A Voice Apart

We truly love to transform lives and put people back into their “vocal shoes”, (like one of our clients from the past professed to us). We work with regular people with speech problems and with those who want to turn their speaking voice into their profession. We also work with people who just simply want to learn how to sing better. And, respectively, we work with professional singers who either want to prevent their voice from damage, or who already had damaged it. And are now in need of non-surgical voice repair. If we are talking about any voice repair cases at all, we are talking about a very complex approach to treatment, which, first of all, includes psychological counseling, and thus helps to identify the actual cause of ones’ vocal trauma. Sometimes, their vocal (and other related) problems have very deep roots lying beneath. And thus, from my side, it requires a lot of skillful experience, as well as true desire and passion to really get to the bott...

Spending over 32 years running my own professional voice/vocal business, I have been working with (estimated) over 20,000 clients on their speaking and singing voices.  Luckily, the mechanics (which are applicable for the speaking and singing voice) are exactly the same. Both my speech ( The Total Communicator Course ) and singing course begin with exactly the same speech exercises. Those exercises have a very important purpose, as they are designed to relieve the pressure of the sound from the vocal anatomy as a whole. The wholesome mechanism takes place to allow the voice to work in the fullest capacity possible with no pain or strain on the vocal anatomy. The voice, restructured to the facial muscles, begins to work in full conjunction and coordination with the abdominal muscles, which play the role of the support for the lifted sound. And the upper diaphragm muscles (rib cage) assure the width and the body of the sound. When all of the components of that wholes...

Lately, for some mysterious reason , I hear more and more from people who used to be able to sing (or even professional singers with voice issues) contemplating to receive the treatment for their voice problems from speech therapists or speech pathologists…? How logical is that? Honestly, to me, it does not make any sense, as none of the above were ever trained how to become a singer or, nevertheless, knowing how to sing and, furthermore, how to treat singers from vocal diseases. Moreover, some of them actually suffer themselves from MTD ( Muscle tension Dysphonia ) or even SD ( Spasmodic Dysphonia ). So their “claim to fame” is that they had (and majority of them still have) such vocal disorders themselves. They brag about it, trying to convince a potential sufferer that they know all about it, since they have been suffering from the same thing…? My question is: if they have been suffering from such disorders described above, how did they get it in the first place...

A couple of days ago, I received a phone call from an 18 years old man who was asking if I could completely change his voice, (surgically, or non-surgically LOL), so he could sound like a certain rapper…? I wasn’t quite sure what to do… to laugh or to cry…   The question was funny, to say the least, but the issue was sad, as, at 18 years of age, he was still very naive and simply foolish, to put it mildly. In our, so to speak, technologically advanced age, he sounded like he had no slightest idea about this world and how it operates, let alone about the human voice and what triggers it to work in a certain way.   I always said previously that the voice, like fingerprints, does identify the person, as each human being has their own unique voice, which, in turn, most of the time, also reflects the state of their being.   Could that be completely changed or modified, you, my reader, may ask? The answer for the former: “No, like fingerprints, it cannot be...