A Voice Apart

Has Your Voice Been Compromised Due To The Above? You had a stroke… and luckily, you survived! In a lot of cases, after the stroke occurs, either the right side or the left side of the body ends up to be paralyzed.  Also, in a lot of cases, the speech centre is also greatly effected, and thus the survived-patient’s speech is very much so compromised. In some cases, it is still recoverable, but in others, unfortunately, the speech remains to be permanently impaired.  For those cases where I could use an alternative approach to voice mechanics , the recovery is still going to be a slow and tedious process, which will require a lot of patience from the person in question and myself.  Usually, a stroke survivor has a very slow and quite slurred speech, not to mention usually pretty faint. Obviously, there is not much enunciation, pronunciation or articulation is precent in those cases. So in order to enhance the above, a lot of special speech exercises have to be admini

Had Your Voice Been Compromised Due To The Above? Unfortunately, after being diagnosed with such a nasty disease like throat cancer and then, as a consequence, having to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatments, the voice could be very easily compromised and the vocal anatomy could also end up damaged.  The medical doctors, in this case, are usually trying to convince their patients to be grateful that they survived (never mind their damaged voice or anything else which ended up being damaged for that matter).   They usually say: “ Be grateful that you are alive and don’t worry about your voice ”. It’s easy for them to say, but the person who use to speak (or even sing) with a normal voice, feels quite inadequate, as he/she has a communication breakdown via a raspy/hoarse voice , or sometimes, even no voice at all. Nevertheless, that person is affected with everyday life challenges, not to mention work challenges and… even the loss of the latter due

Hardly finish your tour? Does your throat hurt after performances? Voice sounding hoarse? If your answer is yes, the above are the symptoms of an overused and abused vocal anatomy. The worst part is if you continue doing it without changing your manner of speaking and singing, it will lead to the need for a serious voice repair and not necessarily a non-surgical one. By that time, if you attempt to attain the non-surgical voice repair, it might be too late. Then you are facing a laser or a scalpel operation, which could result in scar tissue, which by itself could be more detrimental than the original damage... This could be your worst nightmare. The reason I am writing this blog is to prevent you from that possibility. The prevention is definitely far better than dealing with serious vocal damage . What does prevention entail, you may ask? Learning the proper skills for speaking and singing before you embark on any performance or that nasty tour which m

Intimate and interactive: " Alex Norman of illScarlett   (Sony BMG Music Canada)" For those who wanted to know how it all came about, we decided to disclose the "intimate" details of how The Royans Professional Vocal School (a.k.a. The Royans School for the Musial Performing Arts) got conceived, was carried and had been brought up on this Earth for its existence to nowadays. ---   I came to Toronto, Canada from Russia (Leningrad/St. Petersburg) in 1980. In 1984, my partner (common law husband) and I were able to open a school named (at the time) The Royans School for the Musical Performing Arts.  This school was donated to me by an older Polish Canadian philanthropist. This gentleman overheard me singing and playing piano, and while congratulating me on my talent, he asked me why I am teaching singing and piano in other schools, but not in my own? I did reply that I was still a new immigrant and, at the time, my daughter was barely two years old. To

Lately, we have received (in our studio/clinic) a fair amount of people with various voice/vocal injuries caused by numerous forms of accidents. Some of them even had been in a coma for a number of months and their relatives were advised that they may never come out of it; and thus will continue their existence in a vegetative state… Thank God, some of them proved the doctors wrong and did come out not only from their coma, but even stood up and walked (almost on their own) from out of their wheelchairs… and, nevertheless, on their own two feet! How remarkable is that?  It is indeed! No doubt, those people went through a lot! On this note, it is easy to assume that they are real “troopers” and definitely, needless to say, survivors. Unfortunately, for many of them, outside of other physical challenges, their voice became an issue. Some of them literally lost the ability to talk at all or to talk normally. The conventional doctors, speech therapists and pathologists did

If I can say so myself, the Vocal Science ™ method and technique is truly revolutionary!                                         To date, I have coached and treated over 20,000 clients; and I can say with absolute certainty that none of them came to me with any accountable/tangible technique or quality of speaking and singing taught to them, for that matter. Moreover, some of them revealed to me and my staff that they, before entering such lessons, actually had a quite decent speaking or singing voice. One of them, apparently, got signed to a major record label and got addressed to a high-end vocal coach. Unfortunately, the aforementioned person never improved her singing skills, but (on the contrary) in the process, got her voice quite damaged. So she came to us not for singing lessons… but for non-surgical voice repair. How sad is that? Needless to say, since her voice could not handle any recordings and, of course, live performances, she got dropped off of the rec