started to suspect there’s more inside your instrument than you’ve been using, or if you’ve noticed yourself sounding a little too much like the singer you’ve been listening to on repeat, Norwood’s approach is built for exactly that work. He helps students discover the registers and capabilities their voices already possess, and develop the awareness to make their stylistic choices on purpose rather than by default. Norwood is currently accepting new voice students at Tunelark.

Looking for an online voice teacher? See our full Online Voice Lessons page for everything you need to know about getting started.

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About Jennifer Heath

I'm Jennifer Heath, VP at Tunelark and a lifelong singer. I joined the company in 2020 and oversee much of what makes Tunelark work for our students and our teachers. That includes hiring, training, and supporting our instructors, customer and student support, marketing, and the day-to-day operations of the business.

I started voice lessons at age 7, sang with professional choirs that toured internationally through my teens, and performed solo at competitions and community events across Texas before stepping away in my twenties to study other interests, including business management. I haven't performed professionally in years, but I'll happily take the microphone at a karaoke night. Music has been in me every day of my life. Being able to spend the last six years working inside an online music education company, while traveling the world full-time, has been a perfect fit.

I believe deeply that music belongs in every life. For the self-expression, the discipline, the comfort, and the simple joy of it.

The Tunelark blog is where we share what we've learned about online music lessons: how to choose an instrument and a teacher, what to expect from your first lesson, how the major platforms compare, and how to keep music going through the busier seasons of life. Practical, honest writing you can act on.