Every time we sing there is movement: muscles, air, thoughts, feelings, eyes, mouth and hands. Our energy shifts and changes, flows or sticks, and our confidence rises and drops: our connection to words and music and meaning moves in and out of focus.

Sometimes we are in the song and our own story lives through the verses and chorus, sometimes it can be a single line that is our emotional hook. Other times we are listless and bored, distant, and the words move around our mouths like food when we have a cold, our sense of smell shut off by mucus. You know what it should taste like but nothing registers.

There is a misconception inherent in most of us when returning to a song we have mastered, that tells us that only an exact replication of that most perfect interpretation is good enough. We reach for the bit in the middle where last time we 'soared like and eagle' or when the breathing was just right and our phrasing dropped in like an angel. Searching again and again for the time when our emotions flowed through like an Atlantic wave on a perfect summers evening.

We feel the need to bottle, capture, frame, freeze it and then compare or judge, measuring ourselves to this Shangri-La of the perfect moment. Then if we don't succeed, we struggle with the impulse to throw it all away. We doubt our dreams to sing, which I believe is an existential desire to hear and connect with ourselves while being heard and feeling fully connected with others: in fact to be here, to be alive.

When we find ourselves living truly in a song our anxiety for life, forces a blue print upon which the existence of that interpretation is fixed. The idealisation of this moment of perfection can fuel our insecurities, magnifying an exalted quality while diminishing our own 'simply human' contributions to the song.

I believe the idea of the fixed interpretation of a song is as delusional as our collective agreement of a binary, oppositional and segmented reality - good/ bad - heaven /hell - pharynx/larynx - F/ F Sharp. Singing for me has always been a journey of learning to love the spaces in between, to support my fears and to challenge my dependency on these agreed concepts.

The muscles of our face mouth and throat are far more flexible than we could ever imagine. The harmonic variables that can be created by the human voice matches the immense subtleties of human expression. It is simply fear that holds us back, that contracts our worldview and the spaces we can potentially occupy.

Polishing our soprano voice to perfection is all very well and can be very impressive, but if we had stayed perfecting one aspect of our evolutionary skills we would never have left the trees for perfecting the art of polishing our peanuts. It has been our adaptability that has kept us flexible, enabling us to manage our fears and anxieties so we could survive and grow.

We are The Singing Body: we are conscious, vocalising, adapting animals. This gift of consciousness sets us apart, establishes our separateness, and offers us the awareness of our aloneness, our aching loss of the oneness of the universe as we stand embodied, here on this earth. It is both our blessing and our curse: truly the cross we bear. We are spirit and bone, blood and stardust and we carry within us the knowledge of the infinite and the finite: the ultimate perfect imperfection.

When we sing I believe we are fundamentally always engaging with this paradox of life we are both perfect and imperfect, and our moments are both here forever and already gone.

Melanie Harrold has been singing, writing recording and performing for over thirty years. For the last twelve years she has been researching The Singing Body through training and teaching and one to one sessions from her studio in London. She has trained as a Body Psychotherapist and worked with Paul Newham in Voice Movement Therapy. She teaches voice and movement to the National Youth Theatre Summer School and she runs large and small singing groups throughout the year. She also sees private therapy clients.