As an opera singer there are a lot of people asking me why Pavarotti could sing beautifully even though he couldn't read music. There is some spontaneous stuff in opera, although it requires lots of precision. During his career, Pavarotti had a coach who taught him that what is written on the score matters. As a singer you also have space for improvisation and our work is to know when we can do it freely, and when we can’t and we need to catch the original meaning, emotion as much as we can while making it sound as natural as possible. But what is natural? There are different parameters to take into account in natural singing. The first thing we learn is how to pronounce well because we need to be aware of the pronunciation of every vowel and consonant and make sure there are supported by a good breath, ease but with compression (I don’t understand that last point). How to do it? Normally we think that singing naturally means we should follow do it the same way we speak. In a way this is right. But actually most of people don’t use their natural voice when they are speaking, so most of us don't really recognize our natural voice. Or we imagined how we sound in real life which is not comparable to what we actually sound for some reason. And I always think our mental state could affect the quality of our voice. Sometimes we make different sounds when we are more tired or happier and so on... So, it’s not quite right for us to sing as if we were speaking. Or it would be more correct to say that we have many ways of speaking, but we need to find the most beautiful one, it’s all about esthetic. There is another reason why we shouldn’t think only about how we speak when it comes to singing and it’s because the verses usually follow the melody line so we are obliged to pronounce very long vowels. It’s like doing a slow motion, so imagine speaking in a slow motion. But speaking in an esthetic way requires to understand what is a beautiful way of speaking.