A Voice Apart

This blog is my point of view on my non-surgical voice repair clients, who lately, I have no lack of... Yes, more and more people are approaching me with various voice disorders (speakers and singers). Some of them have tried everything, but nothing worked and they ended up suffering for years. That category (desribed above) is extremely difficult to attend to. First of all, because they had lost the belief that they will ever get better and regain their voice. Some of them have undergone two or three vocal operations; unfortunately, majority of them did not get any better but, on the contrary, they actally ended up getting worse. Needless to say that almost all of them have been traumatized and some of them were quite depressed. Obviously, when you have health challenges in general and the symptoms are not going away for some time, you become disillusioned and almost clinically depressed, if not, in some cases, even suicidal. Some of these troublesome people also have spent

When I reached Canada in 1980 and almost right from the start began teaching voice (speaking and singing), I noticed that, in general, nobody per say paid attention to the way they were speaking/singing or, for that matter, even conducting a proper posture while trying to deliver a message. Some of them, while speaking, were literally falling backwards, arching their upper back to the wall behind them, rather than to me standing right in front of them. Needless to say that by doing that, they were throwing their speech backwards and the voice would be falling to the back of their vocal cords, which is quite deadly for the vocal health . Nevertheless, the words were coming out slurred and un-pronounced; thus, their enunciation was quite poor. A lot of them were complaining of dry and/or full of mucous throats. Some of them were complaining of the actual pain and discomfort in their vocal boxes. Today, 33 years later, the problems still persist. The difference is that I am not s

A HOLISTIC Approach To A Person's Vocal "Instrument". What do we mean by that? Throughout the last 33 years, I have been bombarded with phone calls and e-mails from people who have experienced voice or vocal problems. Some of them thought that it had happened to them "out of the blue", so to speak; and moreover, without any indication (whatsoever...) of that happening. A lot of them had attributed it to some colds or viruses; and only some of them had agreed that their lifestyles had not been exactly "clean and shiny"... However, (and nevertheless) the severe cold, virus and especially strep throat, could be a trigger to a mild or even serious voice disorder. As it appears to be, those people tend to eat a lot of fast foods, tons of dairy (which produces a lot of mucus), consume a lot of salty and spicy foods, which affect the throat flora, and evidently, also indulge in smoking, drinking and even drug use. Some of them (on top of that) do

If you think that it does not, ask us how you can obtain it! Everybody lately is speaking about a “WOW factor”. During the vocal competitions like American/British Idol or shows like America Got Talent or Britain Got Talent, judges constantly looking for that WOW factor in their contestants. What do they mean by that? Well, first of all, they are looking for a good song suitable for the contestant and, of course, good and original interpretation of that song. Obviously a sharp performance with the proper technical and artistic merit should move the contestant to the top of his/her category. Similarly, during the speech presentation, unfortunately, a lot of times you want to “fall asleep”, a the presenter sounds monotone; and thus, very boring. He/she often does not have the proper emphasis and inflections in their sentences and, therefore, sometimes you can not even make out what they are actually talking about. This is especially annoying when those so called “presenter