A Voice Apart

When the vocal disorder occurs, whether you are just a speaker, (regular person), or a singer, it is always a devastation to say the least.  For those who are not singers, it appears to be even more devastating than to the actual singers who have lost their singing voice; sometimes their speaking voice as well, and possibly, at least temporarily, lost their singing career, which a lot of the times they have been working on all their lives for. You would think that the process of voice recovery would be easier for people who just lost their speaking voice, but interestingly enough, it is exactly the opposite. The fact is that to recover your voice out of any voice or vocal disorder, takes a lot of strength, a lot of energy, sometimes quite a bit of time and money as well. It is a very tedious process, syllable on syllable and word on word. Especially those with muscle tension or spasmodic dysphonia seem to be suffering the most. They have drawn their voices in a very low pos

Lately, I’m dealing with a lot of clients (young and old) with the voice/speech problems. Most of them spent months or even years with speech therapists and speech pathologists. Some of them have gone to the regular check-ups with their ENT specialists and (in the final analysis) had not accomplished anything with respect to a resolution to their voice problem(s). How frustrating could that be?  It is extremely sad for them and their relatives, not to mention that the majority of those poor people, understandably, keep coming in and out of depression. Some of them lost their professions and their hobbies for that matter, like singing, for example, or playing some sports. Sometimes even watching some sport or concert events (in their case) could become a big challenge. It is usually quite noisy in those venues, and those with voice problems feel even more silenced as they cannot compete with the screaming crowd. Some of them have lost hope, some of them are still researching

The vocalrevolution is here , I said it finally to myself and to the world at large in 1994. I have been teaching voice since 1985 and teaching it my own way, in spite of an extensive 12 year education in the music field.  While I have been studying in the Music Teachers College in Russia , Leningrad, I was offered to do rather strange things to supposedly develop my voice. After those vocal escapades, (I called them "vocabatics without a safety net"), my throat would hurt and my voice would sound raspy and low. It made me really worried and I begun to think about it night and day. I also started rebelling during the private vocal lessons and during the choir practice, to the point that I got kicked out of the choir and almost got kicked out of the college. I was prohibited to sing in my last semester before obtaining the Bachelors Degree of Music Education and specialising in Voice and Choir Conducting. Go figure! I, however, graduated with the flying colors

Teaching now for over 40 years , I could right away sense if the child, or now adult, has ever been taking any activities which require mind/body coordination, like for example: Ballet, Gymnastics, Figure Skating and, of course, participating in some of the other recreational or professionally oriented events and sports. Those who did not do it I their childhood, could not literally “walk and chew the gum at the same time”, so to speak. Some of them could not walk a straight line, let alone on their tippy toes with their arms up, as per the requirements of Vocal Science Method and Technique . Some of them simply do not possess any motor skills. Their brain is not trained to give a command to their bodies, which in case of the voice training and voice powering, it requires a great deal to visualise how the physical sound travels, and then connect the sound to the upper back muscles, upper diaphragm and lower abdomen, to achieve the total voice performance , speaking, or fu