A Voice Apart

Apparently there is! And yes, it is possible and it is fixable… however, with great difficulty. For comparison, let’s look at classical ballet dancers: Everybody knows that ballerinas have to have a certain arch in their feet, especially females. It is detrimental to their careers if their feet are flat and not properly arched, because it would be difficult to do pirouettes; circling up to 32 revolutions ( fouettés)  with one leg while keeping the whole weight of the body on the other leg while the flat foot is virtually unable to hold the body weight. Similarly for singers, the upper palette (located in the vocal box) also has an arch and curve. The deeper that arch is, the more the "body of the voice" will be projected. The palette arch, however, is not everything, as the sound also needs to be supported simultaneously by the lower abdomen and upper diaphragm, or else the whole lift of the voice becomes obsolete. Singers can avoid cracks in their vo

“…and can we stop the spread…?” Like any cancer, in my opinion, vocal cancer is also a serious disease. However, there are always stages. And if the real cancer is diagnosed and detected early, it usually falls in at stage 1, which means it is quite curable and if not completely, at the very least could prolong the patient’s life significantly. Unfortunately the vocal cancer, I would classify as stage 4, which in most cases is terminal and no cure could be offered unless something really alternative, out of this world and crazily outrageous comes along. Strangely enough, it actually has already come, like a lot of alternative treatments for the real cancer, which have been suggested by the alternative herbal and naturopathic medicines. The problem is that the people are so brainwashed and so believing in what they’ve “known” for years, ie. conventional medicine, which in a lot of cases is killing while supposedly “healing”. That said, no doubt, it’s very hard to change the herd menta

Being teaching and producing vocals in Canada for over thirty years, it never ceases to amaze me how many people have gone for conventional vocal training , practicing, the least to say, nonsensical and leading nowhere exercises - and think that one day they are going to wake up with a wonderful voice and be able to sign a million dollar record deal . A lot of them were complaining that they were feeling quite strange making sounds, some of which reminding them of cats meowing and wolves howling. I'm sure if the latter would hear those people, they would be extremely jealous, as those singers were sounding "better" than the original mammals. A lot of these people after years and years are still trying to make some sense of it, while concurrently ruining their voices, as they were told that if their throats hurt to the point that they are losing any presence of their voices, that is good, because their muscles are working and they must be doing something right. Neverth

Really... Guess what? Who ever told the contestants how to make the well known tune their own? And what, in any case, did the judges mean by that? I guess it's still somewhat a riddle to the participants and to the audience, for that matter. Watching American Idol for the last 9 seasons (not to mention Canadian Idol for at least 7 seasons) I couldn't help but notice that those young kids and even more mature adults, are stuggling to turn and twist the well known cover tune into something which is hardly recognizable, as the melody has often been changed, the vocal licks were inserted all over the place (most of the time not corresponding with the style) and that made it just unlistenable and simply left a bad taste in the listener's mouth. My husband and I are big fans of 50s and 60s music and therefore we're very familiar with the songs of that era. Occasionally, while both of us were watching pre-final stages performances (where these types of songs were required t